More goodness from the Lead Painters League, this time my Week Two entry, titled Command On The Frontier. The frontier in this case being the interwar Northwest Frontier, nominally. British officers and sargents attempting to control the volatile, dangerous border between what was then British India & Afganistan.
Command on the Frontier, 192-. More Pulp Figures goodness. As always, click for full size.
Unlike my winning Round One entry, Commandgot soundly and deservedly thrashed by a spectacular field hospital entry from Hammers. Entertainingly, both cover the same ground — British interwar army — and even the same theatre (!) so the random match generation had a bit of a sense of humour about the whole thing.
Anyway, onto Round Three, in which I have a much better set of photos, more colourful figures and (Dog willing…) perhaps a less overachieving opponent!
LPL5 Round 1 is over and Round 2 begun by the time you read this. The LPL format, for those of you not familiar, is ten week-long rounds, with entries paired up so with 70-odd participants there’s 30-some one-on-one entries per round. The league format means no elimination, and every round you’ll be paired up with a different contestant.
My Lead Painters League 5 entry for Round 1 of the comp.
The Round 1 bonus theme was “Civilians”; my entry was five Pulp Figures’ Surly Servants, with a RAFM Investigator’s Roadster‘s back corner on the left. All sculpted by Bob Murch, in fact!
As a bonus, I quite handily won my Round One matchup, against some quite nice modern bystanders. (I don’t enter LPL with any particular expectation of winning; there’s too many far better painters active on LAF for that!) On to Round Two and more!
A bit quieter around the Warbard right now; I’m having most of my gaming time sucked up by the Lead Painters League 5 and real life; Corey is however away for the weekend at the Dak-Kon convention up-Island and promises lots of photographs upon his return. He’ll probably be doing a run of Amulet of Fire at some point over the weekend, too.
A Brigade Games White Russian rifleman in fur hat, first of a unit. Click for full size.
I’ve been painting various things, most of which I’ll wait for the various rounds of LPL5 to reveal, but here’s one of my new projects – a small foray into the Russian Civil War with a unit of White Russian riflemen, figures from Brigade Games, paint scheme not completely historic but based on inspiration from the Osprey White Armies book and some of the great resources shared on LAF’s Back of Beyond forum. Expect to see five or six of his squadmates in a future LPL5 round!
Minor update, a few hours later: I posted this photo to LAF’s Back of Beyond forum and asked for feedback, and got some excellent advice from some of the local experts. I especially like the fact that Russian troops often had coloured cloth inner parts on their fur hats; this was news to me and it’s a chance to make them more colourful yet!
[L]ess than a week left until Round One of the Lead Adventure Forum’s famous and awesome Lead Painters League opens; I entered in 2009 in LPL3, sat out 2010’s LPL4 for a variety of bad reasons, and decided to get my arse in gear and enter LPL5 this year when it was announced a while ago!
Three rounds of the LPL are themed rounds; you can enter anything at any time but get bonus points for following the theme. These theme rounds, especially the big blowout final round, Round 10, are among the most interesting of an already interesting league! LPL5’s special rounds are Round 1: Civilians; Round 5: Africa; Round 10: Scenes from the Movies. I got a good batch of civvies in for Round 1; I think I know what I’ll submit for Round 5 & Africa, but haven’t a damn clue what I’ll do for Round 10 this time around…
I think I’ll do a gallery post in a day or so of my LPL3 entries, just to inspire me to keep on the ball with LPL5 this year.
Entries have to be in by Saturday 12 March at 1200GMT, if you’re inspired to enter. I have no expectation of even getting into the top half of the standings, but it’s a great excuse to finish figures, take good photos, and kick my painting up a notch – entering LPL3 definitely made me a bolder, better painter!
Found, buried in my harddrive, another couple of forgotten work-in-progress shots from the first round of shoreline/riverbank construction back in June 2009. The rest of the construction was written up last week.
Bare cardboard stage of construction of the first set of shoreline/riverbank pieces. Click for full size.
Shoreline/riverbank beginning painting. Click for full size.
Muddy brown paint on the banks, first coats of acrylic gloss varnish down on the water. Click for full size.
Visit the Caribbean’s Hidden Paradise, Costa Guano! (View Larger on Flickr by clicking the image)
More pulp graphic lunacy via Inkscape and the peculiar inside of my skull. This time it’s a travel poster to that oft-forgotten tropical hellhole paradise, The Republic of Costa Guano, which with it’s various neighbours will, eventually, form the background for some pulp/Banana Wars games and pulp adventure lunacy.
“Costa Guano” is, I think, a name originally used in a Joseph Conrad novel I haven’t actually read, but it’s too good a joke to pass up. Pulp steamers and their adventuring crews on the swampy coasts; exiled gangsters and foreign agents skulking in the fetid, dangerous capital Montón De Guano; Lost Worlds in the unmapped jungle-shrouded interior; Banana Wars and uprisings… all these and more are possibly taking place right now in exciting Costa Guano. Book your zeppelin ticket from Miami (with stopover in Havana) today!
