Wednesday Night Musings VII

Victorian Science Fiction: Colonial Japanese Ninjas
As I mentioned last week, I am gearing up to play in a local Victorian Science Fiction/Colonial campaign. The group that does it has written a pretty extensive background to include Martians, Venusians, and all the Great Powers in the middle of the Northwest Frontier.

I have started to assemble and paint all the lovely models my wonderful and amazing wife gave me for Christmas, and I have completed my first section, composed of five Ninjas. They were made from Wargames Factory plastic Samurai and Ashigaru, with guns "donated" from my Tamiya 1/48 WW2 Russian Infantry (they also donated two Maxim machineguns as well.) I have had that kit floating around forever, I am clearly not going to ever build them, so I may as well start cannibalizing it for parts!

Ninjas with guns... almost as much fun as Nuns with guns

Quack!
Also something I mentioned last week, I am in the process of converting my Duck Wizard's Apprentice for Frostgrave. I have been actively participating in WizarDecember, but the Week 4 deadline was extended until the end of the month due to holiday craziness. And then it occurred to me: WizarDecember is running through the end of December. I am in the fifth week of December. I am working on a Duck Apprentice. If I can get the little guy done before the new year, I can actually have five entries for the WizarDecember painting challenge. Assuming I can step away from my Colonial Japanese and Boxer Rebellion miniatures, of course.


The Week
There is still holiday craziness happening. I am trying to make some evening time to do some online gaming with Bashytubits and Mike. I am really going to try to run a Frostgrave game with the kids before they go back to school. I am assembling and painting my Japanese Colonials, Boxers, and Frostgrave checklist. Maybe a trip to California for the New Year if we can hitch a ride (running out of time fast on that one!) Next week life returns to what passes as normal for us, so hopefully we will settle down and make some better progress instead of running around in circles.

Wednesday Night Musings V

Stupid Wind!
Really, all I wanted was to be able to Dullcote my WizarDecember Week 2 entry... 25 mile per hour winds,with gusts up to 35 mph since last Friday has kept me from being able to do so until this afternoon. I haven't had time to do any pictures yet, but since I finished my Week 3 entry today I expect to be doing pictures tomorrow.

Glorantha Again
Last week, I posted a bit about Glorantha and my Ducks and my plans and all that good jazz. As I was looking through my various Warbands, I noticed that first one I did last month would work well as a Gloranthan Warband. It really does have "Lunar" written all over it, doesn't it? Greek helmets, red shields, spears... and a perfect first opponent for my Ducks. Hmmm... now I need to actually finish my Ducks! Really, only a Wizard and Apprentice, but still...

Also, I have started conversion work on my Morokanth Wizard, for painting next week as my WizarDecember entry.

Scenery
How much scenery is too much? I have enough to cover my 2'x2' board twice over, and still have plenty left over to build. I've been a bit busy this week, so no new terrain this week. But here is what's in the cardstock queue...

Not only a LOT of cardstock projects, but arranged in an attractive pattern.

Best Wife Ever
A few years back, I painted up a semi-historical New Kingdom Egyptian warband statted for Song of Blades and Heroes as a gift to my wife, with the cunning plan that she would actually play the game with me. As it turned out, she wanted to put them on display with the rest of her Egyptian display items, and forbade them from being used for gaming. Since we have moved to our smaller home, these miniatures have been living in a box in the closet due to lack of shelf space. In any event, I recently pulled them out and asked her if she would like to try playing a game of Frostgrave with them. She quickly agreed, but did not want me to touch up any of the chipped paint nor re-base the one model that had been for D&D. I want her to have a little more in the way of Warband options than is currently finished, so I have a few more models to finish for her and we will be playing a game!

She and I also  recently did some re-arranging of furniture and re-organizing of the bedroom. In her infinite wisdom and general goodness, she designated a shelving unit to be solely for my hobby stuff. I don't have too many finished miniatures here at the house, so the top shelf is currently DBA and Frostgrave forces, the next two shelves are scenery (at least until I need the shelf space for finished miniatures,) and finally books on the bottom shelf. You can also see some of my model airplanes hanging from the ceiling (another one of her suggestions.)

Best. Wife. Ever.

Future Plans
I've got four Warbands for Frostgrave finished, four more in the works, and I am still rolling hot on wanting to get them done. But I know I am going to want a change of pace soon. I have been feeling the urge to start painting my DBA Persians again, and a local gaming group has invited me to play VSF Colonials with them. So, while this blog will remain Tumbhelada de Punkrabbitt, in January I will be posting occasional forays into other genres. You have been warned!

Wednesday Night Musings IV

Glorantha!

