Brew City Freebooter

A hobby blog about wargaming, mostly Freebooter's Fate.

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  • Day 54: Painting for Competitions

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    I’ve been working a lot on Locura lately – while the flying serpent of pestilence is unlikely to make an appearance in a game any time soon (outside of running The Hunt, but I think I need more Oncas for that . . . ), let’s talk about painting for competition rather than for games.

    Getting Started

    While Locura is far from finished right now, I think talking about the approach I’m using to paint to a higher standard is useful to help me organize my thoughts appropriately and document some of my process, though since this has been taking place over the entire month, I’m not entirely sure how well I’ll catalog it.

    The actual requirement for this painting competition is to paint with at least one very vibrant color, so with Locura, they’re getting a bright, highly-saturated paintjob that focuses on reds and greens to really fulfill that requirement. This has been a long, layered process to say the least – I initially wanted to go for a more sickly color on the skin, but opted to go for greens and yellows to better contrast with the reds.

    Light placement was the first big element I wanted to consider – because this is a model that is meant to be displayed for a while, I really need to look at where the highlights and shadows will fall. This is fairly easy with the main body – the higher up the body, the brighter the highlights. In areas where one part is above another, reduce the highlights and deepen the shadows. Above everything else, aim to keep things clean and continuous on the model, as it has to read as light, rather than sudden color changes.

    For the greenish parts of the skin: I started with a greenish brown once I landed on what it was I wanted the skin to be. Bear in mind, this was repainting after originally painting the entire model purple and red to get the colors together, followed by painting all of the skin in desaturated grays in hopes of coming up with something bruise-like and interesting. This finally led me to the greenish brown, which ended up working best with the red that I decided would be the main feature of the model. Highlights were done by mixing in and glazing increasing amounts of Murm Green for the cooler areas and Bright Yellow Green to the warmer/more exposed areas – this helped me to unify a lot of the colors and provide a skin-like depth. I’m at the next step of things where I’m working on adding some skin tones to further brighten the highlights, but that’s going to take a while and it’s nowhere near done.

    For the feathers and other red bits, I started with a dark reddish-purple, made by mixing Sanguine Shadow with Dark Purple. This is going to form the deepest shadows on the model. After that, it was a gradual process to highlight everything up using various shades of warm reds. When I say “gradual”, I mean it, too – I think I’ve mixed about 8 or 9 intermediate tones as I finally got to my brightest red, and even that’s not quite where I need to end things, as I want these reds to really jump out. As such, I’ll probably be giving it some sparing white highlights in places which will then be very, very lightly airbrushed with a translucent red ink to keep cranking that saturation up further and further.

    For the bone-y bits, I’m dedicated to using paints that are already on my pallet. To keep things unified, I started with a basecoat of the greenish brown, and then started to highlight it up with a mix of that and Brown Rose – this gives a pleasing desaturated yellow that is going to look nice.

    You may notice that I’m talking a lot about process, and that’s because it’s most of what this is – the process of slowly going back and forth between the various areas of the model to make sure everything looks good, all before moving on. The fur and feathers, for example, are going to have several more steps as I don’t think they’re anywhere near what I need them to be, but I have a plan.

    Hobby Progress

    I painted some of Locura, who is currently in sub-assembly form. Behold the terribly over-exposed photograph:

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  • Day 53: Advancing and Attacking – Causing Mayhem While Moving

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    There are several traits in Freebooter’s Fate that give characters access to special actions involving movement and combat. Rather than posting actual hobby progress, I’ve decided to write out some of these and give my thoughts on their general utility in the game.

    Ranged Attacks and Movement

    Assault Shot allows models to combine a Complex Advance with a ranged attack. Note that this can be a retreat as well as an attempt to charge in! The ability to reposition while making a ranged attack is quite powerful, but it does come with a penalty to the attack itself.

    Notable models: Pehua (Amazons), Asaltore (Imperial Armada), Capitana Katharina (Pirates/Imperial Armada), Roberta (Pirate), Senor Conejo (ELTC), Guus van Glapje (ELTC), Foxbite (Tianyu)

    Overall, Assault Shot is one of the easiest of these traits to understand, and while it’s got a penalty associated with it that can’t be overcome with aiming due to being a Complex action, it’s a good way to demonstrate how important movement is in this game.

    Double Charge is kind of a weird one – rather than being extra shots or anything of that nature, it’s a charge that lets the model take a ranged attack with the Imprecise trait when they charge in. This is a great way to soften up a particularly tough opponent.

    Notable models: Cauyacatl (Amazons), Sparatoria (Brotherhood), Pierce (Pirates), Bob (Pirates/Debonn), Lindo Guapo (ELTC), Fog Sharks (Shadows), Grieving Soul (Tianyu), Tong Hu Han (Tianyu)

    Double Charge is fantastic if you can combine it with Event cards or if you have some backup for your charging model. It also plays into the psychological aspect of the combat system – if you aim for an unexpected area with the charge, you can condition your opponent to defend it.

    Sneaky Attacks

    Sneaky attacks get their own section in part because they’re charges that don’t gain the ST bonus of charges, but they do get an A bonus. This is a key thematic aspect of these sorts of charges: rather than being more powerful, they’re more likely to cause a critical or get a hit through due to that extra A card.

    Sneak attack is like a standard charge, save for a few key differences:

    • The enemy does not need to be in LOS
    • The advance can involve any type of movement, including climbing

    This is huge for a variety of reasons, including the ability to sneak around terrain and attack from unexpected angles, as well as allowing your models to advance carefully. If you don’t need clear LOS for a charge, that means you can position yourself to avoid taking any ranged attacks.

    Notable models: Queen of Shadows (Brotherhood), Bonaccia (Brotherhood), Nartz (Goblins), Gob Morley (Cult/Goblins), Mi Yeoh (Tianyu), Maid of Horror (Shadows), Rastrillo Oscuro (Shadows), Black Nick (Pirates), Quamitzli (Amazons)

    Sneak attack is a great trait, and one that really changes how you look at terrain and charge angles.