There’s a 22 page set of demo rules which include the full movement, combat, wound, vehicle, explosive and flying rules, as well as enough Archetypes to build some characters and teams to test the new shiny out.
There’s also a draft copy of the 2nd Edition Special Abilities PDF, with a good selection of the skills & special abilities that’ll be available in 2nd Ed.
More later perhaps when I’ve had a chance to look it over properly and build a character or two! Short version is that I like what I see, lots of streamlining and good tweaks to an already great system.
Full release of the rules is pencilled in for mid-March, apparently.
Two feet of riverbank/shoreline, the original two from summer 2009. On the right, a 28mm hunter and a 28mm sabre-tooth tiger on a 20mm by 40mm base. Click for full-size image.
These riverbanks or shorelines made from picture-framing board (mattboard). I did the first set back in 2009 and another batch in the winter of 2010. They’re designed to form one edge of a playing board, especially on the 2’x2′ playing areas common to .45 Adventures. One of the really nice things about games like 45A that encourage smaller playing areas is that terrain projects become a whole lot more managable — no more having to crank out eight feet of river just to have enough to be usable on the table! Each segment is 12″ (1 foot) long and 5″ deep, 4″ of river and 1″ of banks. The banks are the same mattboard as the rest, to keep them as low-profile as possible. The painting is black and two colours of blue, damp-blended right on the card. I tried to keep the edges mostly matched while painting the pieces. The water portions then got about six or so coats of acrylic gloss varnish so they looked like water. If I was going to paint them again, I’d do the water areas a greener shade with less black, as is often seen in murky jungle rivers.
The docks in place on the new riverbank section. Click for full-sized version.
In the winter of 2010 I added two new segments to the set, one another copy of the existing riverbank pieces, and the second incorporating a ramshackle wooden dock. The dock segment was wider than the others for most of the length, although obviously the same width at the ends. The docks were built up with baswood planks, with toothpicsk and bamboo skewers for the piilings. The large dock section is glued to the base; the three smaller sections are freestanding for flexibility.
The riverbank dock section, showing the freestanding dock segments. Click for full-size verison.
All four sections have been largely free of warping or damage, although the docks section does havea tendency to bow when stored. The eventual plan is to rebuild these riverbank sections in 2mm or 3mm MDF, using a bandsaw to cut the curves, but mattboard will do until then!
(these photos have been seen over on the Lead Adventure Forum and elsewhere previously, if you’re thinking they look a bit familiar…)
The Amulet of Fire posterI only made it to Saturday’s sessions at GottaCon – busy Friday night and working Sunday – but it was good. Had a decent RPG session Saturday morning (I’m not much of a convention RPGer, but it was OK) and Saturday afternoon was my big one, the first outing of the “Amulet of Fire” scenario!
I got five players, four of whom were among my regular 45A crowd and one friend who’d never made it to our previous pulp games. We got set up, factions picked and off and running on the 1st Act, “The Missionary Position”.
Random highlights – the two Russian factions (White & Red Air Pirate) immediately started a brawl that lasted the whole Act and resulted in some sword wounds, lots of wasted lead, and one Red shot in the head. The British and the White Russians stitched up some sort of truce, based mostly on a mutual distaste for Bolshies. Continue reading GottaCon Gone→
Under 24hrs to go until my Gottacon game… checklist time.
Figures, Scenery & Stuff Glue drying on the bases of the last figure needed. Dullcote tonight if I get to it, otherwise they’ll do for one game. No scenery needed to be built, save a couple of small pieces. My brother has those under control, he assures me. Vehicles… we have more than enough. Black felt game cloth just to put under the scenery tiles… forgot that, will have to run without it. Not a big deal, it just would have looked neater with it. Scenario & player handout material… all neccesary stuff finished, proofread and printed. I even have an 11×17 full colour version of the Amulet of Fire cover to put on one corner of the table!
Con Survival Kit Bottle of water, large. Check. Bottles of Coke (2)(Caffeine IS life). Check. Chocolate bars (simple carbs = fast energy). Check. Cold pizza (complex carbs are good, too). Check. Comfy shoes. Check.
Still To-Do Tonight Rearrange figure cases so all the figs I need for the scenario are in one case, instead of spread over five. Rearrange scenery slightly so everything is in one banker’s box, not two. Pick up car, deliver large scenery stuff to convention site, to stash under organizer’s table instead of wrestling with everything tomorrow morning. Decent night’s sleep.
To-Do, Tomorrow Find something worth playing in the morning. 2PM PST, inflict pulp mayhem upon the world!
