Star Saga - painting miniatures and scenery. Mantic games stuff

As I've been playing through "Five Parsecs from Home" second edition, a pdf I've had for ages, I realised that I wanted some generic sci-fi grunters and that my un-played Star Saga box might be perfect for some scenarios

Mantic Games were selling it off a while back and and I bought two copies ostensibly for the scenery. I sold the other one off when I looked at the unpainted pile....

Mantic are all over the place with their quality. These 'board game plastic' figures, that softer PVC, are actually nicer sculpts that much of their ranges for Deadzone or what-have-you. And even with the slightly lower detail they painted up quite nicely. I'm pretty sure that they have changed sculptors quite often and mostly I think it's for the worse, even while their casting improves. In fairness though, their games are mostly superb. I love Deadzone for instance, it's everything I thought Kill Team would be but better. Very slick game. These Star Saga figures are a playable faction too!  

As I'd painted these, I actually got around to playing Star Saga and it's pretty great - solo plays well and a slick reinterpretation of that "Heroquest"-style crawler. Lots of clever variety in the missions and characters. Much, much better than any of the similar games I've bought over the years. ie, Descent(ok, but really a "race" game.) or "Shadows over Brimstone" (Frankly, it's dogshit.).

It's a shame then that Star Saga didn't catch on and ended up on clearance, good for me, mind. 

 

Classic Elves, GW and Grenadier

 

More powering through my pile of shame.

I've been bargain-ating some Elves from ebay for a while to replace an old much-missed army.

I really lucked out on a spectacular collection that had the worst photos I'd ever seen on ebay - thanks to whoever that was. I feel like the Elves themselves organised it. Normally this old stuff goes for eye-watering money on ebay.

There are mounted units too, but I didn't photograph them.

There is a mix of old Copplestone Grenadier sculpts, Warhammer units from three or four editions of Warhammer and also some units sold by Black Tree Design, literally the worst company with the best miniatures that exist. I didn't get those in time for when I built and primed that lot though.

That's probably a week or so's worth. You lose track really, don't you?

A couple of Wardancers and Copplestone hero character.

Only slightly modded Copplestone minis using GW bits and pieces.

I'd forgotten how much work cavalry and chariots actually are, but these old Warhammer casts are just beautiful.

Some Dryad units. 

I have no specific game in mind for this army, but as almost everyone has elf armies in their rulesets it'll be easy to field them. One hopes.

The only thing I'm missing is treeman - that, I've decided to scratch build.

Gaming table finally looking playable

 Using existing kits and the DIY builds I've thrown myself at in recent months it turns out that I finally have enough terrain for a varied table. I definitely need more scatter terrain however.

There's some obvious scaling issues between various bits of scenery here, but the "Garden of Morr" stuff looks ok if you restrict it to a graveyard type corner.

A Northumbrian Tin Soldier "Goblington" takes the first treasure in this game - and keeps it from what I recall.

I call this terrain building phase of hobbying over for now. I have some Antares stuff that's been waiting forever, and an elf army....

Still not enough

 So I still don't have enough terrain to populate a large table for a game of Frostgrave. Having built a few pieces now I feel a little more confident about sculpting something more complex out of foam.

Carved from foam blocks and glued onto foamboard. Pinned by cocktail sticks and drowned in PVA.

Lots of these ruined sections made in the same way. Improve the look and playability of them with detail and wood sections, ramparts, stairs and ladders.

Once everything is as good as I need it to be, slap the primer out and get the first coats of paint on.

Copius drybrushing and a shredded drybrush for foliage....

Now, with my existing Garden of Morr scenery from GW I should be getting to the point of enough scenery for a big table...

Trash Scenery

 


The Manner In which these were built was almost identical to the previous bit of scenery. I used a lot of carved up lolly sticks and styrene bricks for this wall. 

The scale of the bricks is pretty huge against 28mm or lower, so a serious construction!

A more naturalistic tor.

Then undercoated grey, with some generic acrylic emulsion.

And finally painted to look like the ruins they're meant to be.

Northumbrian Tin Soldier gobbos populate them in the scenic shot. 

Scenery for my first Frostgrave game

While the intention was to build enough pieces for characters to play around in Frostgrave, one soon learns that terrain is King in this game. After building these first three, rather too large, elements I realised that if you're trying to stop ranged characters having a free run of the game you need a very populated table.

Primarily I wanted to experiment with a lot of building techniques as I'd only ever created small scatter terrain pieces.

I started by sketching out very roughly in packing polystyrene a playable shape of a ruined gate. 

Next, comes the filling in of details  with plaster, grout and milliput. It is mainly polystyrene foam sculpted to fit.

milliput "exposed brickwork" patches.

All followed up with layers of painting and inking.

The end result is pretty robust after being drowned in PVA.

Basing a mini, without removed pre-slotta base.

Rather than destroying the original mini's base - in this case an Alternative Armies Orc character - I use a mould to sculpt a base and squoosh the mini into that. I hate removing them.

The 'mould' in question is a base from the failed(commercially) Fantasy Flight miniatures game "Runewars"

I've not seen anyone else do this and it forms a perfectly useable stable base, that isn't too thick and can be sculpted upon easily enough.

five little Orcs baked in a pie.

 

Establishing a foothold in the Antares universe....

 

Test post.

First time in a long time of no blogging. I hope to keep this blog as an online diary of my re-emergent love affair with war gaming.

...which began with thinking the ruleset for "Bolt Action" sounded cleaner and more interesting than anything I'd previously played....