    Shadowrun is like a Sneak Attack, only it has a lot more shadow magic involved in whatever it’s doing and contains cyberpunk elements lets the model make a pseudo-teleport between terrain pieces. It’s also exclusive to the Brotherhood and the Shadows, as it is explicitly done using some form of shadowy magic from the same dimension that the Shadows are from. Think of it like a Sneak Attack that bypasses a lot of terrain, and also requires your opponent to be in cover, which is probably why the Brotherhood doesn’t get too many good ranged attackers. Another important distinction is that the model performing a Shadowrun can make a ranged attack after the run, which is a great way to keep your opponent disoriented or maybe even force them out of cover.

    Notable models: Master Assassin (Brotherhood), Whisperer (Shadows), Wailing Woman (Shadows), Blighted Blade (Shadows), Locura (ELTC), Raven (Brotherhood)

    Shadowrun is pretty much the defining feature of (most) models that have it – the ability to jump from scenery to scenery means no one is safe if they’re standing in cover.

    Getting into melee, but Exciting!

    Onslaught is a charge but more so – rather than maxing out at double the model’s MOV, it’s up to triple their MOV. What’s even better is that the attacking model gains an extra bonus to their ST so long as they charge more than double their MOV. You’ll need to be careful in order to set up a usable charge lane, but that extended threat range means you can get some serious hits in.

    Notable models: Lieutenant Krud (Pirates), Arturo (Brotherhood), Quetcholli (Amazons), Wild Ox (ELTC/Debonn), Franjo (ELTC), Chevalier Confiture (Debonn), Animalistic Force (Shadows)

    The biggest challenge is making sure that you can actually support a model that has done an Onslaught charge. Without support, you can easily end up in an unfavorable position or an overwhelmed attacker. One other utility of the move is using it to move further while carrying a Scenario item.

    Run-by-Attack, drawn from the Ironball action, allows a model to briefly enter melee to attack before disengaging with no chance of the opponent keeping them in place. Why, you may ask, would this be useful? Well, for one, you can set up a waiting model near that enemy to intercept any attempts to charge the model. You can also use this move to block off support lanes, move out of charge LOS . . . there’s a lot of options.

    Notable models: Dragonseeker (Tianyu), Will-o’-Wisp (Shadows), Captain Ronbert (Shadows), Flora Corridora (Shadows), Loranus (Shadows), La Crobate (Debonn), La Serpiente (ELTC/Brotherhood), Mapachin (Amazons), Momma Raya (Goblins), Velocia (Brotherhood), Corrido (Brotherhood), Fianccato (Brotherhood), Little Pete (Pirates)

    It’s a fantastic trait to use when you’re switching between accomplishing scenario objectives and harassing opponents. Rather than being a decisive strike or anything like that, it’s a good tool to get some hits in or quickly provide some support.

    Juggernaut is probably the least common of these traits, in part because it technically requires the model using it to be larger than any opponents that you might be attacking. It’s also one of the few traits that allows you to attack multiple opponents in the course of a single activation.

    Notable models: Tibbo Carrera (Goblins), Atoyatl (Amazons), Franjo (ELTC)

    If you’re using a Juggernaut piece, the goal is to get as many opponents in a straight line as possible so you can rampage through. Debonn especially needs to be aware of this trait, as Rank-and-File models will not like getting hit by a model using this trait.

    Hobby Progress

    Absolutely none. Taking a break is helpful sometimes, you know?

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  • Day 52: Demo Scenarios

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    Given that this blog is ostensibly about building community, I think it’s time to talk about the scenarios I think are good for running entertaining demos. The Scenario Finder is my index of scenarios that lists all of the extra stuff you’ll need to actually play them, as well as the recommended doubloon costs for crews, but here, we’ll be directly talking about scenarios that are good for teaching the rules and how the game plays.

    What Demo Scenarios Need to Do

    Teaching a tabletop game requires a change in attitude from the typical competitive game experience. You need to approach the game from the perspective of someone who has no idea how anything works, may not have experience with other games, and who might be hesitant to ask questions if they feel like they’re competing with the person running the demo. While people can thrive under that pressure – I know I have a friend who approaches games with the mindset of ‘beating the person teaching me is a step of learning’ – others can feel excluded, especially if you’re intentionally trying to play down to a beginner’s level.

    Since we’re balancing a lot of factors in a demonstration/learning game, let’s talk about what we need to teach during the game:

    • Basic mechanics: All game mechanics such as initiative, combat, and movement all need to be explained clearly for everyone learning the game. Think about all of the decisions you make when playing – which models do you activate first, where should you move your models, and how do you deal with your opponent’s moves? Explain them clearly without going into more complicated reasons – explaining how you’re moving a model to be ready to defend a key piece of terrain or why you’re holding off reloading a weapon to go for an objective.
    • Scenario priority: Emphasizing how the scenario’s objectives are the most important part of the game, rather than simply fighting the opponent, is key in a demo of this game. Making sure that objectives are clear, countable, and intuitive for people learning the game – physical markers are great for this.
    • The art of attacking: Freebooter’s Fate has a really unique combat system – emphasizing how choosing your attack cards carefully leads to greater rewards than just randomly selecting them. Defense, similarly, should be a combination of your opponent’s patterns as well as what locations you might need to defend carefully.
    • Pirate silliness: I’m a huge fan of showing off the entertaining aspects of any game, and stressing that Freebooter’s Fate is not a serious game is important to that. Encourage players to try climbing buildings, leap off terrain for attacks, and use ridiculous pirate accents to really get in the spirit of things.

    I have a few scenarios that I think really help fit the bill here, and let’s talk through them right now.

    The Hunt for Rats in October

    This is an ideal scenario for teaching the game – players get to balance attacking each other with attempting to catch rats, it’s appropriately silly for the setting, and it can support up to 4 players.

    The explanation is simple: catch rats! If a character is in base-to-base contact with a rat, they use a simple action to attempt to catch it. A fate card determines the success or failure of the attempt, along with how far the rat runs should the action fail. For every rat caught, the player gets to put a rat token on their character’s card – it’s a tangible reminder of completing the objective, plus it gives players rats, which are fantastic creatures.

    The terrain set-up is also fairly loose – you can go with a traditional port city or a jungle for this. While you’re going to need a lot of rat tokens, 21 rats is not a huge stretch of tokens to make.

