Musings on a New Army

If I ever do decide to build an Imperial Guard army, it would be a Death Korps of Krieg army. I love the look - the great coats and the gas masks. Of course, at £35 for 10 troops (which is AU$6 per model), it's never going to actually happen (a single troop choice for an IG army can, theoretically, get up to something like 150 models).

It's beginning to look like my dream might be affordable after all. In May, the Wargames Factory are going to release their Shock Troops range - sci fi greatcoat infantry as they describe it. The best part is that they're going to retail for US$20 for a box of 18 models (or AU$1.20 per model)

I can pick up a box of 10 Cadian Shock Troops for £10.40 (AU$1.75 per troop), just to attempt to protect me from the GW enforcers (apparently to be tournament legal, each model needs to be at least 75% GW). So mixing and matching the parts (along with some green stuff work) would give me at least 28 troops (which works out to be about AU$1.40 per model).

There's also some great gas mask heads available from Pig Iron Productions, so a couple of different sets of these could mix things up quite nicely.

Of course, considering how long I've been working on my Angels of Redemption, and I don't even have a single finished model yet, planning something like an IG army seems pretty ridiculous!

Character Creation: 3:16

I was going to start this tonight, but I'm sick of bagging my head against a wall at work, so I'm going to do this instead. It does limit my choices quite a bit, but I think I'll start with 3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars. I'm pretty sure I got it with the Haiti RPG bundle, but I think this copy is a free version from before it won the Ronnies. I'll have to go back and check if anything's different.

The Game: 3:16
The Publisher: Gregor Hutton
Degree of Familiarity: Virtually none - I flicked through the pdf a while ago
Books Required: The core book

The basic premise is that Earth is a nice, save place where everyone lives the life they want for as long as they want. To protect this nice, happy place, the government has formed the 3:16 Expeditionary Forces to basically go out into the galaxy and kill anything that might one day want to hurt the people on Earth.

Name
There are a couple of examples scattered in the book, but I can't be bothered to go hunting. So off the top of my head, he can be called Bob Mansfield

Reputation
Skillful, Flaky (Bob seems competent, but when it comes to the crunch he doesn't quite seem to deliver)

Abilities
There are only two stats - Fighting and Not-Fighting - both rated between 1 and 10. I've got 10 points to split between the two, so I'll go for FA 3, NFA 7. I have 5 Strength and 5 Weakness slots, but I don't have to do anything with them yet

Rank
It's a bit tempting to make Bob a Corporal, but I'll just stick with him being a Trooper for now. That gives me an Energy Rifle, a Knife, some Grenades, an Entrenching Tool and some Hand-To-Hand training.

Kills
I need to roll a D10 for each point of FA I have. Using the awesome random.org, I get 3, 8 and 4. So a total of 15.

And that's basically it! Back on Terra, Bob was never very good at sticking to one thing. He was the sort of person that picks up new skills fairly easily, but got bored quickly. One afternoon he decided that the 3:16 might be interesting, so signed up. He was bored again before the ship had even left orbit, but by then it was too late.

Character Creation Project

For about as long as he's been doing it (which must be at least a few years now) I've been reading Matthew McFarland's Character Creation posts on his LiveJournal. The idea is that he wanted to go through and make a character for every RPG book he owned (which, being a fairly serious gamer and a sometimes White-Wolf writer, is a pretty large collection). I've always liked the idea, and figured I'd like to have a go at it.

Since I've now got a blog all about my solitary gaming exploits, I should get around to it!

So here's how I'm going to do it. Part of the aim is to at least get a bit of use out of all the games sitting on my shelf (or on my harddrive). Where I have supplements for a game that include extra character creation rules, I'll make a character using those rules. If I have multiple editions of a game, I'll make a character for each edition that I own. So for something like Dog's in the Vineyard, it will be one character, but for Vampire: The Masquerade there will be quite a few (2nd ed, 3rd ed, all the various supplements).

I'm going to try and make this a weekly event - something for me to post on Fridays.

There's going to be a lot to get through, and I'll probably not make it. But it will certainly be a creative failed attempt!

