End Of The Start Of The End Of The Week. I Think (25)

So I have finished last week's twenty five minis. The last three days have flown by with little real progress on the bench. There has been some fun and I have put some problems to bed. So reasonably happy. I'm tired but fairly happy. 

First are what will be the last of the main protagonist force, the men of Regional Control. I say the last, I will almost certainly do more. There are another eight of them. All still looking British but as rag tag as I can make them.

Then there are the thralls. Compassionless, unstoppable killers that never stop coming for you. They are unrelentingly but are not the fastest enemy out there. 

Then there are the ghouls. Most think these are either the early or late stage of the thralls. Whilst fierce in combat, it is their speed that makes them deadly. 

Lastly are my first real attempt at the fascists. There are only four of them. The short term plan is to get up to about twenty. The minis are a sludge of British and German kit with some random bits included.

This was a hard week. This week is also going to be a hard week. It's my clubs show this weekend but I am going to miss it because I have my daughter and I am going to a birthday party. I think I know what I am doing. More stuff from the backlog. Mainly because it's easy. I don't have any work to do. I'm not close to finishing the pre based and primed backlog but I am already a lot closer to finishing it off than I was this time last year. More on that soon.

The End Of The Week And Father's Day

So today was father's day and a fantastic day it was. I got to spend some time with my daughter which is always good time. So basically I am a happy boy. Smiles all round. The only down side is that it had to end.

I've spent most of the day wearing a baseball cap that belonged to my dad. I'd owned a few but never really worn them much until I inherited a few from him. Hard to think it's been over nine years since the he passed. This is the first year that I have really felt that things were trending upward since he died. With the notable exception of my daughter.

Progress has been hard won this week. I feel like I have made less advances than a Russian conscript army. Like an American soldier celebrating Trump's birthday, I just haven't hit my stride let alone made any marches forward. It says a lot when four times as many people turn up for a firework display as turn up for a parade honouring the army, just because someone else made it about them and not about the national military tradition. I feel for the guys wearing the boots and more so for the ones that used to wear them. That said, America seems to treat it's soldiers better than us British.

But I digress 

This is probably because I haven't finished anything. After a slow start to the week I thought I was going to finish things off after I got in after dropping my daughter off. What happened was I sat down and dozed off. When I woke up I was pretty much done. It took me about six hours to get off the sofa. The New Cruelty is extremely unhappy. Things may be a little better organised here. So....You know.

So looking forward. There isn't that much work left to do. Monday looks busy, at least the morning does. Wednesday evening and much of the weekend is also looks busy. I have no new figures and no plans to put anything together. So it looks like I will be diving into the backlog. If I can find some more stuff I have purchased this year, that will be at the front of the queue.

Insomnia Rules

It's the wee small hours here as I type this. I can't sleep. I can't do much if anything else. Over the course of the afternoon I did get some painting done. So the biggest block of colour is done on all the minis. 

Givern the short amount of time I have allocated for painting this week this is going to be some rough and ready work. Fortunately about half of the minis should be rough and ready by design. I am not using the Z word as I don't think they fit the classically accepted definition. That said, they are not exactly human anymore either and tending to injuries and self care are no longer priorities.

I actually fell asleep whilst I was typing this up. So my blog even puts me to sleep.

Start Of The Week And It's A Thursday

There has been a something of a painting of hiatus. Putting the figures together has been a major p.i.t.a. A lot of the minis needed pinning and green stuff. After all I said about plastic minis I was reminded of the downside.

Somewhere along the line I missed the fact that I just hit 900,000 hits. Perhaps my blog is suddenly popular. There are fewer blogs than there used to be. So if you are reading it, or even looking at the pictures, thanks for being there. If you are an AI just surfing and looking to let off steam, just stop by and save hi. Would be nice to have my own basilisk.

I am running out of things I can usefully do for Atomfallish and SUnderdground. There is a possibility that some Russians will appear this week which might make some British communists. If things go to plan there may be some more Brits too, but I don't have a plan for them right now. So I want to finish off the project either this week or next. Will then pick it back up in August when the bits I have on order should be in my hands. Phalanx is coming. I might get some stuff there but I am guessing not. 

