Sludge and Turnip (1) - Down the Rabbit Hole

Full disclosure: It's late, I'm tired, this will be a wall of text

Have you ever found yourself consumed by a new project? The lure of a new era, the "shiny goblin syndrome" pull of new figures. Discovering all the new ins and outs of a new system. If you're a long time (or frankly short term) follower of this blog you know I tend to get drawn in to the "new" much more often than I'm putting the finishing touches on a project. What's grabbed me this time?

Well, it's none other than new kids on the block; Sludge and Turnip.  

Inserted through this ramble are the photos I found of both systems, that I used to con a long time gaming buddy down this path with me.

When they first released Sludge, I thought it was a neat concept but had no desire to go out and buy the dozen or so kits required for an army to kit bash it all together. I thought, "man, what a cool idea but I have enough on my plate" I found the project just a hair to esoteric for my usual "well I can always use the figures for multiple systems" line of thought. When Turnip first got some attention I didnt really make the connection between the two and just sort of thought it wasn't for me.

Like most projects, it stuck in the back of my mind and lingered there like a disease until eventually I came across Knucklebones Miniatures. This is another one of those patreons for STLs I keep coming back to. In his catalog, he has a pile of stuff suitable for the whole Sludge/Turnip craze and of course I started printing. 

For some inexplicable reason, this aesthetic has captured me and progress continues. One of my long time gaming partners has also taken the plunge and I've found out there's actually a somewhat local scene for the game so at this point its just a matter of finishing a few more units and then trying the two systems out. 

 So what is it?

I'll be honest, being relatively new to this scene I'll probably butcher some of this but Turnip28 seems to be one of those weird "movements" more than anything. Years and years before my time, GW released a game called Inquisitor. This was a bit of an odd duck in that the game was a little bit more rpg and character driven from the others and the figures in a much larger (54mm) scale. Each character was named and unique and totally customizable. Being long out of production but still having a fan following, all the neatest bits seem to have been distilled down to "aesthetic" 

As I mentioned, (and will probably mention again) this is all before my time and to be frank, information given to me 2nd or 3rd hand. Somewhere along the line, the community, trying to keep the spirit of the art and the aesthetic alive, kept it all going in 28mm. My introduction to this story is here with the amazing fanzine, 28mag 

This is far from only about inquisitor or any one specific thing but is an absolutely amazing magazine that anyone who likes converting, gaming, gw, or neat dark miniatures should check out now.

Sometime during the pandemic, a guy named Max Fitzgerald dreamt up the tangential world of Turnip28. I'm linking the goonhammer interview here because if you've read this far you'll probably read anything and its a good read to break down this odd duck.

 As I understand it though, the story is basically, "what if the Napoleonic wars turned to shit, got all weird wwi with it, and then they all started worshiping root vegetables?"

In the meantime a gentleman named Sean Sutter (creator of Relicblade) has been working on his own fanzine with several other indie game designers (called BLASTER) Introduced in Blaster vol. 3 is Sludge. I don't know that one game inspired the other in anyway but for me, this finally meant "I could use figures for both games" Sludge has more of a Renaissance feel to Turnips Napoleonic but they are close enough (Infantry, cav, artillery) to me to merit the dive. I'm glossing through the specifics here for a couple reasons but fully expect more content for both games and a podcast or two comparing them.

 So where does that leave us?

Well, in the time its taken me to actually finish this post, I actually painted an entire Turnip force and more or less enough stuff to play sludge minus a couple characters. Over the next few posts (hopefully coming very soon) I'll showcase some of the stuff I've finished and hopefully I'll be demoing both games with Paul very soon.

Cavemen (2) - Primevo

 I was incredibly excited for this one to come out and Paul and I finally had a chance to play it. I'm a huge fan of this game and wholeheartedly recommend it.

We did a full review over on the podcast which you can listen to HERE if you want to know more

Miniature Shame Golf - End of Summer Season

If you haven't read about this yet, check it out HERE

So lets check in. How did I do?

