Friday 29 July 2011

Uncharted Seas

On a whim at SELWG a couple of years ago Monkey Boy, a fellow wargamer and professional modelmaker, and I decided to pick up a ccouple of sarter fleets for the Spartan Games fantasy naval wargame Uncharted Seas.

He and I have always had a thing for Dwarves - not in the "specialist magazines" kind of way, but as armies and characters in fantasy wargames. Fortunatly we avoided a potential Dwarven civil war by discovering that Uncharted Seas has two Dwarven factions, the goody two-shoes, noble Iron Dwarfs and the sneaky, nasty,eeee-vil Shroud Mages.

I chose the latter. Their ships are brutish steampunk boilers with giant ram plates that allow them to board enemy ships after firing jets of superheated steam inside.
They also have massed batteries of cannons on the broadside, which means some careful sailing is needed to bring the weapons to bear.


The models are all resin, and were undercoated with GW Black. I used GW foundation paints and washes on the flat coulours, Khermi Brown base with a Dheneb stone drybrush, then a wash of Devlan Mud. The copper and brass had a base coat of tin bitz with a drybrush of Brazen Brass and sone Sining Gold here and there. The steel and Iron was a very old and gooey pot of chainmail with a heavy black wash, followed by a boltgun highlight. The ram plates at the front got some random washes, drybrushing, splodges of colour, bits wiped off, highlights and a variety of other highly experimental painting techniques applied to get the battered and patched effect I was looking for.


Once done they got two coats of GW Hardcoat (put all the apostrophes in you like - there is an "H" at the beggining of that word).


Overall, I don't think they'll win any awards, but they're done to a good gaming standard and I'm happy with them. Of course, they all got sunk in the first game, but then I always loose the first game of anything we play.

Tuesday 19 July 2011

As I was saying....

Two posts in three years is rather sorrowfull, so I'm going to try and up the pace a bit. I'm getting married in just under two weeks, so I'll try to get a couple of work in progress posts up between now and then and really try and get my act together after that.
I've been following and contributing in a small way to the development of Robin Fittons Gruntz rules over at http://www.gruntz.biz/ and the version 1 set of rules has been released. I first tried Gruntz at SELWG in 2009 or so, where Robin had a very nice board set up opposite the GZG store (and uxing GZG figures in a nice bit of cross marketing). The game is a nice, simple, elegant and fast paced sci-fi skirmish game aimed at 15mm. The rules are simple and very customisable, as the core rules includes a unit builder which allows you to create stats for any figures and vehicles you are using from any manufacturer. I'll be stating up my own collection of GZG, Khurusan, Brigade, CMG and Rebel miniatures with a view to some 2300AD themed battles of TFL versus Kafer in the Hotback outside of the Tanstaafl colony on Aurore.
Current projects:
6mm WW2 US
6mm WW2 Finns
15mm GZG OUDF with headswaps
15mm GZG UNSC Light Troops
15mm CMG Protolene Khanate
15mm GZG light wheeled vehicles
Tron Clu Command Ship conversion (£1 each at The Entertainer - BARGAIN!)