Today's post was brought to you by the letter "V"

hi all

Another quick post of some miniatures I've painted during my limited downtime.

First we have a dude, you may recognise him as a dead ringer for Ragner Lothbrok of "Vikings" fame. This Kev White special from Hasslefree miniatures is listed as Ulfred a warrior from the cold north and was a purchase from Salute!

I took the "dynamic" version, there is one of him with his thumbs in his belt.  Paint wise, although it was tempting to paint him in the all black of the character I ended up using some blue to relieve the monotony of the scheme.  Of course he had to be a Nordic blonde as do all my vikings!

Ulfred is married to Haleth, at least he was.... another Viking look alike this time a ringer for Lagertha (Ragnor's first wife). This was also purchased at Salute! this year.

Haleth is a shield maiden, as warrior of great skill and cunning and the leader of her own band of raiders.

Paintwise, I kept with the simple colours that I used for Ulfred.  For her shield I painted the nordic rune for Odin on the front and I added some red warpaint, just because I can......

To complete a Viking trio we have Tilda, also from Hasslefree she was purchased last year and I've shamefully only just got around to slapping paint on her.  Tilda is another shield maiden and I loved the character of this mini so much I had to get her.

Finally V is also for Vultures! These are Wargames Foundry and when I was looking for sewer alligators for my dungeon tiles I found them and on a whim I snapped them up. No plan for them just thought they were cool....

Hope you enjoy
dGG

Dice Tower

Hi all

tabletop space is always a premium no matter the size of your table. I have an 8x4 foot table but it always covered in at least one game if not more, at the moment its currently groaning under the strain of an ATZ board, Bushido board and a dungeon crawl. I love throwing dice, I love rolling them by hand, I love the clatter of them as they tumble across the table which is why I can't comprehend how people could use Apps on phones or tablets which generate dice rolls.  However I'm constantly throwing dice on the floor, losing them or more annoyingly rolling a bunch of sixes that won't count because they're not on the table.  Now to get around it I built some dice trays which have addressed that problem, you can see how I did that here.

dice trays

This was a very satisfactory solution, but what if even that is too big.  Well a project has been buzzing around my head for a few weeks and I've managed to keep a lid on it successfully until I went along to a local board game club last week and the project came crashing back to the fore.  So I made this....

my dice tower.
How I made it is here....

https://youtu.be/OwPEbr0OSYU

hope you enjoy
dGG

Homecoming - ATZ - an English Adventure part 5

Hi all

Time for the next installment of the ATZ - an English Adventure that I have created, you can find the earlier episodes here:

http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/atz-english-adventure-introduction-part_29.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/atz-english-adventure-introduction-part.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/atz-english-adventure-introduction.html

http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/atz-english-adventure-first-few-turns.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/atz-english-adventure-concluding-part.html

http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/escape-from-hospital-atz-english.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/escape-from-hospital-atz-english_13.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/escape-from-hospital-atz-english_27.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/escape-from-hospital-atz-english.html
http://dagobbosgrotto.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/escape-from-hospital-atz-english_12.html

phew - looking at it I might need to create a page for all of these links!  Anyway to the next installment....

Andy "da Gobbo" Wosa has escaped the local hospital after rescuing his crew mate's partner who had been confined to an isolation suite.  Taking one of the abandoned ambulances from the loading bay he is heading home to find his family and get out of town.

What Gobbo didn't know, due to damaged communications, was that an explosion has ripped through the house at the end of his road (in sector 4) destroying the house and damaging the house next door. As a result a car was flipped over blocking the crossroads. The emergency services, already over stretched can only send a police patrol to evacuate the road and secure the area. Having worked overnight and at the end of their endurance, the police are short tempered, stressed and on edge, especially in light of some odd radio chatter about citizens out of control and attacking anyone and everyone.  Gobbo desperate to get to his family, needs to get passed the road blockage and find out what has happened to them.  The noise of the explosion has attracted some unwanted attention...

Andy pulls up just shy of the crossroads and starts in sector 8, he needs to get to his house which is the mid-terrace in sector 3, where he will learn the fate of his family.  The police will challenge Gobbo although due to the fact he's in uniform and due to the excellent working relationship the police and ambulance service have he can add +1 to his Rep when taking his "meet and greet".  There will be three PEFs that will be pre-loaded to reflect the sketchy neighbourhood that Gobbo's pittance NHS salary affords him i.e low income families and elderly folk.

roll a 2d6

(2-5)   d3 gang members - all rep 3 armed with improvised weapons (1 in six chance of a xbow)
(6-10) d2+1 zombies
(11)    d2 citizens (elderly - rep 2, slow, unarmed)
(12)    d2+1 citizens (improvised weapon)

They are in:

the top house in sector 1 - rep 6
the bottom house in sector 6 - rep 6
the back yard of the house in sector 6 - rep 6

yes all of the PEFs rolled 6s for rep!!

There are 5 zombies on the board when Andy comes on.

The coppers are 3 x rep 3 with a standard equipment layout and 1x sarge rep 4 again with a standard equipment layout.

Searching the buildings will use my custom search tables, if Andy searches his own house he must roll against his Rep - 2x successes he will find his family holed up in the front room. 1x success he must roll against his savvy - (2x successes he will find a hastily scribbled note, telling him that his family bugged out before the zeds hit, he will also find his replica "gladius" which counts as a machete, 1x success he just finds the note, 0x success and he finds nothing). If he has 0x successes against his Rep he will find the torn apart bodies of his family.......gulp.