In short. Not great. I knew the results would be less than flattering but I thought I'd paint more in general. The total number is around what I thought it'd be but I did think I'd have more figures done to show for it. The constant reminder of a running total did however prevent me from buying more things than I normally would. As an off the top of my head example, I was really on the fence about grabbing the new kill team box and the penalties for buying something at launch were enough that I decided against it for now. 

Because of the rather loose nature of the rules, the challenge motivated me to finish a lot of stuff that was just sort of close to done but not finished because it was easy points. Right off the bat, the night before Stellacon, I finally got around finishing the bases on some old WW1 British as well as finishing a whole starter force of Germans, all for Blood and Valor (Review HERE)

Some day I'll come back and take better glamour shots of some of this stuff. I swear.

At Stellacon, I blew a whole bunch of stuff out, in the hopes of actually lowering the number some. Although that worked out nicely, I also walked away with 1k points of slaanesh and a Nights Watch army. Though I left that day with a negative score, it was the last time I'd have that. 

Twice this Summer I've found myself in Chicago at the excellent Games Plus store. Discovering an amazing game store like that will put a dent in your balance for sure. I walked out both times relatively light but definitely with an addition to my score.

The launch of Dominion was a huge dent because aside from being a huge box, I picked it up on release day and took the penalties there. So Far I've only finished these. I have plans to convert the Stormcast so those will have to wait until later. 

Some other addition to my pile of shame include some 3d printed terrain, a ton of stuff for conquest and the other half of my 3d printed 10mm ogre army. 

I did have one really excellent evening of painting where I finished a bunch of Lumineth stuff, a bunch of Crisis Protocol stuff and my first Moonstone figure.

There were a few other purchases here and there but unfortunately as of the end of this season, im sitting at 232 and coming in second to last place. I'm writing this a little early and there is a chance I'll get below the 200 mark but its unlikely. I have a few packages out standing (Lunar preorder, moonstone kickstarter) that will hurt when they arrive but I also don't know how much time I'll have to paint this month.

I'm definitely glad I participated but my goal for the fall season is absolutely to get bellow 100, and ideally below 0. Only time will tell

Marvel Crisis Protocol (1) - Introduction

 I have a smattering of "in progress blogs" I've been working on but to be honest, it's a figure here, a building there and no real completed anything. Lately I've been smitten with MCP. Just before I really dove into wargames, hobby stuff and painting, I was big into comics. I had discovered them in earnest pretty late in the game, being drawn in from video games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Batman Arkham Asylum. I dove in head first and started with the Civil War Marvel stuff and began reading whatever I could. When I got into hobbies, something had to give and I haven't really read any comics since. When Crisis Protocol was announced I put in a preorder as soon as possible, played a couple demo games and thought "Ok, this is pretty neat"

Like all projects, I threw the game back into the pile of shame, breaking it out once every few months to demo it to someone new, and moved on to other projects. Recently, I had a friend visit from out of town who wanted to try it and his enthusiasm encouraged me to break everything out again, and finally play with all the bells and whistles. This encouraged me to teach Erin how to play more seriously (we had done a small "lite" version of the game months earlier) and both of us were surprised at just how much we both liked it. Ever since then, the game has occupied most of my painting time and all of my hobby time with a bunch of side projects as well as getting me back into comics and buying a subscription to Marvel Unlimited (as a brief aside, I just read the 12 issue run of Inhumans from the Marvel Knights era and was super surprised at just how much I liked it.)

I had painted a few figures when I first got the game, mostly just the ones I wasnt as interested in (Black Widow, Red Skull, Ultron) and have been finishing stuff up left and right. To that end, heres some of the figures I've finished lately. 

Spider-man from the Core Set

Wolverine and Cyclops from the X-men Expansions

 

Next on my short list of stuff to do, finish up the Guardians of the Galaxy and get them photographed, get some terrain painted, and get some storage sorted. 

