Finished Miniatures: Stryker1, Nemo2, and Bartolo

Just wanted to put up some pictures of some of the Warmachine Warcasters that I have finished so far.

General Adept Nemo (front view)

General Adept Nemo (back view)

Commander Coleman Stryker (front view)

Commander Coleman Stryker (back view)

Captain Bartolo Montador (front view)

Captain Bartolo Montador (back view)

Starting to play Malifaux

With time being in short supply these days, I've found myself more attracted to skirmish level games. The idea being that you don't have to paint up as many models. With this in mind, I've decided to give Malifaux a try.

Out of the five factions in the setting to choose from, I've decided to go with the Arcanists. The first box set I painted up was the Rasputina crew. I plan to add in the Ramos, Colette, and Marcus sets later on.

Rasputina box set finished!

At the time I had purchased and painted up the Rasputina crew box, my friend Sam had also bought and painted up a Seamus box. We'd both been on the fence about trying Malifaux for a long time and decided to finally give it a try. There's more of an incentive to try a new game when you know you're buddy is going to be trying it out as well. If you can't find opponents at the local game store, then who will you be playing with then?

Our very first Malifaux game was his Seamus versus my Rasputina. With no veteran player to watch over us, we missed a few things here and there. For instance, Sam didn't utilize the companion rule with his Rotten Belles. I didn't use any of the Ice Gamin's ability to cast "Bite of Winter" and augment the damage of his friends. However, the game was able to give me a very satisfying first impression. I definitely was going to continue to play this game.

My first Malifaux game

Around the time I started to get interested in Malifaux, the existence of local players seemed to be practically gone at the local stores. However, I didn't let that worry me too much. I had heard that there were more players at stores across town. I figured if I really wanted to meet some Malifaux players, I can drive a bit further. In the meantime, I figured my regular opponent would be my friend Sam. When getting into a new game, I usually prefer to go through the learning process with my regular gaming friends. That's usually more comfortable.

The thing is, with as many other games Sam likes to play as well, I could see there being a time when I could be in the mood to play Malifaux and he wouldn't be available. So, just in case I could convince another friend to give this game a try, I painted up a second starter box.

I heard the Lady Justice box is one of the more beginner friendly starters and so I painted it up as a loaner set for demos. Recently, I've been able to demo the game to three other friends. All three seemed to enjoy the game.

Lady Justice box set finshed!

Not sure what I'm going to be painting up next. I have a lot of things in a queue on my painting desk. I'd like to finish up some more of my Eldar for 40k, I'd like to finish up 50 points of Cygnar and I wouldn't mind taking some time to construct more terrain. Somewhere in there I think I'll add more Arcanists models to my collection. A Silent One, Snow Storm,  and an Arcane Effigy for sure. Then after that, most likely the Ramos crew.

When I get some time, I'll write up an article that will go into more detailed thoughts on my first impressions of the Malifaux rules and the hobby surrounding it. Until then, time to do more painting!

Alternate Legion of Everblight color schemes for Jay

My friend Jay will be diving into the game of Warmachine/Hordes and I thought I'd mess around with a couple of different color schemes. I'm not sure if he has something in mind already. I'm sure he does. However, just for fun, I worked up a few different color schemes that may help him come up with an idea for his Legion.

Alt.Scheme 1 - Purple & White

Alt.Scheme 2 - Dark Blue/Grey and White

Alt.Scheme 3 - Green with Freckles

Alt.Scheme 4 - White and Turquoise

Alt.Scheme 5 - Dark Grey & Red

An alternate Retribution color scheme for George

So my friend George is joining the Journeyman League for Warmachine/Hordes. His first faction will be the Retribution of Scyrah and he's toying around with a few ideas for what he's going to use for a color scheme. I thought it might help him imagine what his models would look like if I jumped on Photoshop and did some rough versions of the color scheme he described to me.

He mentioned using red on the tips of the armored areas, black for the inner joint mechanical areas, and maybe the glowing parts in yellow or purple? Anyways, I did these three versions up. I've posted them here so he can take a look at them too.

Version 1 - Red with Purple/Pink Glow

Version 2 - Red with Purple/Pink Glow

Version 3- Red with Yellow Glow

Version 4 - Alternate Red Placement with Purple Glow

Coming up with a color scheme for my Cygnar.