    Attack of the Zombie Octopus

    This is another classic scenario for Freebooter’s Fate, similarly to the above. It’s a different kind of cooperative scenario, as well – defense against an enemy force is always interesting for new players and it lets the demo-giver focus on controlling the enemies.

    The biggest issue for someone like me, who wants to have all the models possible, is getting enough octopuses. You can end up needing a lot of them, especially if it’s a larger game.

    Additional Useful Demo Tools

    I always make sure to have the following for everyone playing:

    • Quick Reference Sheets: Letting players know what actions they can take, how game phases are structured, and what information they might need at a glance is important. I also try to have individualized sheets for each of the demo crews.
    • Rulers: Having spare measuring devices is always helpful for players.
    • Books: Having the books on hand gives players who might be interested in learning more about the game a chance to see how many different options there are in the game.

    I should work on getting my quick reference sheets prettified and uploaded to this website at some point.

    Hobby Progress

    Other than the blog post, not really any progress today. Taking time off once in a while can be really nice, I think, and getting my brain in order is certainly quite helpful.

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  • Day 51: Dodo Sculpt, But Physical

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    You know how I’ve sculpted a dodo digitally? Well, because I’m a physical sculptor at heart, I wanted to work on making at least one physical dodo out of greenstuff so that I can have a better idea of what I’m trying to make in the digital realm. Also, I like sculpting weird lil’ dudes, and nothing beats a dodo for being a weird lil’ dude.

    Additionally, I think sculpting information should be hosted in places like this, because I am the sort of person who learns through reading and images that lead into practice. Video content is all well and good – especially once you know how you’re doing stuff – but this sort of step-by-step is important to keep alive in the spirit of Old Internet, a topic on which my attitude is clear.

    Sculpting Supplies

    As this information always comes up when I talk about sculpting and teach classes, I’m just going to cover the basics here. What you’ll need for sculpting are five things:

    • Armature material: In this case, 24 gauge brass wire.
    • Armature holder: I’m using a cork with greenstuff coating it to create a flat surface to sculpt on.
    • Sculpting material: I’m using greenstuff. It’s stored with the parts separated, in my freezer, and taken out only when I need more.
    • Sculpting tools: My primary tool is a Tiranti SG, which is relatively close to the classic Wax #5 used by the old guard of GW sculptors. I also use some silicone clay shapers in size 0 (flat chisel, cup chisel, and taper) and a blunted sewing needle held in an old hobby knife handle.
    • Tool lubricant: I use vaseline, cleaned off with isopropyl once the putty has set up.

    These are absolutely the basics, and you can sub a lot of these for whatever you’re comfortable with.

    In terms of greenstuff: unfortunately, there’s no current manufacturer and old stock is very hit-or-miss in terms of quality. If you have any, store the parts separately in a freezer and try to trim off any skin that’s formed. I like to keep it in wax paper rather than the plastic that it comes in, as well. Sylmasta is currently working on their own version. I cannot recommend getting anything from Green Stuff World – they’re a business I refuse to support due to exploitation of artists, patent trolling, and other moral/ethical reasons, plus their in-house GS is not good and doesn’t behave like the real stuff.

    If you’d like to extend the life of greenstuff, there’s a few options you can go to: mixing in about 10-15% FIMO professional gives you a much more well-behaved putty that is less sticky, feathers nicely, and sets up well under a heat lamp or putty oven once you’re done sculpting. You can also mix it up to 50/50 with plasticine (the sort of non-curing vegetable oil based clay) and it will still cure firmly enough to be usable and paintable. That mixture, which I learned from Scibor thanks to some of his posts, also has the advantage of removing the need for tool lubrication, but it’s a little more fragile than using straight GS. Yes, it does cure just fine, and you can cast models and paint them – I’ve got sculpts that are 4+ years old and painted that are totally fine.

    If you want to post-process your sculpting material, then mix in Aves Apoxie Sculpt – it machines beautifully and takes on the best properties of both GS and Apoxie Sculpt. I tend towards a 60/40 GS/AS mixture for most of my work. Once it cures, you can file it, scrape it, and do all kinds of cool stuff to it!

    Otherwise, when mixing greenstuff, you’ll want more yellow than blue. I tend to aim for about a 3:2 ratio of yellow to blue, and then mix in whatever additional additives I’d like to use. Aves’ is my primary mixer when just doing general sculpting, but this was all done in pure GS for reference.

    Armature, Masses, and Shapes

    Now that I’ve covered materials and all the boring stuff, let’s talk sculpting a dodo! What you’ll want to start off with is a wire armature: I take about a 5″ length of 22 gauge brass wire, bend it in half, and then twist it until I’ve got a decent size for the neck and body. Once that’s done, I bend out the hips, then form the legs. Once that’s done and posed a bit, I trim off the excess brass wire (I only want a bit of wire to go into the cork) and attach it to my armature holder.

    Yes, it looks like a walking penis at the moment. We’ll eventually fix that.

    Looking at the armature, you can see I’ve added some movement to the skeleton – it’s leaning slightly to one side, the legs are offset from one another, and the posture is set like it’s charging. This is intentional – adding a little bit of motion to your sculpts can make them look a lot better, as well as help when you’re doing a bunch of them.

    After checking my poses, I start with the feet and initial leg putty. For the feet, I looked up what a dodo foot looks like, and exaggerated the size a bit so that it was actually readable at the scale. For this particular dodo, it’s got some awfully big stompers because it’s a Leonoran Giant Dodo, one of nature’s most ridiculous creations. In all cases, I start working general to specific – first adding the full mass of putty and getting the rough mass, then trimming and shaping to find the general shapes, and finally working to refine the details so that they’re readable. As the feet are going to be visible on the final model, I add some details that aren’t seen elsewhere on the initial sculpt – in this case, the little ridges on the skin and the slightly-pointy talons/bird nails (unclear on the exact term when it comes to these particular birds) at the ends of the toes. You can see that one foot is lifted off the ground and curling into itself – this helps with the sense of motion and action that I’m aiming for.