Miniature Pile of Shame Golf

 That's right folks, it's time for another "Matt does a painting challenge in the hopes of putting a dent in the grey tide" post.

I stumbled across this Dana Howl Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po3u5ukzbpU

 In short, Dana has adapted the concept of backlog golf for miniature painting. Basically, you get one point every time you buy a figure and lose one point every time you paint or sell a figure. There's bonuses for things like completing starter sets and penalties for things like buying stuff close to its release date. It's sort of what I was doing at the start of the year with the "2 out-1 in" thing but a little better defined.

The "season" starts  June 15th and ends Sept 15th.

Finish painting a model -1
Buy a model +1
Give away or sell a model -1
    (stacks with commission painting)
Complete a unit - 1 additional
Complete faction starter -5 Additional
Complete 2 player starter or board game -20 additional
Box with between 1-10 figs bought within 30 days of release +5 Points additional
Box with between 10-30 figs bought within 30 days of release +20 Points additional
Box with between 30+ figs bought within 30 days of release +50 Points additional

Buying stls doesnt add to total until they are printed.

Gifts and trading dont change point totals.

I'll be doing this with anyone in our group who wants to join in and it looks like other people might be playing on social media with #shamegolf

More Necromunda Stuff for the Analogue Challenge

 Recently Added to my Pile.

First up, Here's the Bounty Hunter Ortruum 8-8

And here's the Starter Gang I finished up for Necromunda

 Real short and sweet this time around.

Cavemen (1) - First Figures

 Weirdly I was bitten by the caveman bug. I'm not really sure why but the idea of tribe on tribe skirmish gaming seems like itd be fun. A few shows ago (now years ago haha) I purchased 3 blisters from Copplestone from one of the vendors. I just got around to painting them up.

First up the Cavemen Characters

The official artwork has a lot of warpaint and such on them and I may go back at some point and add some but until I know what rules I wanna use, I'm not worried about having specific characters

All of these were painted primarily with contrast paints and I'll post the recipes below

 

Here are two packs of Cavemen, cleverly titled Cavemen and More Cavemen.

The paint jobs were dead simple. Darkoath Flesh, Snakebite Leather, Wyldwood, Black Templar, Basilicanum Grey. The bones were picked out in Iraqui Sand, the weapons with PZ Aces Old Wood. 

Tufts are Dark Green Shrubs from Gamers Grass.

I'm about half way through a wooly mammoth now and I have a T-rex to paint. I'm resisting the urge for now to buy some figures from lucid eye until I thin out more of the "to finish" pile. 

Rules we're discussing includes Tribal, Primevo, and Savage Core.

Terrain - Into the Forest

Reposted with Permission on News from the Front
 For as long as I've been a gamer I've struggled with trees. It seems like a no brainer sure, but I can't stand clump foliage. About 10 years ago, I spent a weekend making trees. Slathering Woodland Scenics tree armatures with glue and getting all sticky trying to make trees look presentable. When I finally got some stuff finished, I thought they looked great, but they fell apart after a few months of use. Over the years I've seen some great solutions but for what I wanted nothing fit exactly what I was thinking. Battlefield Terrain Concepts makes some amazing trees but for how many I wanted, it was a little beyond my budget. Woodland Scenics themselves makes some great premade trees as well but they aren't quite as durable as I'd have liked, and still need to be based in some capacity.

With all this in mind, I decided to 3d print my forest. After a bit of research, I found this set from Printable Scenery. 

The set comes with 5 different tree designs, 2 different tree stumps, and 2 fallen trees. The canopies are separate pieces and come in 4 designs. The product page shows which parts to print for which tree.

In order to fulfill my needs, the trees need to be readily available, easy to assemble or paint, have decent variety, and be durable. Aside from print time, these check all of those boxes so I started printing. 