So there it was. My Cygnar battle box. I had bought it before Privateer Press made the new plastic battle box sets so the Warjacks are the old sculpts, but that was okay. I replaced the old Stryker miniature with the alternate one and set out to start painting. However, there was an important question that still needed answering. What color scheme am I going to use?

Well, I'm not gonna lie. Coming up with a color scheme for Cygnar was hard. At first, I was going to paint them in a really dark blue. Then I felt that maybe the scheme wouldn't pop enough while sitting on the board. Or maybe I couldn't pull it off. So then my second idea was to do them in a dirty mustard yellow and crimson color. I was sort of inspired by the costumes in the movie "Kingdom of Heaven" and I thought what the color scheme of Balian de Ibelin's knights were pretty neat.

So I started painting up all four of the models in this style. Half crimson on one side and a pale dirty yellow on the other. Even though I was only about half way through painting them, I decided to play my first game with them. It was during that game that I started to feel that there was something about them that didn't sit well with me. I couldn't quite figure out what it was. Then it hit me. For some reason, the more I looked at the color scheme of my models, the more I thought of McDonald's.

I know it's not rational, but I just couldn't get the McDonald's thing out of my head. So, I had to start from scratch and repaint my Cygnar force. Although, the question still remained, what color scheme? Well, I have this weird pride thing where I don't like stealing someone else's color scheme and so I refused to duplicate something I saw on the painting forums. Most of the time I find that I'm imaginative enough to come up with my own cool scheme. The truth is that this time, I didn't have the creative juice flowing at all. I mean obviously, even the yellow and crimson scheme was stolen from "Kingdom of Heaven" (Stolen? Inspired by? Heh heh. Okay whatever). So what did I do? I ended up stealing a color scheme anyways. I just couldn't avoid it.

I looked up at my book shelf and saw something that I thought would be PERFECT for my Cygnar. I felt it still kept the "personality" that Cygnar projects and yet, at the same time, it's not their default studio color scheme. So what color scheme was it? Where did I steal it from?

From a Japanese video game called, "Valkyria Chronicles"

Alright. That looks cool and all, but can you duplicate it on a miniature? Well....yikes, I don't think so. However, with a little compromise, I think I can. Bascially, I took the same approach to the camo pattern but instead of using like, three or four different colors, I used only two. Light grey blue and dark grey blue. The red areas lined with white I still kept. So, after much work, here is the result! My final Cygnar color scheme!

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I can't wait to see what 50 points of these guys might look like sitting the table all painted up. I'll post more pictures as I add new models to my Cygnar collection. Stay tuned!

Welcome to my Table Top Gaming Blog

Welcome to "Fat Basilisk", my personal blog where I'll be posting about all sorts of things in my table top gaming hobby. This blog at first will seem to only be about one or two games, but I plan on posting about other games as well. It will all sort of depend on what games I'm trying out at the time. So there will be times where I'll be posting specifically about one particular game for a while, but eventually I'll talk about others.

A little bit about my tabletop gaming history....

My first exposure to gaming was with role playing games, specifically Dungeons & Dragons. That was way back in High School. Later on, my friends got me into Battletech, Car Wars, Ogre, and Rogue Trader. I played a ton of games during High School and into the first year of College. Games like the Marvel RPG, the DC Heroes RPG, Shadowrun, Robotech, Rifts, Torg, and many others. Then came a good long stretch of about maybe eight years where I didn't touch any tabletop war games, but I did still manage to continue playing RPGs. During my early twenties, I was playing the Street Fighter RPG a lot. Occasionally playing GURPS, World of Darkness, and Deadlands. Then 1998 rolled around and 3rd Edition Warhammer 40,000 came out. This would be my return to table top miniatures wargaming.

A bunch of my friends and I decided to get into 40k all at once. We were all new to the game and it was really fun learning it together. We all played 40k for many years. We played through third edition, through fourth edition, and into fifth. To this day, we still continue to play 40k.

Now it's 2011. Recently I've been trying to make time to try out other game systems. Some of the new games I've been playing have been Monsterpocalypse and Warmachine/Hordes. If the time and opportunity permits, I may also try out Infinity, Malifaux, and maybe Dust Tactics. Or heck ... even Anima Tactics. Whew! So many games out there! It's really been fun diving into a different games to experience all the things that come with learning something new. This is what the blog will be about. These new experiences. I look forward to writing posts about these new games.

Anyways, stick around and watch me try to unrealistically squeeze in as much gaming as I can.