Naz-Goth v Treyine over at Talomir Tales

Another AAR, this time in a Comic book Style. Here at Talomir Tales.

Failed miserably (B.P part 5?)

Well, I think it's time to face the fact that I have failed miserably in my bold plan to get off my ass and play a game with actual painted figures.

I have a lot of excuses, but minimal results. I will classify it as a success in one regard though, I actually put paint to brush and got a lot started.

What did I accomplish?

I got 35 orcs cleaned and mounted on washers. 10 still need primer, but 9 actually have a flesh tone base coat, woohoo!

For the human (Treyine) side I have cleaned mold lines from 26 figures. Out of the 70 some odd I can now see that there is no way I can finish those, base them on washers and fight out the battle and write the report by Sunday.

So what now? Well I think next is to print out the paper army of Naz-Goth, set up the battle and duke it out.

Although I failed in my stated goal I think there were some positive accomplishments by giving myself this deadline.

First I came up with a plan for priming, basing and color blocking the figs. I intend to use Black primer for evil and viking/ saxon figs to give a dark grungy look. For the regular human forces grey primer and white for the elves/ goodie two shoes types. For the wizard I was going to prime in brown, not sure what difference that will make.

Second, I came to the conclusion that I am a brush on primer kind of guy, I just have no control over the spray can. I bought some great, compared to my previous one anyway, black acrylic paint by Americana called lamp black. Sam had noticed how shiny my previous one was and it turned out that it was a metallic black. The difference in coverage is amazing.

Third, while I am improving I still struggle with cleaning up the flash and mold lines on the plastic. Some of them just don't scrape off cleanly. So I've developed an alternate shaving technique to go with lateral scraping.

Fourth, I made a spear using Paul's method here. I used a a small sledge for the anvil and a hammer. The wire I used was a little hard so I had trouble making as fine a point. I do have some floral wire and I will try that next. It was in fitting the spear that I figured out I needed to clamp my items in place to get super glue to hold right.

When I get a chance I'll document this with pictures and hopefully it will help those of you who may be in similar circumstances.

And before I forget I read this great post from Chicago Skirmish Wargames here about filling your own paint dropper bottles. I feel like I need to do this for my various paint mixing projects and to stop wasting paint because of lack of control from the craft paint bottles.

Battle report next.

Primed (B.P Part 4)

The 20 orc figures are all coated in PVA and primed black. For the Archers, Hero, Bugbears and Black moon orcs I sprayed them down with Scenic Cement. I don't think I'll do that again as I'm not sure the mess made is worth the time saved. I might try a glue dip method but not sure about that either. The primer is that glossy black, I thought I had purchased more flat black but only had it in an artist tube and haven't got my thinning stuff together yet.

Four trees and the four Wolf riders had their washers spackled. I also received my 100g bag of Heki Grasfaser Sommerwiese 3360 (Light Green? Static Grass) from Scenic Express. So you should be seeing me enter modern times in my basing technique. Scenic Express also sent a bound catalog with the order, it's like the Sears Christmas catalog for terrain building. I just wish that model railroad scales weren't so weird. N is 1:160, HO is 1:87 and O is 1:50.

I'll try to add pictures tomorrow. I also had more to say, but my brain is fried. Good night.

Put yer back into it! (Bold plan pt3)

This is how I'm feeling at 0:37 or so.

So yesterday saw my son's flag football team win 32 - 6 and precious little done on the B.P. so I resolved to knuckle down and get on with it.

So the Orcs are all mounted on washers and the Wolfriders are pinned glued and on washers. the main infantry were spackled and textured. The wolves will get the treatment tomorrow. I also determined that I will use magnetic business cards as bases/ movement trays. 3.5" wide by 2" deep is about double my current card bases, so we'll see what that does for my battle board. I was thinking that the infantry would be 3.5" x 1".

The Treyine army has been cut off the sprue, but needs to be cleaned up and put together.

Front middle is the Foot knights, 2 Minart German Knights 72011. Lord De La Warre in pink from Zvezda English Infantry of the 100yrs War 8060. I haven't decided what to do about the standard bearer. There is one in that set but I want to make the Spear of St. Lindorf banner, so I may need to convert another figure. To their right are Sir Alaric Fithugh and Dansforth the Mage, both from Caeser Advebturers Fantasy 104. The next row are the Infantry. 1 entire sprue from the Strelets Military Order Warriors M012 and four added from Strelets Medieval Levy 2 M006. The mass behind them are the 30 archer figures. 21 from  Zvezda English Infantry of the 100yrs War 8060, 3 from Zvezda Medieval Peasant Army 8059 and 6 from the Airfix Robin Hood A01720. To the right of the last row of archers, in brown are the Arquebusiers from the Orion/ Dark Dream Studio Landsknechts DDS 72002. Then the Hykar cavalry skirmishers played by Strelets Turcopoles 090. In the final row the knights of the White Company (including Geoffrey Chambers) Minart German Knights 72011, Tropilium Equites HaT Imperial Roman Praetorian Cav 8067, Eskelin Knights HaT El Cid Spanish Heavy Cavalry 8213 and finally 4 Goblins from Caeser Goblins Fantasy 105.

