Category Archives: Fantasy

Posts on fantasy gaming using the Fantasy Rules 2nd Ed. and Hordes of the Things rules.

An End to 2021 At Last!

Personally and hobbywise, it’s not been a terrible year, although it’s been a bit low on the number of blog posts, overall. But for the rest… yeesh. Good bye and good riddance, 2021!

A bit of year end figure painting, with the faithful feline assistant in the foreground making things warmer but more awkward! Wargames Atlantic plastic skeletons for our fantasy skirmish stuff, whenever current circumstances allow us to resume in person gaming! Click, as usual, for larger.

With the surge in Omicron cases locally we’ve stopped in-person gaming again, out of an abundance of caution. We will probably resume sometime in January, but it’ll be back to webcam Gaslands for a bit in the first couple weeks of 2022.

A quick count shows 22 blog entries here in 2021, far more in the first half of the year than as the year wore on. Not bad, but I would like to get a bit more momentum going through 2022!

To that end, I’ve joined the PaintSlam community and their Discord channel; like a lot of wargaming social media it’s heavily GW-focussed but by no means exclusive to GW in any way. I’m “Vemundr” on most Discord channels, due to having started on Discord for Society for Creative Anachronism reasons, so if you’re on the PaintSlam Discord discussion group feel free to say hi!

Here’s to an improved 2022 for everyone over 2021! Stay safe, get your booster when you can, and try to get some gaming in!

Deer God? Dear God!

I’ve been on a kick of assembling and basing figures in batches the last little while, and also (as you can tell) not been doing much of the ol’ blogging this year… Anyway, right in the middle of assembling a couple of dozen Toadstool Brownies from the big Fenris Miniatures Toadstool Kickstarter earlier this year, the loot from the Fenris KS after that, the Wyrdworld one with all sorts of cool anthropomorphized animal figures showed up!

I decided that I needed to base and assemble Brutolph, the Giant Elk right away, because it is a truly spectacular figure.

Brutolph’s business end. Click for larger.

That’s a 40mm circular base our big deer is on, with his arms, spear and antlers just dry fitted for now until all the Milliput on his base is properly cured.

Brutolph alongside a 28mm Warlord ECW figure on a 25mm base. Click for larger.

To the top of his antlers he’s just shy of 3″ tall, and that spear is longer than that!

Brutolph from overhead, with Fenris Toadstool Brownies in the background holding up the awesome “Love Miniatures, Hate Fascism” stickers, also from Fenris. Click, as usual, for larger.

I’ll get Brutolph’s arms and antlers properly installed over the next few days and then he and the whole village of Toadstool Brownies will be off for priming. I’m not actually sure how I’ll be painting him up, but might go slightly weird as I intend to use the figure as a forest god/spirit of the deep forest type!

Necromancer necro-d, a Sellswords & Spellslingers adventure

We’ve been playing a fair amount of Sellswords and Spellslingers, a fairly light coop fantasy skirmish game. I picked it up on a lark, as I wanted something different it looked fun. Years ago Brian and I played a fair amount of Song of Blades & Heroes by the same author, which is a competitive, fast-play fantasy skirmish ruleset. You can read about one of our games many years ago here:

We recently we played through the Necromancer in the Tower scenario, something we’ve tried and failed before. Be warned, SS&SS can be a brutal game and losing your entire team is not unknown.

This scenario is pretty simple – fight your way through to the necromancer in the tower, kill them and then fight your way out. Like all SS&SS games, the game begins with a few foes scattered throughout the map, some deployed as hordes and some individually. To makes things interesting, I pulled out some skeletal dinosaurs I found a few years ago and meant to turn into museum exhibits for pulp but never did.

Start of our Sellswords game
Opening of the game, with the tower in the middle

The game opened with the three dinosaurs nicely split across the board and us on the road into the tower. Early turns had us pick off the straggler skeletons and make good progress towards the tower. It looked to be going swimmingly, save for Brian rolling a 1 with his wizard, putting him out of magic. Which is where things go wrong.

We run a custom event deck, one that takes a few of the monster spawning cards and adds a few new monster moving cards. One of which is Target on your Back. It causes the nearest non-Minion foe to target that PC to the exclusivity of anybody else.

Custom event cards for Sellsword
Some of our custom event cards, including the Target on Your Back card

This card has caused chaos in previous games – a bear ran across the table, the PC it was attacking ran off the table, so it promptly killed two other PCs in revenge. In this game, it was no different. In two turns, the ceratops charged pretty much all the way across the map, attacking my main character, the wizard Green Hat. Who promptly went down, followed by my bruiser fighter, Mohawk. And then one of Brian’s figures. Here is where the necromancer’s ability to save their undead came in – the ceratops saved 3 different hits that would have killed it, each by a figure that later died by its horn.