Angels of Redemption Painting Guide (Initial Draft)

This is mostly for my reference. If for some reason you're trying to use this for yourself, the paints marked with * are some random craft acrylics that I picked up a few years ago. The instructions marked with ** are parts I haven't tried yet.

Prime
Black (I use black gesso)

Right Half
Base coat with Clover Green*
Wash with Dark Angels Green
Highlight with 1:1 Dark Angels Green and Deneb Stone**

Left Half
Base coat with Deneb Stone
Coat with 2:1 Skull White:Deneb Stone
Roughly coat with 1:1 Deneb Stone:Bright White* (the areas that get direct light)
Highlight with Bright White**

Eyes
Base with Antique Red*
Coat with Red
Highlight with 1:1 Red and Yellow
Dot 1:1 Yellow and White

Guns
Base coat with 1:1 Silver* and Black*
Coat top part (what's that called?) with Antique Red*

Aquilas & Skulls
Gold*

Purity Seals
Base coat with Antique Red* (wax) and Skull White (parchment)
Coat with Red (wax)
Highlight with 1:1 Yellow and Red** (wax)
Text is Brown*
Wash with Delvin Mud

Finishing Up
Any other detailing as required
Black line armour segments with Black*

Painting Update: Still No Pictures

I don't want to bother posting any more photos of my Angels of Redemption until I had something finished, and I didn't want to do any more posts about painting without posting some photos. But these tactical marines are taking me forever to finish!

Part of the problem is that I've generally be trying to do a production line - take a group of figures and do the same part on all of them (base coat the green side, base coat the white side, etc), but then I get interrupted or distracted part way through. Then I might start another section on a different group of figures, or only get through part of the first group when I do the next part. That leaves me with a bunch of figures all with different parts done, and makes it harder to do another production line.

It also doesn't help that I haven't fully decided on a process yet. So I keep trying different approaches and different ideas.

I sat down last night having decided to forget about the production line and just finish one figure. I then changed my mind and decided to get myself back on track. I grabbed all the tactical marines I had partly done, and went through trying to get them all to the same point.

I now have 11 tactical marines to almost the same point. I have some detailing to do, and then it's just highlighting and touching up. I also now have a process, so when I do the next batch things should go a bit smoother.

Initial Impressions: Catan - the First Island

Still feeling a strong desire to play Settlers of Catan, on Saturday night decided to buy the iPhone game Catan: The First Island.

The good news is that it definitely scratches the Catan itch. It took me a little bit to figure out how to actually start a game, but once I worked that out, the game play was very intuitive.

The default animation speed for dice rolling and the various comments the other players makes it all quite slow, but fortunately that's easy to turn off.

My biggest complaint is that the AI players are too easy to beat - I lost the first game because I was still getting back up to speed (and even then would have been okay if the rolls in the last two rounds had gone a bit differently), but since then I think I've only lost one game (and I was on 9 points and a win in my hand).

Overall, I'm very pleased with the money I spent. It's never going to replace the actual board game, but it's great for killing 10mins or so. Or if you're a gamer who's all on his own

Easter Gaming

Over the Easter weekend, I actually managed to get some gaming done!

We played Dominion using both the Intrigue and Sea Side expansion packs. It was the first time I'd played with either of the extra cards, so I was a little slower than normal in picking up on some of the card synergies. I also feel into the trap of wanting to try out the exciting new cards and so didn't keep my eyes on the prize, but that's okay. The best result I managed was coming second.

I had been really wanting to play some Settlers of Catan, so I managed to convince everyone else to give that a go. In the first game I seriously messed up my initial placement, needlessly denying myself access to any wood, and never really recovered. The second game ended up being a lot closer. Brick was extremely hard to come by, and several times I was blocked in just before building a new settlement. So I ended up wasting lots of brick with roads to no where. I still managed to rack up 7 or 8 victory points before I stupidly made some trades that resulted in me being tronned in again AND the game ending.

The last game we tried was Space Alert. Most of us hadn't played before (including myself) so it took a bit of time to go through all the rules and explain what was going to happen. Then we jumped straight into the chaos. When the dust settled, surprisingly we almost managed to survive. Actually knowing what to expect next time will probably help us.