I started by printing a pretty large batch of stuff. The key to the plan here is two things. First of all I printed everything for any given tree in one shot and while printing I set the settings to print with a brim and with a perimeter. This means when any tree prints it will effectively be grouped together. This meant I could print a tree here or there as I was running low on a spool over the course of a few months. Each Tree took somewhere around 10 hours to print so I'd usually fire one up around dinner time and pop it off the plate before work the next morning. You can see here how the tree almost prints on a sprue, keeping the canopies sort of attached. The thin layer on the bottom peels right off by hand. 

In order to meet one of my other demands (variety) I printed some trees at 75% size. You can also increase the size or mirror all the parts to get a slightly different look.  Basically when it's all said and done, you can get a reasonably variety going. 

The next step was to prime everything. I labeled each tree on the bottom with a letter and used Rustoleum Camo Dark Green and Camo Dark Brown Spray primers. Finding a flat brown spray was a bit of a challenge but I'm reasonable happy with these colors. All the canopies are sprayed at the same time and then resorted to match the trees they printed with. 

Once all the individual parts are sprayed, everything is drybrushed and details are painted. I used cheap acrylics from a craft store like Michaels. There's nothing stopping you from using Vallejo, but I like the artist loft paints for terrain because they tend to hold a little better with use. For this project I used Burnt Umber and Gray from Artists Loft and one of the greens from the Liquitex Basics Range. You don't need these specific colors or brands, just a gray, a mid brown, and a medium green are fine.

Drybrush the tree all over with your medium brown and the canopies all over with the green. I was really rough with the green drybrushing and let a ton of it get in the recesses as well. There's no need to be careful here in my opinion. At this point the project was all about speed. You can see how the medium brown makes some of the detail pop without looking too over the top. Since these were printed on a FDM printer, there are some layer lines visible. As I've mentioned before, I dont really worry about it on wargame terrain, but the drybrushing has a bit of a tendency to highlight the layer lines, especially on the tops of surfaces. Using the thick craft paints has the added bonus of mucking up some of the layer lines. When Drybrushing, leave just a tiny bit more paint on the brush than usual and it seems to be ok to my eye.

By varying up the "wetness" of your brush in the green drybrush step, you can see how it changes the tone a little bit. It's subtle but definitely helps break up the monotony of the green a little bit.

The next step is to pick out the rocks around the base with grey and then finally glue it all together. Having based the tree in brown, means you dont really need to be too careful with the grey for it to all be tied together. I switched over to a size 4 synthetic to paint the rocks and just made sure they were covered. When glueing the canopies on, I made sure to sort of slather the ends of the branches in glue. When the canopy is attached, it can be hard to tell exactly where it will sit ahead of time, so better safe than sorry.

And the final Product

All in all, I think the trees take something around 10 minutes each to paint and the longest process is definitely actually printing them. I've been printing trees off and on for months but I think its well worth the effort. Obviously you could take these same prints and really go to town on them with some more detailed painting but for fleshing out a game table I think this does the job wonderfully.

Working in an assembly line, the entire set took about an hour to get everything brushed and glued together.

And here we go! 10 trees, about a month of printing off and on and a little bit of paint work later. 

It doesn't seem like a ton, but this set fills a 3 x 3 board pretty nicely unless youre looking to do an actual forest. As far as scatter terrain goes, I think this is more than enough for an average game but I'll probably be printing another 10 or so over time to fill out the table for games like Flint and Feather or Carniverse

Adding just a couple pieces from my collection here, you can see its basically all you'd need for a small skirmish game. 

So, how do I feel about this as a solution? I think I'm happy with it. I didn't realize until writing this article, just how much time I'd spent printing stuff for it. The longest tree took about 14 hours to print and thats a pretty long time to tie up a printer when you consider that there's 10 trees on the table. I really like that I can set up the printer and then go on to something else though. In terms of variety, theres just 3 of the five designs on this table. The set came with another two tree types that I haven't printed yet and theres still the option to vary up the designs present by changing the size or mirroring parts.

In terms of cost, I haven't done the math but per tree they arent on the expensive side as filament is pretty cheap. The labor involved wasn't bad either with how easy the trees are to finish. 

