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Friday, September 19, 2025

Wild West (1) - Rebuilding the Town

 I realize that we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns on the "Matt decides to restart a project" scheme but here we are again. I've had old west stuff for a long time. It's one of those historical adjacent eras I really like, like pirates and gangsters. 


 Years ago I bought into some of the 4ground stuff but didn't ever complete the collection. Between how long they take to build and the costs it just wasn't something I ever completed. I added on a sarissa railroad station but was always missing some iconic old west buildings. 

Recently, after the success of the Fantasy ruins, I decided it might be worth revamping (replacing) my mdf with 3d prints. I already have a few figures painted, probably enough to run a game of some sort. 

After a bit of researching I settled in on the range from digital taxidermy. The kits cost around 40 bucks after conversion. I started by printing a saloon as well as a few of the "houses". After doing a little bit of googling, I've settled on wanting to print about 10-13 buildings in total to make a nice little town. The buildings run a hair on the small side but do fit nicely on the build plate. The saloon came as 6 parts and needed tree supports to print. I'm not 100 percent sure how much effort im going to put in to painting interiors but they do have interior details sculpted in. 

There's a pretty big range of stuff including scatter and such which is nice. The eventual plan is something like a Legends of the Old West campaign, though I have several rulesets to try including Dead Mans Hand, Rules with no Name, Shoot n Skedaddle, and What a Cowboy.

Friday, September 12, 2025

Napoleonics (6) - Spanish Silver Bayonet Unit and Clue Markers

 Next on the workbench is a unit of Spanish for Silver Bayonet. These are the metal figures from Northstar. They painted super quick. I think the only "new" color I've introduced to the Napoleonic palette is Hull Red from AK 3G. This is a nice red brown, more brown than red. A good addition to my suite of colors. 



I ran out of Army painter white and switched to vallejo white spray for the primer (and subsequently all the white details) and the result is a lot grayer but I think it worked great for the spanish to make them look a bit more "rag tag" 

These painted super super quick, probably quicker than the French. I managed to also get some Clue markers painted. These were just 3d prints from Thingiverse. 


The only other "official" models I have to paint at the moment are the 2 packs of Bandits but I may pick up some more stuff. We actually have a bit of a short battle report and some initial thoughts coming soon too. 

Friday, September 5, 2025

Fantasy Gaming (5) - Frostgrave, Warhammer Quest and Other Diversions

 A few of the guys have been musing over doing a short, 3-game Frostgrave second edition campaign day and as a result I've dug out all my old original Nickstarter stuff and slapped together two warbands. This is the first of them. I'm going to go with a Sigilist this time around. The Wizard and Apprentice are metal, the remaining figures from Frostgrave Soldiers 1. I went with close to box art for the wizards paint and themed it around that. So the wizard has a body guard themed in dark green with a matching rune and the apprentice has her own with a light green and matching rune. Its simple but as someone who doesn't name models for example I thought it was a nice narrative touch.




I've also been thinking about Dungeons lately, something we'll come back to. I did a tiny bit of digging and discovered that there are just a ton of resources available to print your own copy of Warhammer Quest '95. Now I've never played it and have no idea if its worth the hassle but I've been wanting to learn some of the equipment at work so figured this was a good opportunity to self teach



I mentioned dungeon crawls. I've been in the early stages of writing my own dungeon crawl ruleset. I'm not ready to share much in the way of details yet but after we got a bit of playtesting in the other day I am ready to share that it exists



I didn't manage to get many photos as we were pretty engrossed in the rules discussion. I'll admit I spent quite a while writing rules with place holder numbers that did not work at all on the first encounter. A quick on the fly adjustment though and everything started working perfectly. There will be more down the road but for now all you get is this quick little teaser.