    A quick note – because this isn’t intended to be cast, I’m not paying too much attention to undercuts or other elements, but if you end up wanting physical casts, keep mold geometry in mind! These wouldn’t cast cleanly without some parting, at least in my estimation as a terrible mold-maker who leaves that to actual professionals who know what they’re doing. It’s also here where I give my advice to new sculptors that is simultaneously incredible helpful to keep in mind while sculpting and which sounds like I was really stoned when saying it: “Everything is just made up of shapes.”

    Insightful, ain’t I? Look at the legs and count the cylinders Where the joints are, you can mentally insert little spheres. At the hips, imagine a little rectangular box that the hip joints connect to. If you follow the shapes, they’ll never lead you astray.

    Okay, now that I’ve gotten that little bit of advice out of the way, it’s time to start bulking out our dodo.

    As you might be able to tell, I’ve started by making rough shapes on top of my armature. All I’m doing at this stage is making an understructure that I can sculpt details on top of – because feathers require a lot of detail and thoughtful placement, it’s best to sculpt them over a supported surface, rather than over sliding, uncured putty. The feet, as mentioned, will be visible on the final sculpt, so those got the most detail, and will likely get a bit more trimming as I work on cleaning up the sculpt further. Right now, I’m just trying to get the dodo silhouette to look correct – detail is added after your shapes and posing are correct, and if they aren’t, the sculpt itself will look wrong.

    Remember, it’s a process! I sculpt daily (along with painting every day) because I’m kind of a crazy lady who likes doing that, but if you’re worried about anything, always remember you can easily trim back putty. Heck, if you’re working in layers like I recommend, you can just pop a cured layer off and start over. Nothing is permanent unless you’re carving a stone, in which case I’d wonder why you’re doing things that way.

    Now sculpt the rest of the fucking dodo

    I will admit that I have deceived you all in this post, for I haven’t actually finished the above dodo. Additionally, it’s not the first one I’ve sculpted, as I only thought to take WIP shots once I was finished with the first one!

    See how this one has slightly smaller feet, feathers, and actually readable details on it, rather than general shapes? This was Dodo 1, my first attempt at a quick dodo sculpt. Quite the polite little fellow, and the very font of bamboozlement that brought this post to you.

    In all seriousness, this just shows how adding some basic details on top of your understructure can drastically transform a simple set of shapes into something much more recognizable. This lil’ guy was mostly to keep my hands busy while listening to some stuff, so he’s got a lot of rustic charm, but I’m a big fan. So, be like me and sculpt the rest of the dodo.

    Hobby Progress

    Got some painting done today, which is great because I didn’t think I’d really have time to get any done. Today’s painting was a little more detail oriented than usual, and involved a lot more highlighting than I would do typically for a model, so hopefully it ends up looking good.

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  • Day 50: Drunken Ivar

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    Good lord, I’ve been posting every day and working on this project for fifty days. I’m not used to being this good at consistency – or good at it at all – so it’s pretty fantastic that I’ve been able to keep up my hobby motivation and progress. I still have new things to say each day, as well, so that’s definitely a plus.

    Since it’s been this long, I think I’m doing this because I’ve seen people do daily challenges for updates or projects, but in video format, and I always found the stream-of-consciousness nature of that sort of video to be ill-suited to how I want to present information. While getting into the philosophy of internet creation is probably a bit out of scope today, let it be known that I am a textual learner and I think having searchable, unwalled information available to others is more important than anything else in this era – this blog is indexed and should be searchable, so hopefully it’ll reach someone looking for hobby weirdness.

    Enough messing about – let’s talk about today’s painting project!

    Drunken Ivar

    Today’s painting project was the natural companion to Piedro the Publican: Drunken Ivar, a Specialist for the Pirate faction. I believe he’s one of the first minis that I’ve painted for this blog that was sculpted by someone other than Werner Klocke – the original model was sculpted digitally by Luk K, and you can see more of their work at their ArtStation page. There’s some models for Freebooter Miniatures, and I can say that they look pretty good and fit well into the range. I normally prefer physical sculpts to digital, but the design decisions here really match up well with the aesthetics used by the rest of the Freebooter crew, so perhaps I’m softening a bit.

    I started off by painting all of the skin on him, as it’s the ‘lowest’ layer of details that are on the model. Starting with a warm brown, I then moved into a beige flesh tone followed by a brownish-red, until finally I mixed in a bit of tan skin to get the highest points. These were all glazed together to properly integrate all of the skin together while preserving all of the deepest shadows. The face got a bit of extra highlighting in places, as well as more glazes to ensure everything was as smooth as possible.

    Next up was the shirt: much like how I worked on canvas and other white cloth earlier, I started with a light tan undercoat on everything. This took a couple of coats to really be opaque over the black primer, but I was aiming for smoothness above all else, so I took my time with it. After that had fully dried, I then started to highlight with Khaki, leaving only the deepest shadows as the original tan. Once I’d gotten the main midtone set, I smoothed the transitions with some glazes of khaki up so that the shadows integrate well. Finally, I grabbed an ivory paint and – mixing in a hint of khaki for the first highlight – did a few highlights, glazing in-between to keep everything well-integrated. I then mixed my original tan with a darker warm brown to glaze into the shadows, to help give it a worn-but-still-white shirt appearance.

    The pants were a bit of an experiment for me – I wanted to (mostly) replicate the studio paintjob, so I started with a basecoat of brownish-green, and then got my actual midtone by mixing a bit of green into that. Highlighting was just successive layers using an increasing mix of yellow ochre, and it ended up working really nicely – these are clearly green pants, but it reads as cloth and isn’t so vibrant that it doesn’t work with the rest of the miniature. The under-belt cloth (I’m sure there’s a word for this, but I just don’t know it) was pretty simple as well – just a dark bluish-gray followed by a highlight using a bit of warm gray mixed in.

    The bottle started using the same brownish-green color as a basecoat, but rather than going towards the muted yellows of ochre, I immediately went towards a saturated green color for highlights. My highlighting went up through bright yellowish green into a cold yellow for the top highlights, and then black-green was glazed in to help add some depth to the bottle itself. Glass is tricky to make look like glass, so I aimed to use some of the techniques I use for NMM to help the edge brightness and sharpness. Overall, a well-painted bottle that actually looks like I intended it to, which is a great success in my eyes. Highlight placement could probably be messed with a bit more, but that’s just a bit of work.

