Star Wars: A New Project

I realised in my last post I hadn't mentioned what I would be moving on to after the Sedition Wars miniatures so here's a quick work in progress post to show where I'm at.  Of course you've guessed from the title it will be Star Wars however it will be played using the Starfall rules www.starfalltt.com with the Imperial Assault miniatures and set during the Rebels timeline.

What has spurred me on to this new project was a trinity of events, the ending of the excellent Star Wars Rebels (if you haven't seen it and you are a Star Wars fan you owe it to yourself to check it out, the show starts off decently enough but by the end the show's arc has developed considerably and includes some of my favourite moments in the Star Wars franchise), the release of the Starfall rules which will be perfect for this scale of game and finally Fantasy Flight announcing the Lothal expansion for Imperial Assault which will give me all the miniatures I need.

To start with I'm working on the Stormtroopers as they'll be the hardest thing to work on with all that white however I ordered some Arctic White from Instar Paint https://shop.instarpaint.com/ after hearing some goods things about them and it looks very promising as the white is nearly covering the charcoal in one layer.

As usual my work in progress photos will be up on Instagram instagram.com/crucium.giger/ with finished photos going up here (I'll be trying out the black background in my photo box next to see how that looks).

Sedition Wars: Vanguard Characters Complete (plus playing with a light box)

I finished off the Vanguard characters a week or so ago but I've held off taking some photos of them as I ordered a light box (nothing flashy, in fact literally the cheapest I could find on Amazon) and wanted to try it out with them.  As such not all the photos are of the best quality but I think they are a step up from when I was using shoe box lids and should improve as I get better using the light box (as well as my camera again as it's been a year since I've used it, the camera phone wasn't up to taking photos with the light box as it kept dimming the lighting).

You've previously seen both Kara and Akosha but I think these do them a bit more justice:

Next up is Barker, unfortunately the focus is a little off in these and it hasn't picked up his flesh colour all too well.  This is the first time I've tried my hand at a sort of none-metal-metal technique, more in a comic book style, along with some object source lighting both of which have turned out quite well for first attempts.

Lastly we have Morgan, again the focus is a bit dodgy but the photos aren't too bad generally.  On the Studio McVey paint job they have him wearing latex gloves so I thought I'd give that a bash and again it turned out quite well, I painted his hands as I normally would then gave them two layers of white glaze followed by a highlight using the glaze mix with more added white.

Overall I'm quite please with how the light box has performed though due to it's size it's only good for photos of individual characters rather than squads or vehicles so I may invest in a better/bigger one in the near future.

Starfall: First Game Overview

Last night we tried out our first game of Starfall 'The Sci-fi Multiverse Tabletop Skirmish Game' (www.starfalltt.com) written by Elijah Kellogg.  I discovered this game system via the Lead Adventure forum and what initially drew me to it was not only the fact it's free to download but, much like Dragon Rampant is to Fantasy, you can use any sci-fi force at your disposal and for me this was enough to download the rules and give them a read.  I was happy to find that the rules were simple and intuitive yet the options for building a force for the tabletop were very diverse.  Want to play Aliens vs Predators vs Terminators?  No problem.  How about Star Wars?  Yup they've got you covered (and I have now picked up some Imperial Assault minis just for this purpose).  How about Dune?  Absolutely (and I'm already being pestered into getting my Dune miniatures painted up to game with as we'll all massive Dune fans).  So a couple of weeks ago I handed out the rules and we were ready to go yesterday.

For our first game we opted to just play a 60uc (universal credits) game rather than the standard 120uc and also drop the play area down to 2x2 rather than the 3x3, the main idea here was to get to grips with the rules and once we are happy them we can scale the game up to normal.  With this in mind we also opted to play a straight kill game rather than any specific scenario.

The battlezone

Neither of us knew what force the other was going to bring, I was using my recently (and not so recently) painted Vanguard from Sedition Wars and was facing off against the U.N.A. from AT-43, which meant we were both playing Legion of Mankind however due to how we had equipped our forces they were quite different.