Final battle with the skeletal ceratops
Hordes of skeletons attacking Sean, a skunk keeping Brian at bay and the skeletal ceratops having taken down 2 out of my 3 PCs

At this tense moment, nobody could really help me, as Sean was battling 12 skeletons in and around the tower, a merging of about 4 hordes of them, some in the tower, some outside. And Brian’s PCs were pinned by the skunk, a wandering monster that while it can’t harm directly, can you make you smell real good.

Thankfully a few targeted ranged attacks took out the necromancer and with it, most of the skeletons evaporated. And then the ceratops finally went down, but not before doing a lot of damage.

All in all, a fun game and while lethal, we actually managed to succeed, unlike a decent number of our games.

Game Details

We were running 80 XP parties, with Sean and Brian each having four figures to my 3. Each of us had a spellcaster and a ranged figure.

Stats for the Dinosaurs

All the dinosaurs were run with the following:

DL 14 HP 4 DMG 2

All had Bony Undead as per the Skeletal Warrior card – which makes them harder to hit by arrows and easier by crushing weapons (which apparently none of us had)

  • Brachiosaurus
    • Tail Sweep – everybody with 1″ takes DL 12 attack or falls prone
    • Trample – everybody in path of moving is attacked
  • Centrosaurus
    • Gore – when charging, DL is 16 (as per Greater Minotaur)
  • Hadrosaur
    • Trample as per above

The board

The board was pretty simple. The mat itself is a custom SS&SS mat I have been working on for a while now and will write up soon. The necromancer’s tower is a 3D print of the Abandoned Lighthouse by escaroth on Thingiverse, while the trees are from Vegetation B by terrain4print. The bushes are new, adapted from Luke @ Geek Gaming Scenics. Will write those up too soon.

Links of Interest, 11 August 2021

Quiet around here as I’m not doing a lot of gaming, painting, or terrain building this summer. Too busy with other things! I did have a couple of fantastic games of WW2 coastal forces earlier in August, and will get those photos up here in the next little while.

I recently got a well-stuffed box of awesome stuff from Fenris Games as part of their Toadstool Brownies Kickstarter, including whole forests full of mushrooms and some really neat tiny brownie and kobold figures. I’ll get some more photos of those and get some sort of review up soon-ish.

On to links… over on Empire of Ghosts we have some rather nice small scale islands in two styles, one tropical for Caribbean/the Med and one more northerly for the North Sea. They’re nominally 6mm or 1/300 to match the Warlord Cruel Seas boats and others, but as designed they’re pretty scale-neutral and the basic ideas will serve for even smaller scales too.

My excellent local game store started carrying UV resin and I picked some up a while ago, intending to try it out for windows in various buildings. Usefully, I just found this tutorial on using UV resin for windows over on the Comm Guild blog, which should prove useful when I finally get around to finishing the MDF church I started a few years ago.

More content here as the summer comes to an end in a month or so, I promise!

BCS 2021 & A Blog Update

Well, “a few weeks” in my last update apparently turned into two months of radio silence here. Oops.

Build Something Contest 2021 over on LAF had the end date pushed back by two weeks due to the organizer having an attack of Real Life, but it’s wrapped up and voting should start this week over on Lead Adventure!

I’ll get a full gallery of all my build shots up after voting begins, but in the meantime here’s a teaser from early in construction of my entry, which wound up named the “Dark Pool of Dark Darkness”…

The piece with most of the basic groundwork laid down and the rock formations just started. 28mm gnolls on 25mm bases for scale; the whole thing is about 10″ long by 9″ wide or so. Click for larger, as usual.

2020 In Review

Well, that was quite a year, wasn’t it?

No conventions, no in-person gaming at all for a good part of the year thanks to our local COVID precautions, and yet things still got painted, finished, and even played with.

Before COVID (Remember That?)

village
Low over the coastline, approaching the village. Click for larger.

We started the year damp and cold off the 1/1200 coasts of England with a lot of naval gaming and scenery for that, then we were briefly visited by a very strange bartender indeed and got a few games of tiny ships done in-person.

narthoks finished, front
Narthoks all finished except for basing. Go on, tell the bartender your troubles! Click for larger.

The Weird Begins…

March was when it all went weird. The high point of my own gaming year, Trumpeter Salute over in Vancouver, was cancelled on less than two weeks notice, work-from-home started abruptly, and all sorts of other things went very, very sideways. I did spend some of the money I’d have ordinarily have spent on other things on orders from Bad Squiddo and Forge of Ice, two tiny one-person companies I’ve been meaning to order from for many years now, so that part was nice, but the fact that March/April/May 2020 have fewer blog entries here, combined, than I made in January indicates how off-kilter everything was!