I like all of the figures. The HaT Romans and the Airfix seem a little small alongside the others but I'm sure they'll blend in fine. The Goblins are a little more whimsical than fearsome. None of the figures are armored and a few have bombs to throw. There is also an over abundance of wiggly knife blades. In the future I wonder if I could use 15mm Orcs for goblins.

I also realized I had signed up for a terrain competition that ends this month. When it rains it pours.

Soldiering on. Wish me luck.

Orcs of Naz-Goth (Bold plan pt2)

So here we are a few days later, and while not great, progress has been made.

All 35, 39 if you count the wolves separately, figures have been cut off the sprue and some attempts made to clean up flash and mold lines. The seam scraper I purchased from megahobby turned out not to be as useful as I hoped. I'm sure it's great for aircraft fuselages and ship hulls, but it isn't appreciably better than using an exacto knife. In some cases it is worse.

On with the units. First up 5 stands of Orcs. Each base has 4 figures that are supposed to be lightly armed and armored. They are mostly from Caesar set Orc Warriors Fantasy 106 with a couple of figures from Dark Alliance Orcs Set 2.

Brown ones are Dark Alliance, all others Caeser.

Next, 1 stand Dire wolf riders. 4 figures and their mounts. These are the old Ral Partha sculpts that I purchased from Iron Wind Metals. They were recommended by EY here. I only bought the one set so shipping was too much, but other than that I like them. The riders are borrowed from the Dark Alliance Orcs Set 1. I cut their bases of and will use a rotary tool to help them sit down a bit. The armor represented is heavier than I want but these figures have wide stances so were in less need of conversion.

Haven't bored out the crotch yet

The 2 stands of Archers. These are classed as skirmishers and so only two per base. They are from the Caesar Orc Warriors Fantasy 106.

Lastly the Black Orc stand. These are from  Dark Alliance Orcs Set 1 but the standard bearer is from Caesar Orc Warriors Fantasy 106. The Dark Alliance orcs have the armor I want but I liked the Caesar standard bearer better.

I like the one on the right for the General.

One thing I will note is that the Dark Alliance figures are harder to clean. The plastic tends to look ragged and fuzzy after scraping. This leads me to believe that trying to clean the mold lines on them is probably not worth the effort.

The Bugbears are from Splintered Light minis. I originally read about them here. I had forgotten that EY had extended their legs. So they are shorter than envisioned in D&D but I think they work fine. I just wanted to have something other than a proxy. The Ogres are very nice as well. I think that they would probably be of the desired proportions with 15mm. These are advertised as 20mm Fantasy and as such feel a tad small next to the Orc figures. I still like them and will use them without modification.

Nice looking if a tad small.

From dragonsfoot.org

Again a tad small but will do and they look cool.

So there you have it. Way behind but making some progress. The final figures for the Treyine army also arrived so I'll detail them later. 9 days left to pull it all together.

A bold plan.

On Sunday I formulated a bold plan for getting my rear in gear for actually painting figures. Many regular readers will note that I have done much more hand wringing than painting, and to be honest I'm not really sure what is/ has been holding me back.

On with the plan. I have a battle to fight for the Talomir Tales campaign. The Army of Treyine vs. the Orcish army of Naz-Goth. I have until the end of the month to paint 108 figures and play out the battle. Ambitious? Yes, but I think I can manage it.

Here are the forces and proposed figures.

Treyine:

• Foot Knights 4 figures - General and Spear of St. Lindorf in element.
• Infantry 16 figures
• Archers 27 figures
• Merc. Arquebusiers 6 figures
• Hykar Cav 2 figures
• Tropilium Equites 3 figures
• Zog-Rot Goblins 4 figures
• The White Company 3 Mtd Knights (Incl. Sir Geoffrey Chambers), 3 Archers
• Eskelin Knights 3 figures
• Hero (Sir Alaric Fitzhugh) 1 figure
• 1 L2 Wizard (Dansforth) 1 figure

Total: 73

Naz-Goth:

• Orcs 20 figures
• Dire Wolf Riders 4 figures
• Archers 4 figures
• Black Moon Orcs 4 figures (General)
• Bugbears 2 figures
• Hero (Hogash) 1 figure

Total: 35

So a grand total of 108.

Wish me luck. I hope to follow up post with WIPs and figure sourcing along the way.

