A New Adventure Begins...

After a bit of a break from DMing, I've started back with a new adventure for our lovable bunch of rapscallions....

The Seven Brides of Vecna*

The session logs are at http://mojobob.com/roleplay/campaign/eyeless05BridesOfVecna.html

The first episode is related here. It.... did not go as smoothly as it might have.

* Seven Brides For Seven Liches will be a title for another time, but that could be a good adventure hook too.

Bases Galore

These just arrived for me today — a box full of laser-cut MDF sabot bases, from a guy I know only as Catweazle, in Australia. I sent him some vector files for cutting the bases, and he sent me this lot in return. Score!

I haven't sorted them yet, but I imagine that this should be as many bases as I'm likely to need any time in the foreseeable future, unless I really go berserk and start playing gigantic mega-games.

PSC A9/A10 Cruiser (15mm) — WiP

 Some new toys arrived for me today from PSC, two boxes of 15mm (1:100) tank kits. I got some Stuart "Honeys", for future use when I get around to building up my Western desert forces a bit, and this one, the A9 or A10 cruiser, to pad out my B.E.F. force.

I already have a troop of A9, so this box will go to making me a troop of A10 gun tanks, and one each of an A9 and A10 CS (close support) tank.

Options

The sprues provide optional parts to complete  five variants: hulls for European or desert versions of the A9 or A10, and turrets for gun tanks of various marks (distinguishable by the different gun mantlets) or the close support tanks mounting the 3" howitzer.

Note that the hull tops for the desert variants have symmetrical track guards, which wasn't the case on the original vehicles — they were actually deeper on the port side than the starboard to accommodate the vehicle's cooling system. If that sort of detail is important to you, you'll have to do a bit of trimming.

Regrettably there aren't enough running gear pieces to build more than one tank from each sprue, nor enough turret components to be able to just make a spare CS turret. Still, I can't really utterly condemn PSC for that. At about twenty quid for five tank models, they're already pretty good value for money.

Instructions

Construction is pretty straightforward, though instructions are provided for only one variant — the A10 Mk.IIa for the European theatre. You'll just have to guess and hope for the others. The main thing is to make sure you're actually getting the right parts off the sprue for the variant you want to build, and with so many optional pieces it pays to double-check. The colour-coded layout shown on the other side of the instructions is useful for this.

The instructions given are very simplistic, but adequate (for the single tank variant shown) except for one part: Step 3 (highlighted here in yellow). DON'T DO THIS. Go straight to Step 4. It might be possible to force the running gear into place after the top and bottom hull pieces are glued without breaking something, but I doubt it.

I wasn't timing myself, but I'd guess that putting this first one together took me about half an hour.

Flying Carpet

I needed a flying carpet for my up-coming AD&D scenario, so I made one. It's bigger in real life than it would be if it was truly to scale; it's supposed to seat six people comfortably at about 7' by 10' long, so I need to accommodate six figure bases. I very much doubt that the scale differential is ever going to matter at all.

The carpet is just a print of a photograph from the internet, stiffened with epoxy and some cotton gauze, and the flying stand is chopped from a soda bottle neck. The rocks are made from rocks.

The figure is an old Grenadier wizard, and the most appropriately Arabian Nights-ish one I own, but quite a bit smaller than the Reaper figures I mostly use these days.

Enhanced Interrogation Client Containment Module

Amongst the Reaper Bones Kickstarter III offerings is a set of pieces to dress up your friendly local torture chamber.

One of them is this one, an iron maiden.

I've used a couple of Vallejo's GameEffects rust paints on it, and I quite like the effect they give. You can slop them on straight from the bottle, but I find they give best results in several layers of washes, not too thin.

This is the rest of the Torture Chamber set. I think there might have been some other bits and pieces in one or other of the Kickstarter expansions, but I didn't get any of those except the Cthulhu Mythos set.

Morris CS9 Armoured Car (15mm)

Not many of these came back to the UK after Dunkirk, but the Morris CS9 was a fairly common reconnaissance armoured car with the BEF in 1940. I've been using Humber LRC as proxies for them, and it's nice to have models of the actual vehicle to use instead.

Gug

 Here's one of the Cthulhu Mythos creatures from the recent Bones Kickstarter, a Gug.

I really don't know what that is; I've played a bit of Call of Cthulhu but never come across one of these. I suppose I could look it up, but I'm lazy.

Half-Orc

Here's another Reaper Bones plastic miniature. I don't know if it's actually meant to be a half-orc or not, but that's what I'm using it for.

I have a couple of half-orc twins in my campaign, a brother and sister, and they're in need of figures.

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NOTE: Apparently they're actually meant to be hobgoblins. Too bad, they're half-orcs now.

Here's the other one.

Back to Painting Monsters

This is one of the Cthulhoid critters from the recent Reaper Bones Kickstarter. I think they call it Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, but I'm not completely sure about that.

Just a side note: Windows 10 did an update recently, and since then Photoshop's colour balance has gone entirely to shit. What I see in Photoshop has no relation to what I get as output, and I'm really struggling to figure out how to get it back. That's why all of these images are too blue.