Overall then, I think this was a good investment for my terrain collection. I don't think the trees look as nice as the foliage types but they are a lot more durable and if I ever need more, I can simply hit print.

Happy New Year, Analogue Challenge, Some Bookkeeping

 Happy New Year Everyone. This last year has been a roller coaster. Unrelated to the hobby and blogging and podcasting, I've had a super busy year and as a result my hobby time has been severely limited. I've decided to forgo the usual year-in-review post until things regain some normalcy. The analogue challenge has started up and I'll copy my first submission below before we dive into plans for the new year.

" Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! Sorry for the late start this year but the Holidays were surprisingly busy this year. I started seeing someone before the pandemic started and who would've guessed that having a significant other would make the holidays worth celebrating. Forgoing my usual tradition of Christmas Day and New Years day marathon Painting has put me a touch behind but I certainly think it was worth it. Apologies in advance for this batch of photos, I've been staying at my girlfriends during the break and didnt bring my photo booth.

First up I have two "Ornaments" painted for my Girlfriend for Christmas. This was a file I found on My Mini Factory and printed and screwed an eye hook into.

They were painted to look like the two family dogs, Sammi and Koda and went over well enough that they went right up on the tree.

These were the last two figures I painted in 2020. Kicking off this year, today I decided to get started on my Aliens Collection with the new Gale Force Nine Board Game. I painted all 16 aliens in the base game. Super simple paint jobs but I'm super happy with them. I have the marines and both expansions to work through still, as well as the Prodos games game and some extra odds and ends. One of my big plans this year is a Bug Hunt game for whenever conventions return. 

The pugs are a bit bigger than a standard 28 but the paint jobs were simple so to keep everything easy lets call it 18 x 28mm figures for this submission, for a total of 90 points. I hope everyone had a good holiday season. I plan on adding to my Necromunda collection and fleshing out some terrain for some games I have planned. "

2021 Plans

First of all, I want to paint more this year. Obviously this wasnt a normal year and I have my reservations about this year but I'd like to stay optimistic. In no particular order here are some of the things you can expect to see on this blog this year.

Aliens-
I've wanted to do a "bug hunt" style convention game for a while and although theres no conventions right now, I'd like to be prepared for when gaming can resume in earnest. I've started to work through the new GF9 Another Glorious Day in the Corps boxes as you can see above and am planning on finishing up my zone mortalis board this year and hammering out some rules.

Lord of the Rings-
I have been talking about this for all of 2020 but this will be the year I play through Quest of the Ringbearer. I've been chipping away on things here and there but almost have enough stuff to actually begin playing. Expect a lot more on that this year.

Skirmish Games-
Long have I talked about playing This is Not a Test, but lately I've also had my eye on Zone Raiders, Moonstone, Bushido and a couple others.

Terrain-
I've actually been making a dent in the terrain collection. Expect the first article on that as soon as next week.

Housekeeping

I was cleaning up the game area the other day and came to a bit of a roadblock. Though I did far less actual gaming than in years past, the amount of kits I've purchased has stayed pretty steady. I found myself a little overwhelmed at where to start and began setting aside a few kits here and there to get rid of. For most of my time in the hobby, I've adopted a "if you want it, buy it, because you don't know if it will still be available when you want to paint it." I think this has worked out generally, and I have quite a few kits in my collection I'm super excited to own. I consider myself a collector pretty high on the list of interests but this year might've gotten the better of me. As a result, I'm going to try something new this year. 

I'm going to adopt a rough, 2 out 1 in policy. Ideally, before I buy a new "whatever" I'm going to finish 2 "whatevers"

Buy a new figure kit? Finish 2 that I have. Before I buy that new box of VanSaar special figures, I'll finish the Orlocks and their upgrade kit. That sort of thing. I'm not going to define the rules super close, but I'll keep a tally of what gets done and attempt to stick to that. There's no prize of course but the prospect of moving this year has really made me want to get a handle on my collection.

So thats all for now. Happy new year everyone!