Zombtober 2016: Bring Out Your Dead Part 3

 Despite a gruelling week of nights I have manged to make some progress on my 15mm Zombies. I have completed two stands (12 zeds). I have also made a lot of progress on the Garden of Morr (a walled cemetery in the Warhammer world). The Garden is ready to be painted when all the glue has dried. I am off next week so hopefully I will make some more progress. 

Well done to all the other bloggers taking on the Zombtober 2016 challenge; Keep up the good work!

Zombtober 2016: Bring Out Your Dead Part 1

OH MY GOD! Its the first of October and that means its Zombtober again. I completely forgot because I have been on nights and I am very disorientated about what day it is. As soon as I realised it was the fist I new I had to get on the Blog. 

Zombtober this year will feature lots of tiny zombies for my 15mm Vampire Counts Warhammer 6th edition army, along with a few of their dark vampire masters. I have completed the first 2000pts of Orc and Goblins just in time to start this project and, at the request of Vampifan I will be commencing Vampire Counts as my next Warhammer army. 

The zombie horde (although I might add a few more before the end of the month)

A Vampire Count on a Nightmare

Vampire Count on Foot

The First Go at a Corpse Cart-(It's going to be redone as it looks a bit crap)

My Vampire counts army will feature a core of two big units of skeletons and a very big unit of zombies. For Zombtober I plan on getting the zombies raised from the dead, painted and based by the end of the month. I have also made a Corpse Cart and I have two Vampires to paint. All the figures are from Demonworld, although if I can afford it I might order some more form other manufactures to add some more irregularity to the ranks of the shambling dead. 

Creepy Village

A 28mm Warhammer Garden of Morr

A different creepy village with an even creepier windmill 

A vampire Counts castle

I also plan on making a few bits of vampire count inspired terrain peaces as part of the Zombtober project (As painting endless 15mm zombies might be fun for me but I think it might be a bit dull for you readers). I am going to attempt my take on a Garden of Morr, and a creepy ruin, and perhaps even a Vampire Count castle or a cursed Sylvanian village. I can't grantee my finished buildings will look anything like these consept pictures but the will serve to give you the right feel. 

Minihammer: Unit Filler for Orcs (Work in Progress)

I have never made a unit filler before (such things were not at all common when I was collecting Games Workshop Warhammer. Now the seem all the rage, particular in big units. I am making this mobile idol of Mork (or perhaps Gork) for the Bloody Bones Tribe to push about in battle. I will have some more orcs pushing it and milling about the wheels. It will add two ranks to the unit  making i a unit of 36, although there will be only about six figures on the base. I will probably only use it in large 3000 point games. 

Getting Ready for Sharp Practice: Work In Porgress

Having agreed to run a Sharp Practice game at the next Earlswood Wargames night if occurred to me that I could do with another Spanish farm house as I usually play on a 4x4 board and this game will require a 6x4 table. Here are some Work In Progress shots of my farm house under construction. Blue foam was bought from Atenociti's Workshop, the corrugated card was from Hobbycraft and the doors, balcony and windows were from Warbases. The gaps were filled with ready mixed floor tile grout, and then additional texture was added by rubbing ready mixed fine surface plaster filler onto the blue foam with my finger tips. 

I have still got to paint the windows and the roof, but as you can see I am progressing well. I will post finished pictures as soon as I can. 

VBCW: Troop Transport Boats (Work In Progress)

Here are the first shots of the Wirral Socialist Canal Workers Battalion transport boats. These have been converted form 28mm scale models from Sarrissa Precision I have added an armoured prow (which will sport a passenger served Vickers MG on an AA mount) and armoured skirts to protect the pilot at the stern. The windows have been boarded up with armoured plates to create shooting ports for the passengers.

The two vessels will carry the bulk of my WSCW Batt. platoon. They have been fitted with somewhat cramped passenger cabin that will sleep twenty men (or fourteen men with a small sick bay and an officers mess) . There are designs faults, which is to be expected given this is VBCW. Firstly there is no access for the passengers to disembark from the sides of the vessel- All passengers must embark or disembark from the prow or stern of the vessel, making it a slow process. The walls have been reinforced with extra timber, sand bags and sheet steel (counts as improvised armour), but the roof and hull have not been armoured, making it vulnerable to air attacks, indirect artillery and underwater obstacles.  

