Current Projects

The revivification of this blog seems like a good opportunity to look at what I'm currently working on, both in terms of painting projects and the games I'm hoping to play this year.

Back in 2011, I swore off World War II for the time being and declared that I was going to put my efforts towards slowly building up a collection of Warhammer 40K Orks. Well, that didn't really work out. Ironically, not only am I back into WWII, but that project has so far much more closely resembled the goals I'd laid out for myself with my Project Ork.

The spark of inspiration came with the decision to move up to 28mm for my WWII skirmish gaming. I realized that skirmish gaming is truly where my heart lives as far as that period is concerned, and as long as I'm dealing with that level of engagement, why not go with a big figure scale? I've been very happy with my decision thus far, particularly in light of it coinciding with Warlord Games making WWII its period of focus for 2012. Jury's still out on the Bolt Action rules, but that's another matter.

(It's looking more and more like 28mm is going to simply become my scale of choice across the board. I guess it comes of all those games of Warhammer I played back in high school. Although I also played tons of Space Marine back in the day - not sure why I'm not as much of a 6mm partisan.)

At any rate, much like my stated aims for Project Ork, I'm taking things very slowly and deliberately with the WWII project. I'm currently weighing options between NUTS! and Operation Squad. I quite like the former's solo-play capabilities, so that's what I'm going to be checking out first. Initial collecting efforts are focusing around Normandy (a well-trodden theater to be sure, but a first for me, strangely enough), Brits versus Germans. Or, more properly, Jocks versus Huns, as my British squad is going to hail from the 51st Highland Division. The Germans, of course, are going to be redoubtable 21st Panzer Division sorts, because who can resist putting some wacky AFVs on the table? I'm going to keep the Germans fairly late-war generic, though, as I want to be able to re-use them as opponents in other theaters I plan on branching into. Italy '44 and Berlin '45 call out to me like sirens from the shore, but I resolutely stuff my ears with wax and sail on for now...

So yes, the WWII project is what's currently occupying my painting attention, although I'm also painting vintage Grenadier and Ral Partha fantasy figures as a break from all the earth tones.

State of the paint desk, February 2013

As for actual gaming, I'm hoping to get something accomplished this spring in terms of doing more of that. A lot more, if it can be managed. My cabinet currently boasts two completed fantasy armies, a couple-dozen painted gladiators (for use with another solo-friendly THWG game), two 10mm DBA samurai armies, a nice pile of zombies (Two Hour Wargames again!) and enough 1/6000 WWII naval miniatures to run some North Atlantic skirmishes. So there's no want of available games to choose from, for sure. It's just a matter of making the time. With the exception of the couple brief DBA games I played last summer (which did, at least, finally bring my long-suffering 10mm samurai some kind of closure), the last major minis game I played was Labor Day weekend of 2011! That's a terrible drought and one I will be quenching this year, solo or otherwise. If anything, playing more games is the top resolution of the year for me. To me, without the game play, all that painting and modeling going on in the above photo is pointless!

Truth be told, what I'd really like to get into this year, assuming I can start gaming regularly again, are campaign games. Most of my collections are geared towards this mode, now that I think about it: the WWII skirmish scale, the DBA samurai, the gladiators, the zombies, the battleships - all come into their own and are at their best when played in a campaign rather than one-off games. I'd even like to set up a campaign for our Armies of Arcana games, if nothing else than to provide some context so it's not just the same two old armies bashing away at each other all the time. I had enough of that back in high school playing Warhammer, where it was always my Empire army against Alex's Orcs & Goblins.

(Although one-off AoA games should be a lot more fun now, too: another of my projects last year was adding a couple more units to each army. This way, we've got more potential points than our 3000-point budget allows, which means we can custom-build our armies before each game and not necessarily know what the other person is going to field. Adds a nice wrinkle to the whole thing, I think.)

Oh, there is one last pipe dream, both in terms of painting and playing: to get into "vintage" Citadel collecting by way of Rogue Trader. That game was before my time initially, but hot damn if it doesn't look like something I'd be interested in now. I love the aesthetics of old school Citadel sculpts and I really like the sort of loose, DIY RPG-miniatures-game-hybrid feel of Rogue Trader. So that's likely to be a project I start looking at more seriously as the year goes on, or so I hope. Posts like this certainly go a long way towards throwing fuel on the fire...