Which puts me in a bind. Which is what's next? The Quar thing was the next plan. That would be £200 for four weeks painting. As I am trying to do things on the cheap, that is a big ask. Is it time to dive back into the backlog? I have some Sludge steady to go. Decisions, decisions.

Some guys in gas masks who will double as thralls. One of the biggest jumps I had playing Atomfall was sensing something behind me to see an unarmed soldier in a gas mask with out stretched arms two paces away. I panic fired a magazine into it. Most of the rounds probably missed but it didn't stop me thinking these things were more or less the hardest thing in the game.

These are ferals. In the game they are tough (but not as tough as the thralls)and fast and have a spit attack . These things probably killed me more often than anything else in the game. These are mostly Mantic Zombie Swarm miniatures with some Wargames Atlantic Pulp Zombies bits.

My plan calls for a fascist force. So in keeping with the WW2 these will mostly be late war Germans, with an emphasis on winter troops. As it is set in a post-apocalypse London, they all need at least one piece of British kit. A battle bowler here and a sten or SMLE there. With what is coming I expect to add to use more StG 44s. I might throw in the odd PPSh SMG for funsies. These bodies are Panzer Lehr. I was thinking about using them for soldiers in boiler suits but my backup was better. 

In my SUnderdground background the surface is extremely hostile still. It's not going to kill you quickly. It will kill you slowly. So I am thinking the winter troops with gas mask heads and more derelict looking bases for forces on the surface. Many of the tunnels aren't much better. So I have a source for gas mask heads at the right price now which hopefully will appear at Phalanx.

One thing is for certain, if I start another project like this, I will do so with all the stuff I need, before I begin. Sludge certainly went a lot smoother when it started. Although I may gloss over the bit where it took two years to get it started.

Whilst Sunday is looking busy (it's father's day so should be fun) I have plenty of time till the end of the week. Assuming I can stay away. This is good news as I now have twenty five minis to paint.

End Of The Week (23)

Another step closer to my goal. The New Cruelty maintains a sufficient level of acceptance of my commitment to the cause. It has to be said that I have been drifting in and out of things this week. Various stuff but nothing major. 

I got some Crooked Dice minis last week. These are now all done. This was a fairly easy ask as they were all in a standard uniform. Whilst I was tempted to do the jackets in DPM (but not the trousers oddly) I decided against it. I may go back to it. As the minis are a touch bigger than the other figures, my min tells me that they were probably from a guards regiment. I just have to decide which one.

Then there are some more regular army. Another mixed bag. The aim is to get the infantry to look like an extremely rag tag bunch so I limit the commonality of kit as much as possible. 

More druids. I couldn't find the unarmoured ones. Whilst my priginal plan was to have something a little closer to natures,  I figured a few with chain mail would be fine. I have been thinking abour race, For Atomfallish I am pretty sure the number of people from ethnic minorities would be pretty lose to zero In the ruined streets of London's SUnderdground, this would not be the case. In my vieew this group spends more time on the surface. Whilst not The Children of Atom, they have a more unhealthy skin tone.

I have an idea for a group that might be a militia or even a mercenary unit. These need to have a military look to them. What I didn't want was for them to have anything that looked like standard issue gear. If they appear to have looted their equipment from the dead I would have achieved my goal. If Regional Control look rag-tag, then these guys should be more so. As a military force, they will get some military gear but on average this will be less than the RC.

Lastly there are some more armed civilians. There isn't a lot of stuff to say about them that hasn't been said already.

Changes

My original plan was something akin to Atomfall. So Atomfallish suited as a name. It wasn't going to be a big game. At its maximum size it was going to be a skirmish game with a number of opfor. This would allow running a game like Five Klicks From the Zone. I was thinking about a dozen forces and maybe about two hundred figures in total. A good chunk of which had yet to be available. Everything would fit in a storage box.

Somewhere along the lines it has morphed into SUnderdground. This is more of an RPG project. Some of what we planned for Atomfall probably won't fit for this project but most of it will. It also calls for some more forces. If it goes along the lines of the Viking Game, I am looking at three storage boxes. 

