More H&R Artillery

Heroics & Ros B102 4.5" Howitzer

Here's some more Heroics & Ros 1:300 scale WWII artillery, this time the venerable 4.5" howitzer. It was a British WWI model that served on into the early part of WWII, eventually being completely replaced by the 25 pounder.

I don't have any crew figures for these guns as yet, so I haven't finished off the base-work — the guns are just sitting on "dirt" made from MDF sawdust on 25 x 25mm magnetic strip.

H&R Big Guns (but very small)

B43 7.2" Howitzer

This is the British WWII 7.2" Howitzer from Heroics & Ros, with eight foot tall GHQ crewmen.

This artillery piece was a pretty massive piece of kit, so it's a pity that the figures are so tall — it makes the guns look a lot smaller by comparison. Next time I get a pack of H&R artillerymen, I'll swap them out I think.

They're based on 25x25mm pieces of magnetic strip, which makes storage and transportation a lot easier and safer. Plus, the strip is thick enough to give me something to handle without having to grab the models themselves — that's especially important for artillery, because it's the crew figures that bear the brunt of mishandling, and they're the most fragile part of each base.

Carden-Loyd Carrier (1:285)

https://www.shapeways.com/product/XL7A9GKNA/carden-loyd-carrier-mkvi-6mm

The Carden-Loyd carriers were the direct ancestors of the later, more famous Universal Carriers of WWII. They were tiny, very lightly armoured, and had a tendency to fall to bits, but they were useful enough to be used in their hundreds by the British army in the late 1920s and '30s. The army liked them because they were cheap, and they could be used to practice their light tank doctrine. They appeared in a variety of roles (mortar carrier, light anti-tank gun tow, for example), but the most common was the Vickers-armed Medium Machine-gun Carrier, as shown here.

This model is only about 10mm long — the honking great big struts are sprues to support the gun barrel and towing hitch during printing.

https://www.shapeways.com/product/MS8BTEMAU/carden-loyd-carrier-mkvi-6mm-12up

It's also available as a twelve-up sprue — much more cost-effective.

New Arrivals From Heroics & Ros

A new batch of 1:300 scale minis just arrived from Heroics & Ros. From left to right and top to bottom, they are:

• B13 Grant
• B34 Archer
• B33 Deacon
• B68 Matador
• B108 Lloyd Carrier (with separate tilt, top right)
• B93 Humber Snipe (staff car)
• B43 7.2" Howitzer

and then (bottom section)

• B102 4.5" Howitzer
• B21 Centurion Mk.I
• B107 Cruiser Mk.IV Covenanter

Once upon a time, Heroics & Ros provided a crew strip with each gun, but it looks like that's no longer the case. It's a bit of a nuisance; now I'll have to order some and pay postage separately. I can't say I'm all that surprised though — it seems to have become standard practice amongst pretty much all manufacturers to provide guns naked and crewless. I just wish I'd known beforehand.

These are just as they arrived, straight from the bag. All I've done to them thus far is put the appropriate turrets on the right hulls.

Tiny 25 pounders

I've made a start on painting and basing my 3d-printed 25 pounder battery, c.1940.

The crew figures are from GHQ, and I suspect they're going to be too tall for the guns (as GHQ infantry are wont to be). I'd rather be using Heroics & Ros figures really, in spite of the lower level of detail, but they're taking a very long time about fulfilling orders these days and I don't want to wait another six weeks to get the bases done.

Something I realised when I was gluing the guns down is that there's no actual gunner. He should be sitting on the seat on the left of the gun, crouched over the sights — I think I might have to revisit the file and add one.

I'm using 25x25mm bases (cut down from old credit cards and the like), which would make the standard 8-man crew a bit crowded. However, the official "low establishment" crew was only four, so I've got a bit of leeway.

Couple of days later

I've finished painting and basing the guns and limbers. As I suspected, the GHQ crew are a bit too tall, but they'll just have to do. I'll probably glue some magnetic sheet underneath the plastic bases at some stage.

Considering the size of games we're usually playing, it's unlikely I'll ever need to field a whole twelve-gun battery, but if I need to, I now can. There's a comfort in that.

Shapeways Micros

I've painted the 1:285 scale Lanchester Mk.II armoured cars and Burford-Kegresse MG carriers I got recently from Shapeways.

These are printed in FUD resin, and considering that they're only about 20mm long, I think the amount of detail rendered in this material is pretty sweet. I'd like to see how they look in FED resin, but that printing process is even pricier than FUD.