Adobe Buildings

I am making good progress on my mud brick buildings. I have painted two of them and I am very happy with the outcome- I feel I was justified in my belief that the little boxes I made all those years ago were at least as good as anything I could buy. I have added a few bits of scrubby plans and flowers to the bases too, as they looked very bland otherwise. I think it is these details that make all the difference. I still have to finish painting the large compound.

I also remembered that I had bought three prepainted adobe building cheep on ebay a while ago and I wondered if they would look any good next to my own scratch build ones. They are made from MDF and have been covered with a rough textured paint. the doors and windows stick out as they are just stuck on to the surface of the building. They have lift of roofs and are quite roomy inside. I decided to make a test model first. I used a craft knife to trim the corners and the edges of the walls so that the whole thing has a more rounded and organic shape that is important for mud brick building (I think that this is one of the problems with using MDF to make adobe buildings- they are not supposed to have sharp corners and edges). I will be adding a wall and an out building to the structure, and maybe a porch or something to hide the clunky front door. A little ally way between the buildings and a back gate adds to the interest when gaming too. 

Work in Progress: Adobe Builidings

Wow its halfway through January and this is my first post...not good. In part I can blame real life for getting in the way, and the crummy grey English weather that has meant it has been difficult to take any photos, but there is also a degree of procrastination too. 

That said I am planning to show you some of what I have been working on for the last few weeks.  Today it is these adobe buildings that I am currently working on. Mr Pulp Citizen might recognise the basic structures as being those we used to use for 40K for many years- I made them about twelve years ago form foam card. The rounded edge was achieved by mixing DAS air drying putty with PVA glue to make it sticky then rolling it into a sausage and smoothing it onto the rounded edges- it was a very tactile and messy job but very satisfying. The result is rock hard and very durable- as you can see these buildings have withstood a fair amount of bashing about and game play, as well as some poorly considered storage solutions (such as chucking them into a box with no bubble wrap or packaging).  

In order to revamp these little old buildings I have given them new doors, new bases (from Warbases), added matchstick beams sticking out of the walls and the blue foam walls. Blue foam is an easy material to use to make adobe building as it is easy to shape into curves by using sand-paper to file down the edges. 
These buildings will see use in the planned Soviet-Afghan war a few of the guys down Earlswood have got planned. They could also be used for Ultra-modern wargaming (Black OPs or Force on Force), Mexican cowboy games, WW2 syria and parts of India for my 18th century games. 

Useful.

Frostgrave: Soldiers Work In Progress

I decided to jump on the rapidly moving band wagon and back the 'Nickstarter' for Frostgrave, a brand new fantasy skirmish game from North Star and Osprey. I backed it to get a copy of the rules and one pair of wizards, as I didn't want to commit too much in case I didn't like it. When it arrived I loved it. The rules book is a slickly produced hardback rules with lost of coloured plates and pictures of the figures form the game. I just wanna get going!

I realise now I should have picked up a pack of the plastic soldiers while they were going cheep on pre-order, but I never, so I decided to make some from the bits and bobs I had hanging around. These figures are kit bashed from plastics from Warhammer/Mordhiem, Conquest Miniatures and Gripping Beasts. I tried to copy the style of the Frostgrave soldiers, which tend to have more of a medieval look to them than a typical Mordheim figure, which is where the Norman bits from Conquest came in handy. The city of Frostgrave is, as the name suggest, a frozen ruin, and so I added fur lining and a scarf with green stuff, To portray that these are adventurers in the classic Dungeons & Dragons style I also added backpacks, sling bags, pouches and bedrolls. 

Dead Man's Hand: Work In Progress

Just a quick mid week post to show you a work in progress pictures of a couple of dead cavalry men for Dead Man's Hand. 