Welcome to two new followers:

Hugh, I don't know if you have a blog but your avatar leads me to believe it is Ten Mil Wargames, correct me if I am wrong.

Monty from Monty's War Gaming, a nice site that has reviews of movies and computer games as well as some finely painted 15mm stuff.

And lastly the blog has surpassed 9,000 views.

Time to start thinking about a giveaway for 10,000.

Making an old letter

As threatened, here is a tutorial for making an old letter. I was going to re-install my fonts, brushes and texture files but then I thought that doing it from scratch might be more useful.

So I downloaded the latest version of GIMP (2.8.2) here. And then did a search through Google Images for "old paper texture" there are also some nice links to old parchment, old book etc.

I chose to go with this one by nevermoregraphix from deviant art.

For the font, since it is a letter and not a book, I wanted to go with a handwritten style. As usual I went with dafont but most sites have all the same fonts. I slogged through many fonts in the handwritten section before I found one I had used before jacek zieba jasinski, it's okay but I just now did a search for Jefferson which is a nicer hand written font. But since I've already loaded GIMP without it, jacek will have to do.

So I've opened GIMP, I don't have it totally set up how I'd like but it's not too heavily modified from the vanilla install. I've only added some toolbox icons to make it more familiar to me. I've also taken advantage of the new single window feature. No more covering up menus inadvertently.

Another RRTK Battle report over at Talomir Tales

Hi all,

  Just posted another report over at Talomir Tales here. I was seriously procrastinating on this one. I briefly thought I had thrown out all my terrain in the latest spring cleaning, but found it and got stuck in. The game was fairly quick and went well except for one or two things I did wrong. The counter charge by Treyine was a mistake but it just sped up the inevitable.

Welcome to Archduke Piccolo writer of such blogs as Emperor vs. Elector, Vive L'Empereur, and Archduke Piccolo. I was originally turned on to him by Bob Cordery from Wargaming Miscellany to look at his Marnon mini campaign here. Good stuff.

Win the war against procrastination.

Today's post from Solo Nexus here, was very timely for me.

I'm going to print this out and start using it ASAP.

*Edit*

Well the print out was a little hard to read so I saved the image and used it as a desktop background. Move the shortcuts around and viola!

Now I can motivate myself as I stare blankly at the desktop.

Back in the Saddle, so to speak.

Well I'm back on my trusty laptop. I failed miserably to clone the drive, I tried again and saw that the error was bad clusters. So I went ahead and slapped the new drive into the laptop and whipped out the recovery discs I had made. So when you get a new computer that asks you if you want to make recovery discs, DO IT!

It didn't go totally according to plan, I thought I would set it up to partition the drive like it had originally and got this:

This message did not instill confidence

But I persevered and now have a basically new computer with a 991GB C drive and that's it. I can always partition it later if that bugs me.

Now all I have to do is re-download and install all my favorite programs, add chinese to the IME etc.

On a side note, it seems that I may have some how synced with my Dad's computer on my goggle account. I re-installed chrome and hit sync and got all of his bookmarks and internet history. Weird. And kind of creepy that google has all this info about you but I guess it makes sense.

Mistakes were made.

I wish I could say that my computer issues were all rainbows and lollipops, unfortunately that is not the case.

I have been sort of ignoring the problem while guests were here for the holiday but i did remedy my first mistake. I took back the solid state drive and got a regular Hard Drive (optical) that is double the size of the old one and in the process got back $55. So I felt pretty good about that.

Fast forward to this morning as I try to set up the new and old drives for cloning in some drive docks that I have. Problem one, can't see the new drive at all. So I figure I'll plow ahead. After re-learning how to change the Boot order in the bios I boot up the Clonezilla Live disk and happily key my way through the menus.

I fortunately am able to decipher which drive is which, drive names are weird to say the least and then the whole linux sda etc convention for drives. So I clone sdc onto sdb. Have a brief crisis of confidence as it asks me three times if I "really" want to do this. And then we're on our way.

Of course the first part says it's going to take two hours. I won't bore you with more details except that while I was out one part failed to copy, turns out it was the part with the OS on it. So I have a perfect copy of the data partition, which I've already backed up and an OS partition that says it needs to be formatted and has a size of 0bytes. Joy.

Of course I still have to turn each drive on individually, at first I thought I had just fried my original OS partition.

On a gaming note I played a few more games of Munchkin Conan with my son, he won so he likes the game again. I should be fighting the final battle between Treyine and Seniira for Talomir Tales this week. If I could only force myself to get into a painting schedule.

Welcome to TamsinP of Wargaming Girl I'm not sure what took me so long to follow her blog. Lots of well painted figures in 15 and 28mm. Looks like she's been bitten by the Saga bug.