The Burford-Kegresse is the first vehicle I've modeled crew for, and I'm quite happy with how they've turned out, though I'd say that in this scale I could do with ignoring a lot of the detail I included, and exaggerating features like noses.

They're both on sprues of five vehicles each, which is much, much more cost-effective than buying them individually.

Covenanter (1:100 WSF)

I've given my 1:100 scale 3d-printed Covenanter cruiser tank a squirt of KG#3 so that it's a bit easier to see what's going on there.

This one has been printed in WSF nylon, and while that's OK for tabletop use, I'm tempted to splash out and get one printed in FUD resin.

I ordered this one before I adjusted the road wheels and tracks a bit lower, so it doesn't 100% reflect the current state of the model at Shapeways.

It's available for sale at https://www.shapeways.com/product/PJ4PVBAJW/covenanter-15mm

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Think it's an eeeeeevil castle? Bet it is.

I was thinking about the various RPG settings I've seen (and made), and about the fact that they tend to be pretty fucking bleak in one way or another. There seems to be a persistent tendency to give them miserable, dystopian backgrounds.

The standard D&D setting is often described as being "points of light in a sea of darkness" — tiny patches of civilisation surrounded by evil monster-infested wilderness. But even those patches of civilisation are often portrayed as suffering from either an overt or covert rottenness. It does has the advantage of giving the characters lots of things to fight without having to go very far, but it would be a depressing sort of world to have to live in.

I can't think of a single example, in a RPG setting, of a Utopian society that doesn't have some dark secret beneath it.

It's true that such a setting would be pretty dull, from the hack-and-slash point of view, if that were all there was in the milieu. But surely there's no reason why such a place couldn't exist somewhere in a made-up world, if only to provide a contrast to all the other sinks of corrupt viciousness.

1:285 Burford-Kegresse

Here's my 3d-printed Burford-Kegresse armoured MG carrier/APC from about 1930.

It's alongside a GHQ A9 Cruiser, for comparison. The A9 is a few years later than the Burford-Kegresse.

I'm really pretty happy with the amount of detail I can get into a FUD 3d print. There are some issues with striping on vertical and flat sloped surfaces, but nothing I can't live with.

More of the Fruit of My 3d-Printing Loins

Some more 3d-printed bits and pieces arrived from Shapeways today. I've photographed them as they arrived in all their naked glory, but the nature of the materials means that it'll be easier to see what they really look like when I get some paint on to them.

I'm happy with all of them, but I'm especially pleased with the earrings and the 1:285 scale stuff in FUD resin.

Peerless Armoured Car
1:100 scale, WSF

Covenanter
1:100 scale, WSF

"Corroded Cone" earrings
These ones are in Shapeways' "raw bronze" material.

Boer War "Long Tom"
1:100 scale, WSF

1:285 scale stuff (FUD resin). Left to right:
Lanchester MkII Armoured Cars
Burford-Kegresse armoured MG carrier/APC
25 pounder battery

A Tropical Holiday For One And All

http://mojobob.com/roleplay/campaign/eyeless04HumanSacrificeJob.html#session01

The next job for our Intrepid Thursday Nighters sends them off to a hot, wet, stinking, insect-infested tropical wonderland to foil a dastardly ritual and save the sacrifice from being sacrificed.

I'm running my campaign fairly erratically at the moment. It has to fit in with whether one of our number is otherwise occupied or not, so sessions might only happen once a month — I never know for sure.

Urn Critter

I have no memory of who manufactured this little guy, nor where or when I got him, only that it was a long, long time ago. About thirty years, I think. This is a re-paint, to improve on a much older and crappier paint job.

I've glued the original urn to a steel washer to provide a bit of stability, which it did not have much of to begin with.

The image on the far right is for scale, photographed next to Sergeant Measureby with his +2 Spear of Measuring (5mm increments)

Vickers Medium in Bigly Form

I've re-scaled my model of the Vickers Medium Mk.II*, with improved ventilation for tropical deployment, to 1:56 scale (28mm).

It's available for purchase at https://www.shapeways.com/product/GP357MR84/vickers-medium-mkii-28mm

Shapeways gets a bit pricey at this size, even in WSF nylon. I don't know how this price compares with resin casts in comparable scales.

GHQ Grant

Among the unpainted bits and pieces I've been organising, I found this: the Grant medium tank, from GHQ.