So why mention this? There is a thing called mission creep. The biggest force I initially planned was the equivalent of the Protocol which was Regional Control and was set at about twenty minis, which requires some bits that aren't available yet. I'm already up to about thirty and another ten for next week. I'm a WYSIWYG kind of guy so it's always bound to creep. Just wasn't expecting the creep to turn into a sprint. 

I have been looking at the military news a lot lately. The British government seems to be experiencing what I am calling Mission Sprint. I think it applies to most of Europe. It's like mission creep but working at pace.

It is looking like another thirty British WW2 infantry are inbound. I want some British communist forces. These will be a mix of stuff. I have a source of minis, but I don't know what is coming yet. Then there are the fascist forces. So far I have a few German figures. Nowhere near enough but it is a start. 

Plastic Minis

The first plastic fantasy mini I saw was attached the front page of White Dwarf. I had been playing with Airfix stuff for years as a kid but this was different. In fact it was playing with Airfix figures on the first day at school that started me down the whole wargaming thing. It has to be said that the Dwarf was a step ahead of of anything from Airfix. It was still a lot more basic than anything they were producing in metal. It was a nice idea nt it was never going to catch on. Beside, who wanted to do all that gluing?

I seem to recall that a box set with seven lots of ten different monopose minis came out which had core units for different Warhammer armies. This was great if you played dwarves, elves and skaven etc but no so good if you only had the one. The space marine set was better. You could even pose these guys. Things got better after that but it was almost a couple of decades before I became aware of any serious attempts to manufacture historical minis.

For a longest time I was still against them. I have precious little time to paint and I didn't want to waste the time I had gluing them together and chasing after the bits on the floor or digging them out of my feet. The detail still felt a little soft. I was and still am mostly a painter of minis for RPGs and skirmish games and rarely needed thirty of something. Metal minis still had the better detail, they bent rather than broke and you have to admire the heft.

For some time I was searching the internet for gaming inspiration. One of the things I did see a lot of was kitbashing. It wasn't for me but I liked the look of it. People were taking bits and some green stuff nad making something unique. Then I did one. One became a few. And so on. You get the idea.

My opinion didn't really changed until Frostgrave came along. Even then, I was really after the metal minis. The Plastics were nice but they were not to scale compared to the metals minis. It was some time after I got them, maybe when I had about four of the kits, that they really began to appeal because I could see the interchangeability and the choice that this offered. Stargrave would only add to that (and I have even come up with an idea for Ghost Archipelago recently). Both continue to add to my collection but not as fast as I would like.

Customisation is the name of the game for me. It usually works better across minis for a single manufacturer than those from multiple lines. But I am working on some stuff for Atomfall ish/SUnderdground and its no problem to have a partisan with a crossbow and another with a medieval handgun (homemade black powder rifle) assuming you have a knife and a pin drill. I am thinking in terms of a resurgent British Union of Fascists as a opfor for the SUnderground game, so WW2 German bodies, with a few German style helmets and weapons but overwhelming British weapons and equipment or homemade kit would if I can glue it together. The druids from Atomfall become Wiccans or Pagans and I have some Viking bondi that might work.

My plan for Sludge could only come to life if I used plastics and second hand plastics are even better than new ones. It was really getting hold of the stuff for this that has changed  my mind the most. This was despite the fact that a lot of the minis I had were deus Vult who used the same heads, bodies and arms across multiple sets (not a fan).  Even my bete noire, the Wargames Atlantic The Damned project seems to have a delivery date. This will push forward a few projects. And I do like the stuff they do, I really do. Even more so now they are talking about 2300AD.

Now I have gotten into buying up single frames instead of boxes. My current project is a post apocalyptic one. For this one I want a broadly generic British post World War Two vibe, which is basically World War Two but more chaotic. Basically late war uniforms, but some early war, paras, commandoes and a lot of winter uniforms when they come out, Maybe even some other uniforms with the right pouches added. I wanted some SA-80s. I was about to buy some metal ones when I found a plastic frame with the same number of them and a load of other bits. What's not to love?