Various Fantasy

For the upcoming Frostgrave campaign, I started to dabble in 28 mm fantasy miniatures again. By far, the easiest (on the wallet) option is Reaper Bones these days, although the D&D unpainted line of miniatures is also giving them a run for the money. My miniatures are mostly a mix of these two product lines.

For my Frostgrave warband, I decided on a dwarf-themed group, with a core of dwarves along with other hired "helpers".

My wizard is an enchanter, along with his rather buxom apprentice. Both of these are Reaper Bones miniatures.

In Frostgrave, the enchanter can create constructs, obedient machines animated using magic. In this case, I have small, medium, and large constructs that are supposed to be rock-like creatures. The small and large constructs in the foreground are from the World of Warcraft boardgame, while the medium construct is Reaper Bones.

For some shootiness, I have a couple of crossbowmen. One of them is a dwarf ranger figure, and the other is a derro (i.e. "dark dwarf"). Both are Reaper Bones again.

For cannon-fodder, I mean, more valuable members of the group, here are two more Reaper Bones derros used as thugs.

For sneaking around, these are a couple of halfing thieves. These are D&D unpainted miniatures, which are much slimmer in build compared to Reaper.

Some more extra characters. In this case, they can fill in as a man-at-arms, a templar, and a treasure hunter, respectively, as needed. All of these are again Reaper Bones.

For both Frostgrave and other fantasy games, I also painted up some trolls, in case they are needed. These are actually 1/72 scale fantasy figures, but they are big enough that they can pass as 28 mm trolls.

Here is a size comparison with a 28 mm figure. These 1/72 trolls are still big enough to be a threat to a human-sized 28 mm figure.

I also painted up a Reaper giant worm, just because I like the model. This is a gorgeous piece of sculpting to paint.

The first Frostgrave game is coming up right away on Sunday, and I can't wait.

Mayday 2016

Yet another year has come and gone, and I went to Mayday 2016 over the weekend. Even though this year had somewhat lower attendance than usual, Mayday has become enough of a fixture that most of the usual suspects were there.

I ran my typical Strange Aeons: X-Com game, with the boards mixed up a little bit from usual to provide some variety. I hosted Wiley and Andy in a couple of introductory games - Andy had been interested in Strange Aeons for a while but had never played my game, whereas Wiley had played once before.

The rural board, which I modified to add a farm house.

The urban board, which is now a UFO crash site.

Here Wiley and Andy were trying to figure out the rules on the urban board.

They ended up winning one game each and had a good time. We talked about possibly running a campaign on normal game nights, which is where the base system really shines.

In the afternoon, I played in a series of DBA games with Dennis. Due to low turnout, we were the only ones in the DBA time slot, originally meant for a British-themed tournament. We went through three games, with me playing an ancient British army and Dennis using a sub-Roman Briton army.

We played through slightly different terrain set-ups using the same armies. Dennis ended up winning 2 to 1 and won the "tournament".

In the evening, Terry hosted several players in a Frostgrave game. Frostgrave seems to be the new thing around here, being a fairly simple skirmish campaign game. A lot of people are building their own warbands, and I'll probably modify my Mordheim warband to add some wizards.

The scenario we played had each of us trying to get our wizard to a fountain in the center of the board, to drink its magical waters. Of course, we had to kill each other (and random monsters) along the way.

We played quite late into the evening, and I ended up winning after killing another wizard, which gave a lot of experience. I really liked the rules, since they're both simple and quite flavourful, with everything you'd want in a fantasy system. Time to dust off my Mordheim stuff!

So another enjoyable Mayday has come and gone, and I can't wait until the next one. Maybe I'll run something other than X-Com...