This camouflage scheme is more or less the same as that painted on the example at Bovington, and it's a scheme I rather like, which is why I painted this. It's large swatches of KG#3 outlined in lines of black and white on a Dark Sand base.

I experimented with various means of getting the outlines done, but in the end I didn't find any easier or more effective way than just painting on the KG#3 blotches and then outlining them with a fine brush. Now I have four more to paint the same way.

And as usual, now that I've photographed it, I see that I've forgotten to paint the various tools and what-not. Not to worry, that's easy enough to fix.

Warmaster Chaos Critters

I picked these up out of a bargain bin for a couple of bucks quite a few years ago. They're for Warmaster, so 10mm scale — in 28mm scale they'd be about the size of a pony, I guess.

I have no idea what they're supposed to be; the box just said "Chaos Creatures".

They're squatting on beds of skulls and bones which I haven't painted (yet). If I use them for 28mm gaming, those skulls would have to have come from something pretty tiny — some kind of fairies maybe?

GHQ Matilda 1

I'm in the process of organising all my unpainted microarmour, and I'm finding quite a bit of stuff I'd completely forgotten I'd ever bought.

Among them are these Matilda 1, from GHQ. They're tiny little things, and beautifully modelled, but being GHQ they're also pretty bloody expensive — $US10 for five, which (when I bought them) meant about $NZ17, or about $NZ3.40 each. Add on postage, and that brings them up to about six or seven Kiwibucks each. A lot more, if I hadn't bought a bunch of other stuff at the same time, so the postage cost was spread out a bit between them.

I have some other Matilda 1, from Scotia. Compared with the GHQ models, their sculpting is fairly... "crude" is a harsh term, but I can't think of anything more appropriate right now. On the other hand, they only cost me about one Kiwi buck apiece, and they're readily identifiable on the wargames table for what they are.

I haven't yet seen any examples of the Matilda 1 from Heroics & Ros; I might add a couple to an order one of these days out of pure curiosity; I'd expect them to be roughly equivalent to Scotia quality, but with H&R you never can tell. (Note: see below)

Is the extra money for the much better quality of GHQ justified?

I'd say that really depends. If all you want are identifiable playing tokens, then I'd say not. However, if your interest is more in the micro-diorama modelling line, then I'd say definitely yes.

Personally, while I like having exquisitely detailed models on the tabletop, I'm quite willing to settle for less as long as they do actually look like what they're meant to be. And the skyrocketing cost of postage from the USA (which often doubles, or more, the cost of an order) means that, with the high cost of their models, I won't be buying any more GHQ stuff in the foreseeable future. That's kind of a shame.

Heroics & Ros Matilda 1
Image courtesy of Les Hammond

Addendum:

These are Heroics & Ros' new sculpt of the Matilda 1. The detail level and price are comparable with Scotia, though the edges are a little sharper. The proportions are a bit exaggerated vertically, but the profile does give a good visual impression of the dumpiness of this little tank.

Deadeye Slim

Here's another figure from the last Reaper  Bones Kickstarter — 80002: Deadeye Slim, by Patrick Keith.

I wanted a "spaghetti Western" gunfighter, so he's very very dusty and sweaty and almost monochromatic. I also wanted to get him painted very quickly because I didn't want to have to expend too much effort on him, so this is about a 15 minute paint job.

Strong Independent Woman

This lady is part of the Townsfolk set from the last Reaper Bones kickstarter. She seems very friendly. Possibly one of the Hot Singles in Your Area Keen to Meet You.

This is not one of my better paint-jobs; the subtleties of nice smooth skin defeat me. Nevertheless, now she's done.

The figure SKU is 77086: Townsfolk: Strumpet by Bobby Jackson, and she's currently selling for $2.49.

Covenanter — finished

I've finished my 1:100 scale Blender model of the Covenanter.

Now I'm trying to get it uploaded to Shapeways for 3d printing, but for the moment there appear to be issues — the trouble is, I have no idea if the issues are with the model, or with Shapeways' servers, which have been known to crap out fairly frequently, especially when somebody has been trying to make "improvements" to them.

EDIT: It's now available for sale at https://www.shapeways.com/product/PJ4PVBAJW/covenanter-15mm

Adjustment

Something was bugging me about the proportions of the tank, and I finally put my finger on what it was — the road wheels were riding too high, so it didn't give the exaggerated gap between the running gear and the track-guards that was seen on the actual machine. So, I adjusted that and now it looks a bit better.

