Information Gathering - SoBH AAR

A one off "Song of Blades and Heroes" battle this week, between MacSver's Dwarves and a new Human Holy Order warband.

 The scenario was "Traces to Emrpise" from Hour11's Scenario booklet. The aim was to get round the buildings and question or torture the inhabitants for pieces information.

Quick Crossbowmen

This week a one off game of "Song of Blades and Heroes" is planned. The campaign is in a haitus at the moment until MacSver can find time in his busy schedule to get his recruits painted (autumn time probably). Lots of games to play in the meantime. For this week I had a bit of a rummage around and came up with some blue and white quartered Empire Soldiers I'd painted ages ago as a town or noble guard for roleplaying. Coincidentally they fitted in with the robe colours of a Battling Bishop I'd picked up somewhere (already painted). If they are to try and face up to MacSver's Dwarves though they'll need a bit more than a willingness to go toe-to-toe in battle. So I raided the old Empire soldiers and Mercenary boxsets to make up a couple of crossbowmen, and gave them a quick paint to match the existing troops.

I thought town\noble guards would be more likely to have crossbows than long bows.

The assembled warband.

As far as SoBH stats go the guards are just standard Human soldiers\archers. I think I'll make the Bishop an Enchanter to give the flavour of shouting religious zeal to encourage a particular soldier for a turn (pass 2 or 3 dice to add 1 to combat for his turn). I would also like to make one or two of the pikemen as bodyguards, but that's a "Song of Arthur and Merlin" rule, and so far I don't think we've included any of those rules.

The Citizens Come out

When writing up the last Dead Man's Hand session I finally succumbed and bought a gang. I had always planned to buy a quick to paint, easy to play gang to let me get on with other projects, but looking round the Great Escape Games website I seduced by the obvious characters in the citizens pack, so bought them with "The Stranger" add-on (basically a Pale Rider set)

So with them embarrassingly naked MacSver and I gave them a run through to see how they played.

Dawn Breaks and the Lawmen advance.

The Citizen's gathered in the Undertakers and Rogan's bar

The Law reach the centre of the town, confident
against the hesitant local populace.

The Stranger makes a move to confront the Sheriff, but
poor activation cards, and well played one's by MacSver
leave him exposed without taking a shot.

The Sheirff and his deputy take care of the interloper.

The Citizen's are spurred into action with Drunken dutchman
Rutger charging in with his shotgun, backed up by Jolene from the bar.

The game was inconclusive mainly thanks to my inability to roll numbers in double figures on a d20! The Stranger is quite powerful, but will need the backup (or shielding) of the citizens to make best use of his talents.

15mm Undead Get Some Paint

Completely stalled with the painting over the last few weeks, so I thought I'd act on some of those unsubtle comments and start painting the 15mm warbands.

4 Walking Dead, 4 Skeleton Warriors and the Cavalry. All from 15mm.co.uk

T-Shirt Art

The Arabian family have been away on holiday for the last week, so no gaming. However I did pick up a couple of Fantasy art t-shirts from a stall trader in Barcelona, and so liked them I thought I'd share here.

I couldn't resist this one. None more "dwarf-y". Elements of it remind me of old G.W. artwork so much so I'd had a look online to see if I could find a copy, but couldn't. Great pose!

You may have to click on the picture for the full size version to fully get a grasp of this second one. A pile of goblins. There's something that is just right about having all these characterful faces crushed in together.

Warmachine - The Final Door is Slams Shut.

It's been about a year since my last game of Warmachine, so MacSver and I dusted off the models for a game. The forces were Khador (MacSver) against Cygnar (myself).  We lined up:.

Khador:

• Kommander Sorscha Kratikoff
• Juggernaut - Heavy Warjack
• Destroyer - Heavy Warjack
• Assault Kommandos
• Widowmakers
• Man-O-War Shocktroopers

Cygnar: 

• Commander Adept Nemo
• Ironclad Heavy Warjack
• Lancer Light 'jack
• Firefly Light 'jack
• Journeyman Warcaster
• Charger Light 'jack (bound to Jr)
• Black 13th Gun Mages
• 2 x Stormcallers

It was to be a straight battle across the Crystal Fields.

15mm Skirmish Box - Board & Building Improvements

First of all thank you for all the suggestions on my board problems a few posts ago. All very helpful and appreciated.

For the record I tried flattening the vinyl based tiles under books. This did sort of work, but they still resorted to a curl after a period of non compression. I also experimented with gluing pine wood strips to the edges. Both White glue and hot glue bonds were too weak (white glue didn't stick at all) so I abandoned that idea.

After a bit of head scratching and beard stroking I decided to trial mounting the printed boards on mounting board, quite often used for displaying artwork or presentations. Made of cardboard, not to be confused with foam core.

I used 3M Photomount glue spray, stuck the printed sheets down, cut to the correct size and left under a couple of heavy books for a while. The result (so far) has been flat at the edges (see above)

This has left the boards pushing together nice and flat, as you can see in the picture above. I'm on Holiday for a few days soon, so I'll leave them just "in box" and see if they are still OK on my return (fingers crossed).

I have also been playing around with the folding house design. I've not been happy with the way the roofs have been sitting. They could be a bit fiddly, or sit squint and showing a gap in the wall (look back at previous photo's and you'll probably see evidence of this. So I changed from a tab to printing the full wall apex (see above).

The wall apex is still duplicated on the roof section, but the proper contour into the roof, and the texture overlap give a much better sitting and solid look (above).

Building scaling has also been changed. The models are designed for 30mm, so naturally the advice is print at 50% for 15mm. As you can see above the 50% is a bit small here, especially with the MDF bases I'm using.

Changing the scaling to 55% has produced a better result (to my eye anyway) and if I moved to basing on thinner washers I think the 55% would still be the way to go.

As an added note, these alterations have been made using Dave Graffam's alternative format of selling the Photoshop files of several of his designs. The two above are from the Small Shop and Rustic Cabins #2 sets. Photoshop is a bit pricey, but I use the free software GIMP which handles all the graphics and layers in the original format just fine. This has the added bonus of being able to apply the different layers as per the normal PDFs, but also make my extra cut sections, change the location of elements (window positions for example) and make new image files so that the scaled down versions can be entirely printed on a single sheet of card, saving time and money. I would personally recommend them over the pdfs where available (especially as they are the same price!)