The end of May did see the modification of our local COVID restrictions so that we could have “pods” of up to six or so people, so my brother and a friend resumed gaming most Sundays, starting up a Frostgrave campaign that eventually morphed into a fantasy-flavoured Pulp Alley campaign.

start of game
Start of the game. My chaps centre foreground, Sean’s ogre ladies top left, Corey’s mousling bravos top right. Click for larger.

COVID Bubble Gaming

June and July saw something like a normal posting pace resume here as I cranked out a bunch of fun quick fantasy scenery to add to our Forestgrave tables including a standing stone and a big tree. There were also a few impossibly tiny planes as a diversion from fantasy!

Tiny, tiny 1/1200 RAF and Luftwaffe airplanes to trouble boats not quite as tiny.

August saw a return to naval stuff and small scale scenery, and September saw the arrival of Gaslands on the scene, which has provided much pandemic diversion since!

Mad mushroom jungles for properly fantastical fantasy gaming!

The Bubble Bursts…

The last quarter of 2020 saw tightening of our local COVID restrictions and the end of even limited in-person gaming, but before that we did get to see some mad mushroom jungle terrain and some other weird fantasy terrain before we finally turned to that most 2020 of communication solutions, online webcam conferencing, for a Gaslands gaming fix.

Gaslands by webcam, via OBS and Discord.

So, that was our 2020 here at the Warbard! A weird, stressful, very strange year but here’s hoping that sometime before the end of 2021 we’re back to in-person gaming, conventions, and something vaguely like pre-pandemic normality.

In the meantime, wear a mask, keep an eye on how soon you can get your COVID vaccine, try to get some hobby time in if your situation allows, and stay safe. Happy New Year, I guess!

Resin Bases and Bits from Rain City Hobbies

I’ve talked up Rain City Hobbies on this blog before, but only for their very nice grass and flower tufts. They also do a huge range of resin bases, but because I rarely use elaborate complex bases they’ve not interested me much.

I do own a few of their resin bases, however, picked up from the “production seconds by weight” bin sold by Rain City at gaming conventions. (remember gaming conventions from the Before Times? I miss them…)

Needing a distraction from current events I decided to paint up the biggest of these, an elaborate ruined temple base nearly the size of a CD, their Huge Ruined Sanctuary insert. 120mm (~4 and a quarter inches, roughly) across, the production second one I have has nearly perfect molding of all the details, but it warped before the resin had fully cured so won’t lie flat.

The ruined sanctuary base all painted up. Click for larger.

I tried out a bunch of different stone painting techniques on this base and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. The three big chunks of shattered statue were based in light tan, then progressively highlighted with whiter and whiter paints well diluted with glaze medium, which really got a translucent polished stone effect going.

The green arc and big green fragment were basecoated fairly dark green, then given marble-like veins with brighter greens, again well mixed with glaze medium. They got a good coat of gloss varnish, and then some highlighting with almost pure white.

The flagstones got basecoated with four or five off-white/tan shades, washed with GW Sepia and Earthshade washes, then highlighted with light tan and off-white. The tree roots are various shades of reddish brown.

The big base from the other side. Click for larger.

Because of the warp across the width, I’ll probably base this onto a larger piece of thin plastic, then use putty and then foliage to merge the lifted corners back into the base, making this look like a fragment that has been largely swallowed by forest or jungle.

I’ve also got a few more random bases I might finish up, and those three tan pieces to the right in both photos above are the Large Broken Statuary Base Accessories that I will be using either together with the big base or on their own as scenery elements. More on them in some future post when I get them finished.

Stay safe, stay home, try to get something creative done, mask up when required out in public, and better days (actual gaming conventions!) shall come again.

Mad Mushroom Jungles

From the excellent people running Dark Fantastic Mills I purchased this Doomcap Shrooms Bundle earlier in the year. If you want to run fantasy games, you should, I think, have fantasy scenery. If you want to fight amongst perfectly ordinary trees, run a historical game, those are fun too.

Unpainted Doomcap Shroom bundle, photo from the Dark Fantastic Mills website. I believe that figure is on a 32mm base. Big fungus!

These mushrooms are all 3d printed in FMD; you can see some layering here and there, especially across the broad flat tops of some of the bigger mushrooms, but other than that they’re wonderfully sculpted and beautifully detailed pieces of scenery. And BIG – check out that roughly human sized figure in the Dark Fantastic Mills shop photo above!