It could be taken a little further still, but then I'd be running into strength issues in the printed model. So, this will do the trick I think.

Covenanter (digital model)

Bovington's Covenanter.

I'm in the process of building a 1:100 scale digital model of the Covenanter, the immediate (unsuccessful) predecessor of the Crusader cruiser tanks of WWII.

This is a tank of many, many angles, and modelling is not proving to be completely straightforward.

At the moment, the gun mantlet is giving me a huge amount of trouble. It's a casting, so all the component parts will need to be faired together, but first I have to get the actual profile right, and that's giving me a lot more grief than I thought it would.

I think I'll have to scrap what I've done on it so far and start again.

Later....

The lug you can see at the bottom of the turret is just to hold it to the inside of the hollow hull.
It won't be seen on the assembled model.

The mantlet is still far from perfect, but it's a million times better than it was, and certainly good enough for my purposes.

Now I've got all the bits and bobs on the turret, and hollowed it out to save on materials when it's printed, and I'll call it finished. Now I can move on to the next bit, which I think will be the various components of the running gear.

Next bit

We've got some wheels, and now I shall have to make some tracks to wrap around them.

And the next

It's starting to look a bit tankish now. I have the basic shape of the hull and trackguards, and the wheels in place.

However, I'm going to have to revisit the turret because I forgot about the cut-out beneath the back half which would allow it to rotate over the guards and other assorted clutter.

What a nuisance. Still, I have nobody to blame but myself.

Running gear is complete, and now I'm making a start on all the crap that clutters up the decks. Those things in front are radiator covers.

Things are coming along, and most of the rear deck clutter is done. There are still a few bits and pieces to take care of — hinges, fire extinguishers etc. — but the end is in sight.

Freebooter

This is a very old miniature, from Games Workshop I think, which I've had sitting on my desk undercoated for years and years. It came in a blister of two versions: this one, and a mounted figure. It was actually the mounted figure I was looking for when I came to finally get around to painting it, but I couldn't find it, so this guy finally got the treatment.

It's designed for a plastic slotta-base, which I hate, so I've mounted him on a 22mm washer and built up the ground with GreenStuff. I briefly considered adding some foliage, but that stuff catches the dust like you wouldn't believe, and is impossible to clean properly. So, he gets to stand on bare rock.

Ghastly Ghasts

77159 Ghast by James van Shaik

I got these four guys in the last Reaper Bones Kickstarter. They're ghasts — a sort of uber-ghoul, for those who don't know D&D monsters. Retail price is about $2.50 each.

I just wanted mooks, so I painted them up as quickly and simply as I could bear: black primer followed by white zenithal spray followed by white wet-brush followed by greeny ink-wash followed by ivory dry-brush followed by inks for clothes and ground, and that's it. Actual painting time, not including waiting for things to dry, was about twenty minutes I guess.

The only thing I don't like about Reaper's plastic Bones figures is the mould lines. They're a real pain to get rid of.

New! Improved! Now with added synergy!

Get it here!

Get it even more here!

Do YOU have a need to randomly determine integers from 1 to 4?

Are YOU sick of impaling your bare feet on caltrop-shaped 4-sided dice in the dark?

THEN YOU NEED THIS NEW AND IMPROVED d4!!!

Now you can throw dice that will be the envy of all your peers. [gender] will want you, [otherGender] will want to BE you!

Coming now for an unlimited time to a Shapeways printery near you!

The dice are 10mm sort-of-cubes — the lugs sticking out on two sides are so that they will come to rest square on the table, and not sit half-cocked on the roundy-bit.

Limited-Use Magical Doo-Dads

There's a system for determining whether or not your magical gizmo still works or not that I read somewhere some time ago, and that I rather like.

Rather than giving it a set number of charges remaining, you assign to it a die — anything from a d2 to a d1,000,000,000,000.

Every time the macguffin is used, the die is rolled: if a 1 turns up, it fizzles, fails to operate, and is out of charges from that point.

This system has two advantages:

• First, it adds a degree of uncertainty to the use of magical gew-gaws. I don't imagine them coming with a little read-out showing exactly how much fuel is left in the tank, and I don't think the characters using the thing should have that information either.
• Second, it reduces the amount of record-keeping that either the player or the GM has to remember to keep track of.