Having dead bodies for you team is not really essential in Dead Man's Hand, but it is a lot of fun. Unfortunately Great Escape Games have only brought out dead bodies for a few of their gangs- and none at all for their second wave of gangs- including my favourite the Seventh Cavalry. 

So Instead I bought one of their packs and just converted them- mostly quite minor green stuff work and a bit of shaving with a scalpel, but they both needed head swaps- one is a Mordhiem warhammer head, and the other is a Mantic zombie head with a hat from a Warlord Games ECW musketeer.  I am quite please with the results, but I have to say it is only when you have a go at green stuffing you realise how talented the likes of Kev White, the Perry Twins and Paul Hicks are to be able to make something that looks like a human being out of Green Stuff!

Peninsular War Backdrop (WIP)

At the moment I am jolly busy preparing for the Lead Painters League compensation, and so I can't show you any of the figures I have been working on for the last few weeks, but I can show you this- it is going to be a back drop for my photos of my Napoleonic Peninsular War figures, and obviously is representing a typical Spanish or Portuguese street scene- It might seem like quite a lot of work to go to (and it is) but I don't have any suitable buildings or terrain for the Iberian Peninsular yet, and if I want my figures to look cool I need something suitable- It's also a good chance for me to practice some scenery making techniques that I will eventually employ to make a whole village for use in the games. 

The balcony are laser cut MDF from Warbases- as are the windows and shutters. This plastic door is a left over from the Mighty Fortress. The buildings are foam card, and the barn is made from balsa and part of a broken resin model from TSS I have been meaning to recycle for some time. 

It is a happy chance that I decided to base my Napoleonics on 1p coins not 2p, so that they can rank up together in close order- because the 1p coins fit onto the balcony really well. 

Here you can use you imagination to picture how the back drop will work if was all painted- also not they use of brown undercoat for my Napoleonic range- something of an experiment- and I like the way it is working out. 

I'll post pictures when it is done- That is allowed win the LPL rules. 

Force on Force: Radio Areial and Cell Phone Mast

Here is a couple of quick WIP shots of a cell phone (mobile phone) mast and a radio aerial I have made as objectives for Force on Force. They are made from Hornby Trains OO gauge pylons I got form the local model shop. I built them and then trimmed off the bits that stick out the side to hold the power cables. Then I rooted through my bits box of Games Workshop tank parts and added some bits and bobs to make them look the part. The cell phone mast also has some plasticard receivers too.

The Radio Free Zugando aerial

The Cell phone mast is to be used in my modern Finland campaign  It will be painted up and given a light dusting of snow flock. The Radio areal will be part of a radio station complex for my Zugandan shanty town. Both will be important objectives, as securing them can effect the oppositions command and control. 

A mobile phone mast in Finland

The Pylons come with three in a box for £15.99. The other one might get made up as a more traditional BBC radio mast without all the satellite dishes etc to be used for Very British Civil War. 

Winter War 2015: WIP

This model is a bit of a sneak preview of something I have floating around in my head for Force on Force.

He is a soldier from the Finnish Defence Force. This one is a test model, and I am rather pleased with the results.

Basically, although I love developing my African Force on Force campaign setting, set in the fictional country of Zugando, I felt that I would like to explore other areas of the world. Not feeling terrible comfortable with gaming in Afghanistan or similar locations, I began to look further a field for somewhere to set my new campaign.

The  ‘eureka’ moment came when I was researching the 1939 ‘Winter War’ between Soviet Russia and Finland and I thought ‘Aha…I could use this for Force on Force”. All I had to do was let my imagination go a bit wild, and to engineer some sort of conflict between Russia and Finland, set just a year or two in the future.

This has the added advantage of being more appealing to my regular gaming buddy Pulp Citizen. I think its fair to say that the FoF bug has never really gripped Pulp Citizen, and he is decidedly cool on the whole Ultra-modern thing. But as he is by decent part Finnish, and still has relatives over in that frozen Land, I reasoned that he might feel more motivated to play Force on Force if it involved protecting Fins from Russia.