And...we're back

I've been giving a lot of thought to the state of my miniatures hobby and the state of miniatures gaming as a subset of tabletop gaming in general. This merits a much wordier post of its own. (Please save your groans for after the show.) In the meantime, I thought that I'd reactivate this blog. ::waves at the two followers I've somehow retained:: This was my first gaming-related blog and I have fond memories of it. Plus, I think having a blog devoted exclusively to my miniatures hobby (as opposed to making it a subset of my RPG blog - I've migrated the last three years of miniatures-related posts [all 12 of them!] that I made over there back over here) will be a nice tonic for a sadly atrophied element of my overall gaming endeavors.

I want to make 2013 a year for reconnecting with the gaming part of my miniatures gaming hobby. In other words, I intend to actually play as many games as I can. Thanks to Two Hour Wargames and their solo-friendly rules, I think I can make this happen even if I'm still sniffing around for worthy opponents in my local area. And I'll still be keeping my expectations low. If I can get in a game every couple months, I'll count myself satisfied with a hopeful start.

Last year, I did clock one major milestone in this regard: my long-delayed samurai project finally resulted in some gaming! I'm nothing if not persistant, it seems. In the end, I ditched all the period-specific rules and simply based some of my samurai for DBA, using a rules mod I found online (scroll down to "Battle Phase"). Des and I got in two games of Takeda vs. Uesugi, all in a couple hours, and had lots of fun. If I can rustle up another interested opponent or two, I'd give some serious thought to running a campaign; that old Milton Bradley game Shogun (also called Samurai Swords) was a great favorite of mine in high school, and goodness knows I've got enough spare figures to put together a couple more clans plus some ikko-ikki. At any rate, enough talk. Here are some pics from our games! (I think we each won a game.)

July 4th Memories

I am 16 years old, sitting at the desk in my bedroom as my Dad works the grill outside. I've got the Twilight Zone marathon playing on my six-inch black and white on KTLA (this is back before SciFi/SyFy/PsiPhy/whatever bought up the rights) and I'm working on some 15mm Napoleonic Prussians (the first of many forays into historical miniatures - this one didn't work out too well in the end). It's a sweltering L.A. day but I've got my desk lamp on and I'm painting.

Ever since then, despite the heat, summer always puts me in the mood to paint miniatures.

[Project Ork] Finis

Many moons ago I blogged about drinking the Kool-Aid and embarking on a Warhammer 40,000 collecting and painting project. At the time I promised pictures as the project unfolded.

What ended up happening was that rather than slowly building the army up over the course of the year, as intended, I painted everything up all at once in a stretch of about three weeks and then essentially put the figures aside, where they proceeded to sit in my display case without a whole lot to say or do. I felt unmotivated to take pictures and felt disappointed in the work I'd done.

So I've decided to sell the collection. Ironically, in the course of taking photos of the figures I've come to appreciate the paint jobs that I did, as well as the modeling and conversion work. I think my demoralization came not from the quality of the work, which in retrospect was up to my standards, but rather the realization that I wasn't going to use them for anything. It's a nice collection and I hope it finds a good home, but the project taught me that Warhammer 40K just isn't for me. I intend to use to proceeds generated by the sale of the Orks to fund a return to World War II skirmish, albeit in a scale new to me in that genre: 28mm. I've already bought a couple sample figures from Artizan and I'm quite excited to be working in the larger scale. Pictures (and hopefully some battle reports!) will definitely follow for this project, albeit at a slow pace. I'm determined to pace out my WWII project as I had wanted to do for the Orks.

But enough of future plans; let us take a moment to bask in the glow of what-might-have-been, Project Ork. The conversions and paint jobs were based on World War One German forces, inspired by an influential 'Eavy Metal spread from a White Dwarf of my youth featuring the work of the late, great Carl E. Cordell, aka the Orkmeister. On with the show, then - click and ye shall maketh the pictures to become larger.

Three Nobz with resin heads. I was very pleased with the Micro Art heads - without them, my concept wouldn't have worked nearly as well.

A squad of Stikk Boyz. Note the gunner of the Heavy Bolta and his gasmask!

I couldn't resist adding a unit of Shootas with a Rokkit Launcher and all those big guns!

Another Nob. I exercised my experience with painting WWII figures to add fun little details, like the chipped paint on his shoulder plate.

The other unit of Stikk Boyz.

Kommandos. "They're doin' their best, do what they can..." I was particularly pleased with how their masks turned out. The ones with goggles had their lenses painted with day-glo green paint to make it look like night vision.

The Kommando Nob, a resin monstrosity from Forge World. That axe is the most 40K element in the whole army. Ridiculously wonderful.

Killa Kans. I had a blast painting the WWI-style camouflage.