    Wood was my usual recipe, as were the leather and bandages. All of them started with a mix of dark umber and warm brown, with the leather getting highlighted with successive mixes of yellow ochre, the wood getting pale sand highlights, and the bandages getting painted similar to the shirt fabric, but omitting the final highlight to give them a bit of a dirtier impression. The wood also got a thin wash of sepia darkening and integrating the wood together, as this mug can’t be too clean if Ivar’s been around for any period of time.

    His hair was the next interesting bit to work on – blonde hair is always fun to paint and it keeps the light appearance across the entire miniature. I started out with a coat of warm brown, followed by some scratchy highlights larger than the planned final highlights using yellow ochre. After that, I did a couple more highlights using yellow ochre mixed with pale sand and then pure pale sand, follow by glazes to integrate everything together and enhance the ‘hair strand’ effects. The most important glaze was definitely a lower-targeted mix of warm brown and yellow ochre – it helped to really manage where the darkest shadows would be while integrating all of the hair together nicely.

    The NMM on the mug was done using the same method I used yesterday for Piedro’s anchor, albeit a bit more focused to show that it would probably be much shinier. I think this simple 3-color NMM is a really good way to do iron and very bright steel, so I’m definitely going to be leaning on my Payne’s Grey a lot more going forward. I also have some Golden High-Flow white that might work well for glazing in those final highlights on the NMM, so I’ll need to experiment a bit more before coming to a conclusion.

    This was a remarkably fast paintjob, too – the clear details made it quite easy to get Ivar painted, and he didn’t have too many greeblies on him that required precision paintwork. A fantastic miniature with some fun materials to play with the painting process, and a really welcome addition to the rest of my crew.

    What do you do with a Drunken Ivar?

    Drunken Ivar is a Specialist for the Pirates, and at first glance, he’s a bit underwhelming. A base MOV of 8, no ranged weaponry, and a price tag of 50 doubloons puts him in the same category as some Deckhands, but it’s his traits which really make him interesting. While he’s a Loner and doesn’t benefit from being in his Leader’s Authority, his rather . . . unique set of morale values makes him not really need to deal with that anyways. Rather than the usual steady progression, his morale changes with every single LP he loses, ranging from 2 at its worst (after taking 7 damage) to 9 at its best (when he’s taken 6 damage).

    While those morale values would just be a curiosity otherwise, it’s his signature trait that makes them really interesting: Sloshed replaces the right-hand ST of his weapons with his current morale value, as he is so staggeringly intoxicated that his blows can be weaker than a goblin with a broken arm or hit harder than an Imperial arquebus. In addition, his ST cannot be modified further if it’s using his current morale – I think you can see why Loner is so important to have on him! Now, due to a bit of lexical ambiguity, it’s unclear if modification to this morale also changes his strength or is explicitly disallowed, but given how Piedro the Publican’s Incentive trait works, it’s at least thematic! My reading of what they meant says ‘no, Incentive can’t buff morale for the purposes of Sloshed’, but that’s why rules text is complicated at times.

    He’s also got a couple of other useful traits to talk about. Again, as he is incredibly drunk at all times, he’s got the Unfeeling trait to keep him from being taken out-of-action through critical hits. In addition to that, he’s got a single Fate Point, which lets him force a redo on a hit determination or a fate card draw on an action he’s directly involved in. Again, that staggering drunkard luck can sometimes work out in his favor.

    With all that, he’s a remarkably cheap Specialist who – while far from consistent – can help with some surprising plays during a game.

    Hobby Progress

    Painting pirates, that’s what I’m doing! Been spending a good amount of time putting pigment to pirate minis, and the Pirate crew is coming together quite quickly. I’ve got another Deckhand and the Leader remaining, and then it’s time to work on Debonn and possibly a second Pirate crew focused more on shooting than this current hard-drinking crowd.

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  • Day 49: Piedro the Publican

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    More work on pirates these days, as I suspect the theme will become clearer as you see more of the Specialists that I’m planning on using for them. Pirates are varied enough that you can make most crew ideas work if you’re willing to play around with your lists, and as with all less-than-serious games, aiming for thematic crews is a lot more fun than just optimizing your lists.

    Also, I really need to apologize for how washed-out these photos are. Some of the paints used are quite glossy, so what looks fine in person is absolutely a nightmare to actually capture with a camera. I’ll have to work more on softening things up when I have the time.

    Piedro the Publican

    Piedro the Publican is a Specialist for the Pirates, and an absolute joy to paint for this. Thanks to the positioning of his head and arm, I’ve had to work on him in sub-assemblies: his right wrist/anchor is one such assembly, as is his head. If you recall the issues with getting the Queen of Shadows assembled after working that way, I am pleased to report that he went together much more easily thanks to having a much simpler attachment point.

    His skin is the first major part that I worked on, as it’s such a prominent part of the model. I began by basecoating everything in a dark warm brown, followed by progressive layers of various fleshtones until I land at Monument’s Warm Flesh, thinned down into glazes, as my final highlight. There’s the usual back-and-forth to make sure that I’ve got some definition on the muscles and that it looks like he has skin, rather than isolated little islands of brightness, but that’s just the aperitif for the main reason anyone is interested in this – his tattoos!

    Image copyright Werner Klocke/Freebooter Miniatures

    Per the recommendations of other, much more skilled painters, I mixed up a ‘tattoo ink’ paint out of VMC’s Basic Skin Tone and Golden High-Flow Payne’s Grey. This combination gives that nice old-school tattoo appearance – not quite black, not quite blue or green, but faded into the skin. Then, using a very fine brush and a lot of well-braced paintwork, I started to draw designs on him. On his right shoulder, I took the designs directly from his concept art, but as I started drawing the coiling designs around his arm, I decided that it could easily be a rope. What better to attach to a rope than a gigantic anchor across his back, then? Using the physical model’s anchor as my guide, I sketched it – along with several other elements of more-or-less nautical theming – onto his back and started working back and forth with my skin tones. I think he came together fairly well after all of this, and this recipe is fantastic for many of the pirates I’ll be painting down the line.

