RWBY: COMBAT READY!

 RWBY: COMBAT READY is a board game that I have not played... it looks super abstract but I'll eventually get round to giving it a go.

I am enamored of the RWBY anime and totally bought the game to mine it for minis... forgetting that they *might not* be in a useful scale...  

The models are in a soft plastic and are a little bit larger than GW Heroic scale. They come mounted on a 38mm-ish beveled base .... awkward! We can see Penny is a bit taller than Sister Veridyan.  I *may* re-base these later and mix them with the Kingdom Death: Death High series but maybe not... some of the models actually use all that base-top real estate.

Penny is my favorite model in the set:

She is a fun character and the least flash ridden of the set.  The models themselves are of relatively low detail and the faces are a poor match to the original art for several of them.

I did find a fun way to paint the base that I'd like to remember how to do...

Black wash

Cloudy Grey (Reaper) blobs (diluted) in a rough cobblestone pattern.

Base White (Reaper) stippled on the grey blobs.

Sewer Water (Secret Weapon) washed thinly over the whole base.

The Sewer Water wash wash attracted to the black washed base and blended the edges of the gray blobs without any help from me.  The White stippling added subsurface highlights giving everything a nice feeling of depth for very little effort.

Moving on from Penny to the natural pairing of Blake and Yang

These had the roughest of the faces but, since anime is so color coded, it all works out in the end.

Other groupings... sisters Yang and Ruby.... and Ruby and dreamy mean girl Weiss

These really use all that base...

Finally the Villans!

All in all I'm reasonably happy with the project.  The characters are easily identifiable and will be fun to have on the tabletop.  I'd have liked them to be a little more in scale with regular tabletop models but they are not so egregiously scaled as to be unusable with Heroic scale models.

Thoughts... Board Game Kickstarters as sources for cool models.... 

I'll be doing a lot less of that unless the models are presented in a scale that is useful to me. So far RWBY: COMBAT READY!, and Darksouls: The Board-game have been in funky scales while The Order of Vampire Hunters and Chronicle X have been in standard heroic scale with bases.  Excluding the board games that are made by war-games manufacturers, like GW and Mantic, or Board-games that are intended to function as, or compatible with, tabletop wargames... like Joan of Arc (15mm) I have to be aware that my idea of proper mini scale is not universal.

With that said... I wonder where Etherfields is gonna land for figure scale?

Next time I finish up some Void Elf Executrix troops that I started working on before the big move and have relocated.

Back to the desk!

Epicast Stompa revisited

While unpacking the workshop I rediscovered an old friend from 40K 2nd Edition... Its from Epicast back in the bad old days when GW licensed a few outside companies Like Epicast, and, later, Armorcast to produce stuff that occurred in the fluff but GW itself was not producing.  Eventually all of those licenses were withdrawn and consolidated back into what we now know as Forge World.

These early models came with rules in the form of Data Sheets so they could be played, with the consent of your opponent, without any new rule books being required.

Second edition was the high water mark of the cartoon style for 40k and my Orks were as cartoon-y as they come. These first couple of pictures are of the Stompa appear (with the addition of the beginnings of some lining that I started before remembering to snap a photo) as I played it for decades.  Bright primary colors and almost zero weathering, highlighting, or shading.  The roof tiles over the rear assualt doors were perhaps the only attempt at weathering.  

This was not entirely a sacrifice on the altar of speed.  The cartoon style really relied on mass color coding with a very small number of spot details as focal points... much like Anime does even now. I wanted to update this old can a bit so it didn"t look super incongruous with my current Orks but retained its 2 ed. roots.

Below is the result.

As you can see I chose not to start over from scratch and just continued on over the old paint.

I started with a lot of Brown Rust (Secret Weapon(SW)) to move the nearly monochrome green into a two color scheme, jazz up the freehand chevrons, and to make the iron jaws of the skull a bit more fearsome. This was all large brush stippling.

Following the Brown Rust I did a full model Drybrush with Silver (Vallejo(V)) followed by a full model wash with Armor Wash (SW) and then wiped away the excess wash with a paper towel.  

Orange Rust (SW) was stippled in the central areas of any Brown Rust areas, Phoenix Red (V) stippled over red areas. 

Brass Casing (SW) was used to touch up and shade gold areas and Engine Metal (SW) touched up and highlighted all metal areas. The battlecannon barrel mouth got some thin coats of Orange Heat (SW) fading into Purple Heat (SW) fading into the base green.  The entire model then was lined with Rust Shadow (SW) with extra effort directed at establishing a more detailed impression of a blade track for the chainsword.

The model has always been unsteady on its feet and prone to falling over so in a final omage to 2nd ed., and to play with my newly rediscovered static grass applicator, I  grabbed a big oval bass and loaded it up with 2mm static grass.  In 2nd. ed almost all the armies I encountered, including my own, were straight up flocked unlike the more significant efforts expended on modern bases.

Here is the completed model with some Ork Burna Boyz making their wicked way into the Undertown... gonna be a bad day for someone!

 Back to the desk!

Cheers

Joan of Arc 15mm Core Game, GW Forest Goblin Spider Riders, an Epicast Stomper Tune-up in progress and fun with static grass!

The Joan of Arc game is so ambitious!  Its a board game, a Tanletop Mini Game, its a Historical Game, its a Fantasy Game. It has an RPG and its almost an action RPG right out of the box... It even has aerial combat because.... Angels and Dragons... whew!  Its gonna be a fun ride!

From the core box: The Tarasque, The Unicorn, The Archangel Gabriel, 4 Angels, 2 Bullock Wagons.

As you can see you can go full on fantasy right out of the starter box... I think one of the scenarios is a werewolf hunt even... or you can stay with the historical scenarios. Its a great transitional game.

These were all sprayed a dark camo green primer (Rustoleum), damp-brushed with white craft paint and washed with Secret Weapon (SW) Washes.  The wagons then got a dry-brush of Sunny Flesh (Vallejo(V)) to make the wood pop.

Below is the tray ready for re-interment in the game box... In this Golden Era of Mega-Games I'm going to have to put some thought into how to condense the numerous expansions.

The angels got sky themed bases to go with the sky tiles in the aerial combat portion of the game.  Sky Blue (Warpaints) Stipple with white, wash with Blue (SW).  White robes are layered Graveyard Bone and Splintered Bone from the (Reaper) Bone Triad.   Gold is Brass Casings (SW) Flesh Wash (SW) dry-brush Silver (V).

 Being easily distracted by shiny things... I was unable to simply put the static grass applicator back into its box and decided to fix a long standing problem... namely my ancient 40K second edition Epicast Stompa!  Its never stood well on its own and is heavy enough to take out models it happen to fall on...doh! So I thought I'll just slap a base on it and its "problem solved!" ... 

...then I noticed that the old second edition paint-job looked really, really, dated so... doing something I very rarely do... I decided to do a bit of an update.  These are the pictures of its original state except for some black lining I started to do before remembering to snap a photo.  I'm going to preserve some elements of the original and bring it up to date without starting from scratch.  Well, that's the plan anyway!

The completed Forest Goblin Spider Riders. Ready for an Oldhammer rumble!

Speaking of a rumble I literally hate this new Blogger interface!  Its more primitive than its predecessor and seems specifically designed to be rigid and unwieldy.  For example I'd like to put this sentence at the bottom of the page... but I can't do that without actually removing the picture below... fabulous improvement... This update would normally have taken be about 15 minutes to compose on the fly but I've been at this now for three hours and still can't get the words and the pictures to go where I want them.

MADE
  OF

 FAIL