The easiest thing, from the GM's point of view, is to just let the player know which die they should be rolling to activate the thingumajig. The down-side to that (if it is, in fact, a down-side) is that it gives them some information about the state of charge of the doohickey.

The slightly more tiresome method is for the GM to secretly roll the die every time they attempt to use the framistat. The possibility here is that an unscrupulous GM might take advantage of the secrecy to remove from his or her campaign a magical splandlefloopit that is causing them irritation.

My personal choice would generally be the former, but that's mainly because I'm really very lazy.

Dwellers in Dark Places — a New Monster Book

This book of monsters for AD&D/OSRIC by Matthew Hargenrader, Dwellers in Dark Places, has just arrived on my doorstep — at long last; I ordered it from DriveThruRPG a couple of weeks before Xmas last year.

I bought it in PDF format some months before then (about September, I think) and enjoyed it enough to shell out for the PoD hardcover when it was marked down (about 20%) for the pre-Xmas market.

It is, without doubt, the most entertaining book of RPG monsters I've seen in decades. I haven't enjoyed a critter collection as much since I got my brand new copy of the Fiend Folio in 1982.

It's thoroughly illustrated in black-&-white throughout, and generally, the illustrations are pretty good — to my mind, they're of a much better standard than the usual run of fan-published work. There's something to be said for the enthusiasm of amateurs, but it's refreshing to see such a solid body of professional-quality black-&-white artwork. There's nothing there, alas, by Pete Mullen (one of my favourites), but I guess you can't have everything. There are about 500 monsters detailed in the book, and almost (?) all of them have at least one illustration, so that's a lot of pictures.

The paper is a bit thin, and not terribly opaque, but considering the page count (366 pages, not counting the front- and end-matter) if the paper was as heavy as that in the first Monster Manual and Fiend Folio, the book would be about two or three inches thick. Not that I'd particularly mind that.

The organisation and layout follows the precedent set by those earlier works, though in places it betrays a certain amateurishness. The most obvious example is in the tables that are scattered liberally throughout the book; they are all dominated by thick black borders which overpower the text within, and make the whole table less legible.

Another example, and a more serious one from the point of view of the book's usability, is that all too often monster statblocks and descriptions/illustrations are spread across more than one page. That's not really an issue as long as they're on the same two-page spread, or at least start on the same spread, but frequently I see a statblock table on a right-hand page that refers to a monster that is detailed on the following page — and that description is lacking any sort of title or visual separation from the previous entry. That's just bad design.

However, even with these reservations, I like this book a lot. It has obviously been a labour of love for the author, and it's jam-packed full of critters that I'm champing at the bit to use.

I hope it makes him a MEEEELLLION DOLLARS!

These also arrived today, in a separate delivery: ten 24-sided dice from the faraway land of China.

I've made my love of Stupid Dice known before.

I can't foresee very many uses for these, except maybe to randomly determine an hour of the day, so you'd think there would be no point in getting more than one. Or even one, for that matter. Ten certainly seems like overkill.

However, they were only about a buck-fiddy for a bag of five, with free postage, so really I think I should be congratulated on my self-restraint in only getting ten.

With an Onion +2 on my belt...

....as was the style at the time....

I was idly leafing through one of my old AD&D 2e Players' Handbooks and feeling that its layout, it's look-and-feel, were really boring and old fashioned.

It's true that the layout is staid, to say the least, but it was more than that. Then I put my finger on it: the blue bold serif headings and the blocks of conservative Times-Roman-like text make it look like a web page from 1995.

All that's missing is <blink> and <marquee>.

On the cover, there's a TSR logo with the tagline "Products of your imagination". This sort of layout does not reflect much in the way of imagination at all. It might as well be an engineering reference manual. It does have the occasional illustration, but they're mostly pretty crap.

An argument might be made that keeping everything as neutral as possible is a good thing, as it would be less likely to unduly influence the imaginations of the users in any particular direction. This layout fails at that as well, because of the general focus and tenor of the aforesaid lame illustrations. They influence the imagination without particularly inspiring it.

I felt, at the time that it was released, that there was quite a lot about 2e, mechanically, that I liked as compared with 1e. But I thought at the time, and still do, that it lost a lot of the heart and soul that 1e had had in spite of its frequent clunkiness.

The Troll Job — Episode #03

http://mojobob.com/roleplay/campaign/eyeless03_theTrollJob.html#session03

Hey! I know! Let's all

SPLIT THE PARTY!

What's the worst that could happen?