Looted Leman Russ tank. I added an Orky flame-thrower on the sponson mount, an Ork heavy bolter on the co-axial, and bolted-on armor. I was also quite happy with how the hand-painted Blood Axe logo on the turret turned out.

A bit of weathering, too.

I found this Cybork Mechboy on eBay, complete with the little helper  Gretchin; I added the dynamite chucker in the backpack.

My warboss. A mashup of the plastic Boss from the Assault on Black Ridge set, the resin banner pole from the Forge World Kommando Nob, and the original metal Kommando Nob. The cigar clenched in his teeth made him the perfect Patton-esque Blood Axe boss.

Another view of the first unit of Stikk Boyz.

I drilled out the barrels on all the guns. Maybe I did get a little carried away...

The Shootas again. I was really pleased with how the Rokkit Launcha turned out. The "rokkits" added a nice splash of color to all the earth tones.

Kommandos! You get a nice view of the night-vision goggles in this shot.

What a bad-ass.

I've always loved Gretchin.

I was quite happy with the bolted-on armor plate. It looks suitably funky and rusticated.

I have to say that Killa Kans with WWI camo was my original mental image around which the collection coalesced, and this shot pretty much matches that image exactly.

And we can't forget the Death Koptas! I patterned the paint jobs on German biplanes from Richtoffen's Flying Circus. My only regret here was that the Koptas didn't have more surface area to show off the colors!

In the end, the project was a success, but ultimately I realized I'm just not going to be playing any 40K and I'm not enough of a collector to be okay with having a display of minis that never get used for a game. So the Orks are off to find a new home (maybe your own?), one where they can hopefully do all the shootin' and stikkin' and blastin' their little green hearts desire. On to the next project!

Why I'll Always Love Miniatures Gaming

The RPG side of my gaming hobby has been experiencing a sort of golden age of late. I'm currently involved in...let's see, four campaigns, easily a lifetime high. (It's one of the reasons posts around here have gotten a bit thin on the ground--been too busy gaming to write about it!) But I've also been thinking a lot about the other side of my gaming hobby: miniatures wargames.

I've talked in the past about how that side has been subject to increasing atrophy over the years. Back in high school I'd say I was involved in minis wargaming at least as as much as RPGs. Nowadays I'm lucky if I can get in a game every six months. Most of my hobby today consists of painting figures. (Still gotta post pics of my Germanic Space Ork army that I put together last year...). Although this is partly down to a question of lack of time (viz. the "four campaigns" mentioned above, ahem), I also feel this is due to the wargaming and RPG hobbies going their separate ways over the last 10-15 years. There just simply aren't as many RPGers who play minis games as there used to be, it seems.

There are a variety of causes behind this, I think. Certainly, Games Workshop played its part by very much intentionally nurturing the perception of miniatures wargaming as its own thing (or, as GW calls it, The Hobby). I also think the emergence of pre-painted figures played a major role; people who were reluctant or indifferent towards painting no longer had to. The irony, of course, is that over the same span of time, D&D's various successive editions have become evermore miniatures-centric. Pre-painted figures enabled the quick and easy acquisition of lots of single models or small groups of models. But the idea of building and painting a large army and making the terrain to go with it? I've shown my miniatures cabinet to about a half-dozen gamers, ranging from total noobs to old grognards like me, over the last year. To a person, they have reacted with a sort of ambivalent amazement. The overall impression was summed up by one of their words: "I'd never have the patience to paint all those figures!" As if I did it all in a week of cocaine-fueled frenzy.

A while back I saw someone post some provocative words online. (Just the once?) The words were to the effect of, "Miniatures painting is a craft. It's not an art. Get off your high horse." I was a little taken aback at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I tended to agree. But I'd add a corrolary: done right, playing a miniatures game is where the art comes in. The sight of a table full of lovingly-crafted terrain and hand-painted miniatures is something to truly give one pause, to remind one of the beauty of human endeavor and creativity, hours of work simply for the sake of having a fun afternoon in the company of a few friends. I was reminded of all this today when I followed a link from the always-excellent World War 20mm blog to a series of pictures taken at a recent club game. Here's a selection of my favorites; the rest can be found here.

Those are pictures taken from the game in progress, not just posed to look pretty. That organic, almost alchemical process of figures interacting with terrain to create spontaneous vignettes...if that's not art, I don't know what art is. Aside from my own selfish reasons, I really wish more RPGers were also miniatures wargaming enthusiasts. It's such a rewarding aspect of the gaming hobby, and it's because of pictures like those above that, as much as my participation might have shrunken over the years, I'll never truly walk away from miniatures gaming.