As to the back ground…well I think I have a lot more work to do to iron that out. Rather like VBCW I will do some research, base some things in facts, make some leaps of logic, and then just fabricate a whole lot of stuff, to end up with a semi-plausible background to the conflict. I know Russia isn't really going to invade Finland, and that the two countries are on fairly good terms (diplomatically at least) but it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a reason for the conflict. Just look at Georgia in 2008.

As to the time scale for this project? Well I am still planning to get my Bolt Action Burma stuff finished first, and to wrap up a lot of Modern African stuff I have in the pipelines, so it will be a while before Russian tanks cross the border into Finland, but I am hoping I will be able to get the first few games in before the end of the year.

This figure is from The Assault Group and is a Russian soldier in a wool hat. It’s fair to say there are some similarities between the look of the Finnish Defence Force and the Russian army, and the TAG figures will serve for both, with different paint schemes. Red Star also makes some nice modern Russians. 

Wrecked Car for my African Shanty

I thought my African Shanty town needed a few beat-up old cars hanging around to 'modern' it up a bit. I looked around for a source of suitable models, and came up with a surprising find.

Modern 28mm civilian vehicles are a bit of a rarity. You can find Hummers and Toyota pick ups in some ranges, but they are expensive. for this project I wanted something a bit different. I have had plenty of experience converting die-cast cars into wargaming pieces, having done it for my VBCW and Battle Cars collections in the past. The trouble is that most die-casts are not in '28mm scale', which is about 1:56. It was by chance I stumbled on the fact that Disney's Cars die casts are something close to 1:56 scale, although there is some variation across the range with some of the small cars being undersized for comic effect.










I thought I would start with Tow Mater, the tow truck. I bought him on eBay for about £5. I drilled out the bolts underneath so I could take it apart. I took the mouth piece off the front, and removed the tow hook thing on the back. I used a bit of card to build up a new front, and built a scenic base to fit in with the rest of the shanty town scenery. I also cut down one of the tires to make a flat tire out of green stuff.

A quick bit of paint, a bit of rust effect stippled over the top and plenty if GW washed to add a lot of weathering, and hey-presto! A suitably wrecked piece of war gaming scenery.

Here's a shot with a 28mm Russian (I haven't got any Africans yet) for comparison. Bear in mind, this isn't a Toyota type pick up typically used as 'Technicals', but rather an older 1950's Chevy type, which was a bigger beast. Scale wise, I think it's about right. I have also got a nice small salon car (I think it might be an old Skoda) and a VW camper to do next.

Sierra Leone Slum

If you have followed my blog for any length of time you will know that I have a habit of getting totally distracted from my current project and stating a new one completely on a whim. I am sure I am not the only wargamer who has this problem.

OK, that said by way of an explanation, it's time to announce my latest distraction/project. Having played COD:MW3 far too much of late, I have been particularly taken by the level fighting in the slums of Sierra Leone, and thought "I would love to do a wargame in a slum". Without more thought as to exactly what wargame I would play, and totally lacking suitable armies to fight over it, I broke out the foam card, balsa wood and corrugated card. This is what I have made so far. ..

This is the first shanty I made. Basically I made a box with foam card and stuck bits and bobs to it. All the buildings have lift off roofs, so I can get my (currently non-existent) miniatures inside. The shanties are bigger that they would be in real life- some might say palatial in fact- but that was so I can get my big clumsy fingers in. I haven't bothered painting the interiors.

I had a lot of fun experimenting with painting the rust- I used various techniques from stippling to inks, and I am generally pleased with the results.

I made this mattress myself from Fimo- great fun and easier than you might think. The rest of the stuff is bits of balsa wood, match sticks, tooth picks, resin barrels by Fenris Games, gravel out of the garden and other similar bits of junk. The fences are made with aluminium mash used to repair car body work- available from Halfords in the UK for £1.99 an A4 sheet.

Coming soon- More shanties, more fences, a hill of rubbish and a polluted stream. I might do a little market place too, and may be a Church or some ruined colonial buildings too.

As to what I am going to do with this terrain, who knows: Force on Force seems an obvious choice, given its origins in COD:MW3, but equally it would be useful for Necromunda, AE Bounty, and 40K. I am open to other suggestions too.