8 Bit

Sweet.

CCP + White Wolf = Awesome

Turn the way back machine to about 2005 and you'll find me kinda giddy that Eve Online creator's CCP purchased up RPG producer White Wolf wholesale. I always admired the World of Darkness setting over others in my teen years. And even though the setting has changed a bit after White Wolf holding true and actually putting out splat books that cover the actual end of their world, a feat that is impressive by itself for commercial reasons alone let alone creatively, I still like how the WoD does Vampires, Werewolves, and everything in between.

The Underworld movies owe themselves to their RPGs as much as they might owe Anne Rice.

And yet my favorite MMO producer and all around good company purchased my favorite RPG producer. Awesome things should have happened, but they didn't. Things got quiet and faded from my immediate memory.

Color me impressed that they are doing something with the property.

Edit: Woah, wait, what. I just noticed this: The game is set against the MASQUERADE setting and not the newer Requiem. Wow. Nostalgia goggles go.

ACROSS THE WIRE AND INTO THE BREACH!

Not much painting, but did get some games in over the weekend.

This particular photo is of a game with Yankyaeger. He's a pro and generally schools me. This match was no exception. It reminded me of the times I'd generally sweep the board in Battletech and Magic. Only now I'm on the recieving end.

He kept a whittling amount of machine gun fire down that alley by the buildings that kept nearly everyone pinned (hence the red markers). I contested the objective (a winning point) for about a turn before being repulsed and never really recovering.

This was the only win of the game (of 3 games) against another fellow whose name evades me for now. I had the option of making a night assault since it was a British thing to do and I took it. After sending a diversionary force to the right to tie up and anchor the right flank, I sent the engineers, led by McCormick himself, into the left flank to breach the wire and assault the bunkers.

The right flank was incredibly successful in tieing up reserve assets from the Germans. I played aggressive on that flank (and the platoon eventually broke morale and ran) and it paid in droves. It argueably won the game by forcing a disproportionate distrubition of German firepower.

However some of the troops had trouble crossing the wire on the left and would have been whittled to nothing by machine gun nest fire had it not been for the night and heavy supporting fire by way of smoke from a 4.2" mortar battery. They proceeded to make the last pivotal battle on the hill as dawn crept over the horizon and a German pioneer platoon began a desperate assault that quite nearly took the hill and put victory in doubt. Bloodied and below half strength, they repulsed the huns in wave after wave.

All in all, I was pretty excited to get a decisive victory for once. Though some credit goes to Yankyaeger since he was giving some incite on how to use the rules to best effect.

Workbench: A taste of things to come.

Turns out I did have a bag piper miniature. He was sulking around in the commandos bits. I wonder if it was a mistake as I have a hard time thinking of an elite spec ops team stealthing their way into enemy territory under the wailing of bag pipe music.

But then again, this seems in line with any Scottish person I've met. They'd probably kick their ass too despite being heard a mile away.

And to the left is a new commander ('McCormick'). Since the last one perished leading an infantry charge into a tightly controlled group of buildings (and, with his death, actually secured the battle and saved the lives of two other platoons marching through a stream bed against MG42 fire), I figure a new commander was in order.
This ultimate bad ass is complete with a 1911 and his ultimate bad ass friends to protect him (shooting thompson guy and waving to attack rifle dude). The meta story I suppose is that he's part of the crew that was assaulting the creek.

Perhaps this also will look more appropriate since the last assault was led by a model that was essentially a staff team.



And the other project.

Queue Isengard music.

Workbench: Changing Gears

For a little change of pace we'll go step by step of a batched painting of a Humber IV recce group.
Here they are primed and painted in the mass produced and monotonous olive drab that nearly every Normandy British equipment was in.
We'll first paint the tires. A lot of people make the mistake of painting them black, and while tires are "black" a keen eye might notice that where the light shines it tends to be a little more gray. So we'll mix up some paint for the purpose and give use some color depth to make shadows in the creases of the tires later on.
Here they are painted and already looking nice. A lot of people stop here. We're going to do better.
Scuffing! What self respecting recce company stays on the road all the time? With a little off gray dabs and streaks where the armor might have been scratched we can create an undertone for lost paint.

Now some heavy (but diluted) black ink goes a long way in making our off gray tires look more realistic.

Now with a thinner black ink you can wash the whole mini, but I prefer to just bring out the paneling like so.

Now here was a fuax pas on my part. The rattle can spray primer green I was using... I could not exactly recreate. Nonetheless you don't really need to for this stage. Normally you'd take a shade lighter than the undertone and lightly drybrush the miniature to bring out the edges. Instead, I got a close green and then brought it a shade to brown.

Now we throw on some mud. For this, I just used a roughly close but different brown and applied it around the wheels where mud would fling and across the front of the Humbers.

Add the blue/green markers of the 15th Recce Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps as attached to the 15th Scots. I should have done this earlier, but now is good too. Just have to dirty them up after painting them.

???

Paint details, use a little brown makeup powder to simulate dirt in recesses, dullcoat/seal, and enjoy 2 more infantry stands.

That is an in scale Panther tank in the background (I didn't paint it)... those wacky Germans and their ridiculously huge production tanks.

Workbench: +2

The front two are the new ones. The rest are arranged in the order and batch that they were painted in.

I still don't like how these are coming out. Worse still, they are better than the former and these make them look worse on close inspection by comparison.

But they are still serviceable for a war game and for that they will suffice.

These are actually finished for the most part, barring some glue drying. The others have a series of minor issues I need to redress. Such as none of them having their rifle straps painted and a helmet strap that has gone unnoticed till yesterday.
As a bonus, they took about 25 minutes each to do.


Random Trivia: The movie 'Predator' started out as a sequel to 'Rocky IV'. It was a sort of in-joke that the only thing Rocky could fight after 4 grueling movies that was more impressive was a space alien. The script was penned and worked under the title 'Hunter'. It wasn't until a weekend spent watching the movie 'Commando' that one of the lead authors, John Thomas, decided to substitute Rocky for Hutch and 'Predator' was made.