With “fantasy scenery should look fantastic” in mind, I cut loose and did up this lovely batch of 3d-printed giant ‘shrooms (and their smaller brethern) in gloriously weird colours. Reds and purples and vivid blues and greens, all the colours I usually use sparingly here and there came out in force.

I started with a dark grey spray primer coat, then did a rough drybrush of pure white. All of the colours after that got cut at least 1:1 if not more with glaze medium, so the original drybrushing mostly showed through and the various colours layered and blended fairly smoothly. I’ve posted this link before, but go watch Dana Howl’s 24 minute intro to glaze medium on YouTube, it really has changed the way I paint and these giant mushrooms would have looked much less interesting without her influence.

Three of the DFM ‘shrooms and the smaller of the two scenic bases that come as part of the bundle. Click for larger.
The larger of the two scenic bases, and three more of the big DFM shrooms. Click for larger.
DFM shrooms on the left, as well as their mini-shrooms on the three mushroom thickets in the background. The foreground fairy ring features mushrooms from Bad Squiddo. Click for larger.
The largest single piece in the DFM bundle is that huge multi-trunked shroom off to the left, which I still need to finish the base of. Largest scenic base in the foreground. Click for larger.

Some of the DFM shrooms still need another round of highlighting or glazing to finish them off, and the biggest one, the massive slope-topped multi-trunked one in the last photo, still needs it’s base finished, flocked and detailed.

I’m really pleased with these Dark Fantastic Mills ‘shrooms. The bundle isn’t cheap, but you get huge dramatic pieces of scenery for your money that really stand out on the table! Go check Dark Fantastic Mills out, they’ve really harnessed 3d printing to make scenery that couldn’t easily be made in other materials and their designs really are fantastic.

More Weird Fantasy Terrain

Back in June, roughly 20,000 years ago in the Early COVID Summer Era, I built a stone portal/archway/summoning gate thing, showed off photos of it all unpainted and pink, and then never got another photo of it up on the blog! The paintjob was pretty similar to the standing stone I’d done a week or so prior, in any case.

This week I pulled both those pieces out and finally did the base detailing so they fit better with the rest of my fantasy terrain, which has a wild, fecund, lush Summer Realm feel to it, even before you start noticing the giant mushrooms!

Weird stone arch all painted up. Click for larger.

I’ve just ordered a top up of flowers and grasses from Rain City Hobbies over in Vancouver; they do a bunch of different grasses and flower tufts in a nice variety of colours and I always like having a relatively-local source for this stuff! One of these days I might need to put an order in for some of the really weird alien grass colours Bad Squiddo stocks to add that extra touch of strange to my fantasy table!

As for the stuff in the background of the photo above, stay tuned, I have more weird fantasy terrain posts coming soon!

Weird Fantasy Terrain

If you’re going to do fantasy battles, why restrict yourself to normal-looking trees and such? If you want to fight a battle in a pine forest, go do Romans vs Germanics or WW2 Ardennes or something. For fantasy, we should have properly fantastical terrain!

To that end I recommend Dark Fantastic Mills terrain (but more of them in a longer future post!) and the Fantastic Rocks & Plants STL Kickstarter which concluded back in September and which now appears to be available for purchase (or late pledges? I can’t tell) over on MyMiniFactory.

I don’t have a 3d printer but Corey does, so I pay him in beer and snark and (when his tempermental 3d printer cooperates) get 3d printed nifty things back from him.

Using a couple of junk CDs (best scenery bases ever!) I put together this trio of fungal thickets to add proper fantastical flavour to our fantasty skirmish games.

All three mushroom thicket bases together, plus nine Reaper tree-kin to lurk in the thickets! Click for larger.

These thickets use half a dozen big 3d printed mushrooms from the FR&P KS and a bunch of resin and 3d printed smaller mushrooms from Dark Fantastic. Scraps of cork board about 1/4″ thick add some height here and there, and sand, flock, and lots and lots of flower tufts finish them off.

More mushroom madness. The tree-critters in the foreground are Reaper Miniatures saporlings. Click for larger.

The tree-dudes are Reaper Saporlings, available in a batch of nine, as a single, or in Bones plastic. They’re about human sized and great figures. They’re going to star as zombie stand-ins in a fantasy pulp game sometime soon, and will no doubt find other roles to play in future games.

More Saporlings, and two of the mushroom thicket bases. Click for larger.

I have the Doomcap Deeps bundle from Dark Fantastic all painted up in the same bright colour blending scheme as these mushrooms, and I’ll get some decent photos of them soon for that longer review post I hinted at at the start of this post.

Stay well in our second wave of COVID world, stay safe, and try to get some gaming in if you are able. If we isolate now, it is so that there isn’t a gap on the other side of the gaming table when we do gather again in safety.