    Now that the important bits were done, it was time to start on his clothing. His apron – the biggest piece – started with a coat of Tindalos Red mixed with a bit of Payne’s Gray to reduce the redness and make a more neutral brown. I then started highlighting in a very scratchy fashion, using orange-browns, ochres, Iraqi sand, and Pale Sand for the final bits to create a well-worn, dirty looking apron for him.

    The pants started off with a coat of a dark greenish-brown and then followed the same procedure, albeit with a few stopovers in actual green colors to give them a little bit more saturation and show that he’s wearing a pair of well-worn pants. It creates a nice, dingy duck cloth effect that I remember from my youth camping in ancient tents, so that’s definitely a plus. Piedro, having lost his bar, is now more interested in vengeance than fashion, so he’s going to be wearing these until the fools who tossed a rum barrel into the fireplace are taken care of.

    Speaking of rum barrels, he’s still got one on him, so that’ll need some painting. Rum is traditionally aged in oak barrels, but given that this is a fantasy universe, I’ve opted to start with a coat of mahogany paint. Highlights are added using mixes of Iraqi Sand and Pale Sand to my base tone, and the barrel is ‘grayed’ to convey age using a very light drybrush of warm gray, followed by some strategic glazes of sepia ink – this has to look like a really impressive barrel, after all!

    Next up is his ‘other’ most notable feature – the former sign of his beloved pub, the Golden Anchor. While the actual gold paint is gone now, I’ve added in a few spots here and there to evoke that memory using my usual old NMM gold recipe. The majority of it is good ol’ iron, however, and this was done by first painting everything in a deep matte black, followed by a first overall highlight/tone using the same high-flow Payne’s Grey that I used on his tattoos. Once that had dried, I started mixing in progressive amounts of blue-white and created broad highlights, making sure to diffuse them so that the anchor didn’t look too shiny when I was finished with it. This involves a lot of fuzzing via glazes, because the sharper the highlight, the shinier the object appears to be.

    The tattoos especially were a great way to enjoy some freestyle painting – I don’t do much freehand, but it’s incredibly fun to do and I suspect some pirates are going to have a few tattoos in the future.

    Piedro Brings the Rum

    Piedro the Publican is a fantastic melee piece for the Pirates – with high T and V values, he’s able to soak up a hit or two as he tries to get into melee and has more than your average light V values to ensure he won’t panic as he’s approaching. While toughness is one thing, actually attacking opponents is another. He doesn’t get any extra A without a friend, but he practically doesn’t need it: using the Golden Anchor, he’s got a ST of 9 when he can connect. Chain Weapon makes cover useless against his strikes, and Armour-piercing ensures that if he hits, opponents can only resist using their lower T value. Finally, he’s got access to Whirlwind Attack – if you can get him into a multi-participant melee, then prepare to watch several enemies fall over.

    What’s even more important than his combat abilities, however, is his Incentive trait. He grants a morale bonus to everyone within 20 cm of him – that’s huge, and it will (possibly) synergize well with some upcoming traits that we’ll be talking about later. Anything that helps morale is fantastic, and his giant cask of rum is a great way to keep your pirates in the fight for longer.

    Hobby Progress

    I’ve been doing a bit more random sculpting and working on my competition piece in addition to painting some pirates, which has been a great way to keep my motivation up. I’m hoping to get some tokens done next, which will be quite helpful as I prepare for my preferred demo scenarios.

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  • Day 48: Cuchillo and Pirate Deckhands

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    Now that I’m done with the first half of my crews, it’s time to get started on a perennial fan favorite: pirates! They’re one of the biggest factions available because pirates are the heart and soul of the game, plus they have so many diverse options for design thanks to the breadth of historical inspiration available for them. This also means that actually coming up with an representative list for the Pirates is nigh-on impossible – how do you build a sampler list for a faction that’s defined by having a bunch of all-rounder models?

    Either way, rather than thinking this through further, I made several lists around specific themes before settling on a couple of options. After flipping a coin, my final choice for the first pass through was the list of Pirates that you’re going to see over the course of this blog. As with most lists, I’m going to start by painting a Deckhand to get warmed up for this painting as these pirates are definitely not the elegant assassins or otherworldly monsters that I’ve been working on lately.

    Cuchillo

    While this Cuchillo (trans. knife, from Spanish) model is definitely showing its age compared to some of the more modern sculpts, but that works to my advantage in trying for an old-school painting style. When you have a sculpt in this style, using some of the older painting techniques like dark-lining and highly-saturated colors can help an old sculpt shine quite a bit.

    There’s not a ton of colors going on here, so let’s start with the skin. I started with a dark reddish paint, then highlighted up to VMC’s Basic Skin Tone with progressive mixes. I then mixed in some ivory to brighten up the highlights even more, before glazing over everything with an orange-y skin tone to help unify the skin. There’s a lot of back and forth that goes on here – I played with the highlights and shadows quite a bit, and while it’s a little washed out in the photos, it looks pretty decent in person.

    The shirt and apron was painted with a light tan base layer, followed by successive layers of khaki and ivory. The layers were done with some stippling and lines, to help make it look slightly rougher and more textured – you can see this a little more on the apron, as the shirt then had the next step of freehand painting stripes across it. These were done using a neutral green, highlighted with light green and then outlined with black-green to help them stand out. There are some serious rough areas – I think I’m going to try and fix some of the stripes because they’re pretty uneven.

    The pants were started with a coat of S75’s Red Leather, and all of the leather bits were then painted with a warm brown. I then started successively highlighting both of them using a warm yellow-brown, followed by German Camo Medium Brown from Vallejo Model Color. That same GCMB was used to paint the hat and the handles of the knives, and then I mixed in ivory to all of these colors for a final highlight. The leather boots and hat got a glaze of the GCMB to bring everything together and help lighten it all, which came together pretty nicely.

    The sword and knives’ NMM was done using my usual recipe, only painted with a lot more glazes to get a smoother result. For those who need a refresher, here’s the recipe:

    • Basecoat P3 Coal Black
    • Highlight Anthracite Gray
    • Highlight Medium Sea Gray
    • Highlight Wolf Gray
    • Highlight Ivory
    • Highlight Bluish-White
    • Highlight White

    I smoothed the transitions using glazes, playing around with the positioning of the lights and ensuring that the gradients are fairly smooth and reflective-y. Practice definitely has me painting these metals faster – I’m at the point where some of the elements are almost automatic these days, which is incredible to me because it’s one of the first times I’ve felt that my physical technique is sufficient for me to start really exploring the artistic intention for this.