Back in the day, I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons because that is what my friends played. There were some other games out there, but we had all invested in AD&D so that is what we played. I was the only one looking at the other options, and that was more curiosity than any real urge to try a different system. There was this one game called Runequest, which had a weird fantasy setting called Glorantha, a Bronze Age world where elves were actually mobile plants and the closest thing to hobbits were anthropomorphic ducks. I was okay with cat people and centaurs in my fantasy games, but duck men? I passed on Runequest.

Not a duck to be taken seriously.

As it turns out, with 35 years of hindsight, I had passed on a good thing. I have lately looked back into Runequest, its various editions and improvements over the years, and oddly enough, at those very ducks that turned me off from it in the first place. See, the ducks seemed like Donald-Daffy-Howard analogues when I first looked at it. As it turned out, the ducks of Glorantha called themselves Durulz and were portrayed in the setting as grim, fatalistic warriors stuck living next to the Zombie Swamp, with a mystical connection to the Death God. These were ducks who wanted very badly to kick serious ass against the undead that regularly invaded their home and also the Lunar Empire who had offered bounties for duck kills.

Ducks that will kill your sorry ass and eat your innards for a snack.

The only problem being, by the time I realized that Runequest was a great set of rules, with a great setting in Glorantha, and that ducks are not what I had expected, my RPG days had passed me by. I pretty much only do tabletop miniature gaming these days (also computer gaming,  but that doesn't count for the purpose of this.) So, I was looking for some duck miniatures that I could build a small army from, and also a fantasy rule set that would allow the creation of a custom force so I could field those ducks.Rebel Miniatures produce a set of wicked looking ducks, not cartoony at all, and I was hooked. So I ordered some during their Spring Sale, did some amazing conversion work on them, and was set to play.

Slightly out of focus, but we can deal with that, right? Right?

After an abortive attempt at using my ducks for Brink Of Battle (my gaming group disintegrated before I ever had a chance to seriously play,) I boxed them up and took them to Storage. But recently, when I looked at Frostgrave, I realized two very important things: 1) my Durulz warband would be perfect for Frostgrave, and 2) Frostgrave is the perfect rules set to play some Glorantha skirmish games. So, my various plans for all sorts of Glorantha-themed Warbands has a chance to see the light of day once again!

An entire duck village... dedication, I tell you.

Wednesday Night Musings

Just some random thoughts about Frostgrave that have been brewing in my mind this week...

How Much is Too Much?
I've jumped fully into Frostgrave. I haven't even played a game yet, and I have plans for six or eight warbands. I may not ever even play six or eight games! It's as if every time I see an idea, I want to Frostgrave it. I had a couple of warbands from my abortive attempt to play Brink of Battle, both of them are being written up for Frostgrave (the unfinished flamingoes, however, are not.) Then there is the warband I am currently painting, as shown in my last installment. And I read about Dwarvember and, you guessed it, I felt the compulsion to start a Dwarf warband for this new project. Add to that the goblins I painted but never based for D&D, some leftover figures from both of my daughter's Elf projects, and an unassembled box of Orcs, and I am already set for the next several months of building and painting. Did I mention I still haven't played a game yet? Did I mention leftover Kroot? Oh, and what about those Egyptian and Libyan groups I did for Song of Blades and Heroes that are gathering dust?

Somewhere, something sinister and powerful is laughing at me. I can feel it...

Models With Two Weapons
I originally posted a topic about this on TMP; one of my dwarfs will be my Barbarian, but he is using two axes instead of a two-handed axe. While the general consensus is that it is just fine as long as everyone playing knows that two axes = two-handed axe, this is driving me crazy. I started serious miniatures gaming with Warhammer 40,000, and I am firmly indoctrinated in the "What You See Is What You Get" mentality. Granted, this rule was later replaced by the "Counts As" rule, but my roots go way back. So, I will be running this guy as a "Counts As" in regards to the axes, but at some point I may feel the urge to replace him with a different naked dwarf with a single big axe.

It stalk me in my dreams, whispering gluttonous thoughts, too much is never enough...

Scenery
I am heavily invested in cardstock scenery. I have a lot of it. And by a lot, I mean it in capitals. I have a LOT. So my first thought for Frostgrave were to forget about the winter theme, and just use the rules, but for a more temperate gaming environment. But, when I went to my storage to dig out the big bin o' generic fantasy scenery, I discovered some small Christmas Village trees I had bought a few years back, and an unused sheet of white foamcore board (as well as a few other scenic odds and ends.) So, we are back to winter. Or at least defrosting winter. I am in the process of building some scatter terrain pieces on the white foamboard to be snowy patches still intact on my otherwise brown and green gaming board. With a fair selection of cardstock houses and other accessories. I *think* I have a selection of ruined buildings, if not I will have to make some more.

No, of course you don't have to worry if there is enough room in the house for it all...

Sorry about the lack of fancy pictures tonight, I will have posts up with pictures for both Mo'vember and Dwarvember as we close in on the weekend.