The encounter will occur during the afternoon (using the time progression rules in the main rule-book) and is considered urban.  I'm just using one of my urban boards which is 24x24" so move is reduced by 2" and range is reduced by 2"

It is still DAY ONE

hope you enjoy
dGG

taking out the trash!

Hi all

When I was at Broadside the other week, I came across a stall with some really interesting resin pieces.  The trader - Debris of War, deals mainly online and obviously some trade shows, presumably in the south as he is based about 3 miles from my house!!

http://www.debrisofwar.com/

Anyway, you will be seeing some of his marvelous resin bases soon enough when I unleash my new Bushido faction on you all, but for now I painted up some of the modern pieces that I bought to decorate my Zompoc games including the next chapter of Gobbo's English ATZ adventure (coming soon).

Really simple to paint but full of character I took the urban debris set which comes with 5x wheelie bins, a sofa and 2x armchairs and loads of bin liners filled with rubbish!

on my zombpoc board

we all have know one of those families who has the sofa outside the house and a garden full of rubbish!

that's all for today though

hope you enjoy

dGG

demonic portal

Hi all

Continuing on with the making of terrain for our upcoming D&D campaign and to supplement my collection I have built a demonic portal! This piece or something similar has been sitting in my brain for some time, inspired by Dave Stone's awesome "dragon emerging from well" pieces and other cracking terrain online.  It had got to the point where I was getting antsy about NOT building it and I couldn't concentrate on uni work etc so I busted out the blue foam and the video camera and spent  40 minutes or so, excluding drying time in between and knocked out this....

As has been the theme for this project, I recorded the build rather than take pics so if you want to see how it goes together then check out the link below.  

https://youtu.be/B4cngPPxL-A

hope you enjoy

dGG

Broadside 2017

Hi all

a quick post shoved in at the end of a busy day!  Today I've had a rare day off, squeezed in between working yesterday and uni tomorrow, i was desperate to get something gaming in, so I headed off to Broadside - a local show hosted by the Milton One Hundred Wargaming Club.  This was the second show I have gone to by these guys and I wasn't disappointed by either.  I'm not going to do a blow by blow of the day as it's not very exciting to read about and I haven't got the patience or energy left to do it.  needless to say the "bring and buy" stalls were very busy and where I spent my meager savings (certainly compared to Salute! which wiped me out pretty much).

Lootwise - there were no planned purchases as this was a bit of an impromptu visit as i had the time, so they are a bit eclectic but I don't regret any.  The giant greek archer -  I will use in some terrain building projects that are sitting in the back of my head and cost just 20p. Under that is a Rogue Trader Ogryn that I've always really liked and fits with a passing idea of doing some Old Hammer projects next year.  With that in mind I also bought 6 classic Eldar which I used to own and lost many moons ago.  I also got some Kroot Hounds for a Tau force that has been hovering at the edges of my painting table.  Lastly I bought some resin pieces from, what turned out to be a trader who lives in the next town over, running his business online - Debris of War.  From him I got some cracking bits, some urban debris including abandoned armchairs and a sofa, wheelie bins and rubbish bags - perfect for decking out some 7TV ideas and zombpoc games!  But by far my fave purchase was the resin bases he has made up - perfect for Bushido and soon to be the bases for my newest faction that I hope to start after i finish uni.

Highlights for me included chatting to Ray Roussel, Big Lee and Clint - three bloggers of some renown and thoroughly pleasant fellows, playing some fun and light demo games inc Infinity and a Jurassic Park style game and lastly I won the prize draw - a shanty towns set by Battle Systems! as an admirer of the terrain they produce, I'm thrilled to have won the prize.

my prize!

Lastly here are some pics of the tables for the eye candy lovers.  I thought the quality of the tables was excellent particularly for a local show.  I really liked the "not" Star Trek board made up of cheap Poundland "not" Lego toys and Tribbles! Winner of the best board was Big Lee and his magnificent African war board.

hope you enjoy

dGG

Lilliath

Hi all

managed to paint a miniature this week in between assignments.  When I made a recent purchase of some rather lovely miniatures for my daughter,s D&D campaign, I received an unexpected surprise in the form of a freebie.

Sculpted by Kev White of Hasslefree Miniatures fame and billed as "Barbaric Liralith, a dark elf chick with her pet spider", she has been painted up in pale flesh tones, brilliantly I'll add by Inge Jensen and Jay Berezowsky on the website and she looks fantastic.  However I decided to go a different way, I decided to rebrand her as Lilliath and paint her up as a Drow Elf! 

Drow Elves are the dark cousins of the surface elves in the "Forgotten Realms" body of work currently supported by the "Wizards of the Coast" who purchased the D&D franchise as well as many others.  Drow represent the dark, sinister side of the faerie race of elves and live deep under the surface of Toril in the lightless tunnels of the "Underdark".  Worshipping the Spider Queen - Lloth, they have a reverence for the 8 legged beasts and live under a fierce matriachal society where the females are often stronger, certainly more powerful and definitely more evil than the males.

Using the drow then as my muse, I painted her up in deep blue/black skin tones which aren't really evident in my photos.  I also painted her eyes red to reflect her being underground with her infravision, but for some reason I grassed the base?!? i guess some habits are hard to break.....

hope you enjoy
dGG