    Cuchillo on the deck!

    Cuchillos are one of the cheapest Deckhands for the Pirates, and you really get what you pay for here. They’re useful backup for some of your more specialized pieces, but probably won’t be single-handedly winning you a game. Statwise, fairly average for human Deckhands, but they come with one big advantage – they have a ranged attack thanks to their throwing knives, which do not have the Reloading trait. As such, they make a great harassment piece if you don’t mind tossing a few knives randomly at your opponents.

    Hobby Progress

    I’m working on several more pirate models now as I slowly get this next crew ready. While I may not have as much time to work on painting this week – and will be working on painting Locura for a competition – I should see some steady progress on at least one Pirate crew.

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  • Day 47: The Brotherhood’s Equal-Opportunity Assassins

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    It’s time for another demo crew breakdown, and today’s a pretty special one – that’s right, we’re talking about the Brotherhood and their gender-neutral policies on murder to preserve the Pelagio bloodline. Being a proper secret society, they’re all about the masks, sneaky knives in the dark, and poison, which makes them incredibly fun to paint and play.

    The Crew and Mechanics

    This is a fairly straightforward crew in terms of build – no extra equipment, though their ability to have multiple Specialists for a single Deckhand can be a bit confusing at first.

    • Leader: Queen of Shadows
    • Deckhand: Coscritti
    • Specialist: Adombra
    • Specialist: Bonaccia

    Playing the Brotherhood

    This demo crew is fairly straightforward to explain, but they require a lot of finesse to use well. They don’t have the ability to use orders, and most models in the list can’t benefit from the Queen of Shadows’ authority thanks to Loner. They’re also fairly limited in numbers: their pieces are scalpels, not hammers, and putting them in the wrong place means that they’ll quickly be taken out of action. On the other hand, when they’re in the right place or manage to get a sneak attack in at the right time, they can be devastatingly effective.

    In terms of close-combat, the Queen of Shadows and Bonaccia are the main attackers. Sneak Attack as a trait is incredible in terms of opening up attack vectors for your crew: it’s similar to a charge, but doesn’t require LOS or a straight line to the target and grants +1A if you successfully reach close combat. The ability to attack from a safe location helps dictate their play style – you want to aim for decisive strikes or attacks against lone opponents. Given that they can easily hit the cap of attack location cards, these tend to be fairly successful strikes and – since they both have poison – it’s almost guaranteed damage so long as they can hit successfully.

    Adombra is there to help ensure that your opponents go where you need them to be – similar to many other ranged attackers in these demo crews, she’s got Hide to park herself in cover for survivability, and once she’s there, can keep up a steady stream of bolts. One option to consider for her is using the Wait complex action when she’s in place: she can get a shot in when someone crosses her LOS.

    The Coscritti is there because this crew needed a cheap Deckhand to hire the exciting members of the crew, but she’s not just for show – having an extra body in melee is nice and her activation can help stall for time so that you can get your other, more dangerous models safely into melee. She can also grab an objective if you spot one that’s needed, but given that she’s slower than the rest of the crew, that’s going to be a really situational thing.

    Hobby Progress

    I’m gearing up for the next few crews to work on, as well as getting some sculpting taken care of. I’ve landed on running “The Hunt for Rats in October” as my demo scenario: it’s thematic, requires the players to balance between completing objectives and stopping their opponents, and can host up to 4 players.

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  • Day 46: The Queen of Shadows

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    Whew, I am still exhausted from yesterday, but that’s to be expected. Thankfully, I have had a bit of time for hobby work today, so I took to the painting desk to get another crew ready for gaming. I’d been working on her on and off over the past few weeks as I tried some new stuff while painting, so without further ado, here’s the Queen of Shadows.

    Queen of Shadows

    This was an especially complicated model because she needed to be painted in sub-assemblies: the sides of the dress (which could probably be a bit better-seated in my final assembly) were painted separately and glued into place, which turned out to be an exercise in frustration as my dry-fitting was a little less than accurate, especially considering the added problems caused by paint changing some very tight tolerances into non-functional ones. Still, it was necessary so that I could get all of her painted to the best of my abilities, and I think she turned out quite well.

    Let’s start with the main focus – her dress. This purple/lavender number started with a deep shadow red, made by mixing black-red with a dark purple. Then, it was a lot of highlighting and glazing through various purples, lilacs, and violets, finally landing on my top highlight of Vallejo Mecha Color purple, which is a surprisingly light lavender sort of color. I also did a lot of intermediate glazes with reds and magentas to really make the dress feel fancy by giving it a nice depth of color. The interior, meanwhile, was painted up to a shadowy red color, both to provide clear separation between interior and exterior and to add a sort of liner to it, adding to the expensive feel of it.

    Next up was her skin – this was the same pale skin recipe that I used back with Adombra, but with a few more intermediate glazes thanks to having much more skin showing. I wanted to go for a powdered skin appearance, so the final layers ended up being Cadmium Skin and Elfin Flesh by Vallejo – they give a nice, pale skin tone that looks like it’s been coated in high-class powder cosmetics without overwhelming the warmer tones of the rest of her skin. As always, tons of glazing helps to keep things smooth (mostly).

    The gold accents were – surprisingly – done using a new NMM gold recipe! That’s right, I can learn! I wanted a more antique-looking gold for her, as the Brotherhood is decidedly old-money and doesn’t want to be flashy, but rather show off a bit of understated elegance, so while I started with the usual dark warm brown, I used a much more desaturated orange-brown for the initial highlights and tones. This then proceeded up through a warm yellow to a bright pale yellow, with smoothing in-between and some purple glazes in the shadows to help tie it together with the rest of the dress and to add some richness and depth to the gold. This came out really well, and I’ll probably be using it quite a bit more as I work on more models with these sorts of golden accents.