The Vanguard

U.N.A.

Below I've are some of the key moments from the game.

 The Vanguard deployment

U.N.A. deployment

The U.N.A. pulled the first activation of the game and so a soldier spooled up his gun only for this to happen, needless to say this was ineffective.  The second shot however managed to inflict some damage on Akosha.

Next up was Akosha who was in prime position to fire her scoped rifle but only achieved a decent amount of damage rather than the killer shot I was hoping for, still she had here special action to go (being a Corporal with an initiative of 4).  My hopes of using this were dashed however when the U.N.A. pulled two dice in a row and managed to finish her off.  Not the best of starts but it did take 3 activation's to kill her.

To avenge Akosha my Heavy Repeater advanced up to to some cover and blasted the three soldiers.

The Cover Fire rule for the Heavy Repeater was great here and thanks to their placement two were killed with a third taking a light injury.

As the game heats up the troops advance forward to gain better positions though the U.N.A. soldier on the building would be pivotal, half range and higher ground meant he savaged my two troops on the ground with Cover Fire.

Meanwhile we had an Alpha face off, Kara managed to weather the Ambush fire from the U.N.A. Sgt and return fire with her Plasma Shotgun, it proved rather nasty at that range reducing the Sgt to 3 wounds.

Then in the special actions round the Sgt couldn't go first as he should have done due to being Walking Wounded so Kara charged in and finished him off with her Power Sabre.

This left one wounded U.N.A. soldier on the field so I had my remaining soldier gun him down thanks to a really good roll and the higher ground advantage.  With this the Vanguard claimed victory!

The game took around two hours to play however we do play at a rather leisurely pace with plenty of chitchat and we were referring to the rules more than is normal just to make sure we weren't missing anything along the way.  As I previously said we kept this pretty simple for a first outing (for instance we weren't using any psychic/force/magic powers) but even so it was very enjoyable, play was fluid and it didn't tax our brains too much (which is a bugbear of ours with rule sets, especially after long days at work).  We're certainly looking forward to our next game, which will be in a few weeks, and I think we'll be keeping the same factions though I'll be changing up my force somewhat due to having painted Barker Zosa by then and I'm eager to see what profile I can make for him.

Sedition Wars: Kara and Akosha

Keeping on with the Sedition Wars minis and with our first game of Starfall  on the horizon (www.starfalltt.com/)  I needed to get some character models painted up.

The obvious first port of call would be Captain Kara Black who will be able to lead the Vanguard through games of Sedition Wars, Starfall ,Deadzone and Warpath.  Did I mention how flexible these miniatures are?  Next up on the table was the sniper Akosha who I wanted to paint up due to her anime style and how useful a sniper will be for your upcoming game (I'm planning to get here high in order to dominate the battlefield).

When I started to paint Kara I decided to put my all into these and give them the best paint job I could and I think it's really paid off as they are easily some of the best I've done (unfortunately my photography skills haven't caught up but I thinking of buying a light box to see if that will help but I am limited by the fact I'm using my phone to take the pictures).

Next up will be Barker Zosa who add a nice bit of heavy fire power to the force.

Old Crow Vehicles: The Vanguard get mobile!

I've had these vehicles base coated for a couple of years now but after I had finished painted up the Vanguard for Sedition Wars and then the three other tanks from Old Crow (see my very first blog post for images of those) I was sick of painting blue so put these to one side for something else and there they have stayed, until now.

As I had finally finished off the Vanguard troops I thought it would make sense to get these last vehicles done as well as once I've painted up some character models (being worked on now) I'll have a fully functioning force for Deadzone/Warpath/Starfall and even 40k at a push.

Before we get to the pictures I just want to re-iterate how lovely the Old Crow vehicles are, beautifully cast and the aesthetic matches right in with the Vanguard, I'm glad I picked these up when I did.