    Her legs were the next tricky part – I’ve always wanted to try painting proper stockings with a translucent appearance, but I’ve never had the courage, so with the belief that the giant poofy dress would hide any egregious painting sins, I set to work on her legs. First step was establishing a base tone – Sunny Skin Tone with a hint of Cadmium Skin was what I ended up landing on. After that, I needed a shadow tone, and VMC’s Rubber Black ended up being the winner. I also added some Dark Green-Gray as an additional intermediate step. I started by painting the entire leg in the skin tone, then blocking in shadows using the darkest tone with Rubber Black. After that, it was a process of working up midtones using mixes of the paints I mentioned earlier, smoothing down from the areas where the skin was most closely pressed into the stockings and thus would show through. I’m explaining it a bit poorly, but thankfully, you can see where things ended up, so I hope my explanation makes a bit of sense.

    Her wig was another fun bit of painting – I started with a darker purple to establish a shadow tone before using that same Vallejo Mecha Purple to get to what I wanted my general undertone and shadows to be. After that, it was just a lot of thin lines of ivory, blue-white, and white to help it look like hair, followed by smoothing with some glazes.

    There are areas I’d like to put a little more time into – for example, the gem on her throat and the NMM effects I ended up working on her fans – but this was already a pretty extensive project and since I’d like to keep practicing painting, it’s a little simpler for me to just get it to “pretty good” and let myself take a break. I can always go back to work on her further, after all.

    Why the Queen of Shadows For Demos?

    The Queen of Shadows is one of the most straightforward Leaders that the Brotherhood have – she’s entirely about melee combat, and is terrifyingly deadly in it. Much like Bonaccia, she’s got the classic Blade Mistress/Agile/Sneak Attack set of traits to help her get into close combat, but unlike the Specialist, she’s got Dodge (Ranged Attack) rather than Lightning Reflexes, so she’ll only be getting a defensive bonus when being attacked at range. Still, that just means that she’ll need to get into combat with a Sneak Attack and finish things as quickly as possible, which is pretty easy considering her high MOV attribute.

    Her Attractive trait is the real bonus for her – while most Brotherhood models can’t take orders, they can benefit from the ST bonus she provides to friendly models within 20 cm. She’s a front-line Leader, designed for coordinated strikes against unwary opponents, but with her lack of ranged combat abilities, there’s not much else she can do.

    Brotherhood is full of complicated Leader models – explaining Shadowrun, for example, is always a bit of a headache the first time through, whereas Sneak Attack is just “Charge, but doesn’t need a straight line” – and she’s pretty easy to explain in that respect. She’s also great because she’s part of my all-ladies Brotherhood crew, which is something I’m really happy to have because it’s proof that women can be deadly assassins as well, some of whom even wear practical footwear at times.

    Hobby Progress

    Brotherhood demo crew is done! That puts me at a whopping 5 demo crews ready, and also signals the start of Phase 2: finishing the next 5 demo crews. I’m probably going to take a bit of a break and spend time making game aids/terrain for a bit thanks to hitting this milestone, but it’s a great way to know that I’m making progress and will be able to run demos sooner rather than later.

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  • Day 45: Sculpting Casimeere Flynn

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    It’s another day, and while I’ve been absurdly busy today running a tournament, I still think I want to put up a post. While this one isn’t exactly related to any upcoming crews or anything of that nature, it is a fun topic – sculpting miniatures!

    Casimeere Flynn: A Primer

    Casimeere Flynn, introduced back in the Deep Jungle expansion, is a fantastic concept for a pirate. His introductory fiction has him being catcalled by a number of women pirates as he’s working, serving both to introduce him as similar to his namesake (the legendary Errol Flynn, of the classic expression ‘in like Flynn’ and – according to Wikipedia – renowned for his womanizing reputation without any undertones of deceit or coercion) and to reverse the common objectification of women in fantasy settings. Far from being a random piece of eye candy for the more feminine members of the crew, he’s regarded as an upstanding fellow and a perfect gentleman, which stands in stark contrast to some of the cruder comments delivered by Big Jenny during that section. He’s a classic movie swashbuckler, and in a game so heavily influenced by that era of Hollywood, a great character to have.

    Unfortunately, his miniature has been discontinued for a few years now, so actually getting a copy would be quite difficult for me. Thankfully, the book provides us with the next best thing: concept art!

    This image copyright Werner Klocke/Freebooter Miniatures. Any reproduction here is solely for illustrative purposes.

    This is fantastic concept art – it’s got a great pose, motion, and all the essential details are here for us to work. So let’s go about sculpting this miniature!

    The Sculpting Process

    As with all my miniatures where I have good concept art as well as scale references, I started by sculpting the most important feature: the face and head.

    For a human miniature to have the right kind of character, getting the face correct is incredibly important. Casimeere here took a lot of tinkering to get looking like his concept art, with the third image above showing the ‘wry smile’ that is necessary for his character. The head is also scaled at 5 mm in height, all parts included: given that Freebooter Miniatures are roughly 32 mm scale with realistic proportions, this gives me a total planned height of about 35mm – he’s a bit taller than I’d like, but again, as this is a personal project, I don’t think it’s that much of a big deal. I’ll definitely need to work on reducing the size if I want him to fit perfectly with the rest of the range, but practice makes perfect.

    Once I’ve got the head looking how I want, it’s time to get the body armature ready and start the base layers.

    I’ve tried to pose the body as naturally as I can here, following the concept art.

    At this point, since I have the dimensions, I can start work on the sword. He’ll be drawing it from the scabbard, so I start by sculpting a sword blank out of a mix of greenstuff and apoxie sculpt, then letting it cure. After it has cured, I then carve the blade down to the appropriate size before adding more putty to create a sheathe around the rest of it, as well as the initial quillons for the decorative portions of the hilt

    Once the sword is ready, I start adding details and bulking out the rest of the figure.

    Trying to keep things smooth is always tricky around this point, as I usually get pretty excited. Now that the main body is ready, I can start working on his arms, at which point I bend the armature to its final position and attach the sword and rose.

    Looking at him now, he’s a smidge taller and with thicker/longer arms than I should have made him, but it’s still a pretty good miniature. He’s 32mm to the eyes exactly, which is a pretty good measurement overall for a model of this scale.

    Hobby Progress

    Absolutely nothing today! I ran a tournament, so there’s not much to say. Will hope to do more tomorrow!

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