Beginning a Dracula's America campaign

 Tonight, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting up with a couple of local-ish guys to start a fresh campaign of Dracula's America - a supernatural western skirmish from Osprey, which really deserves the same level of releases and support as Frost/Stargrave, if you ask me! 

Premise of the game is that it's 1875, and Count Dracula used the chaos of the American Civil War to assassinate Lincoln and his entire cabinet, ensorcelling Congress into declaring him president for life. Various supernatural evils have crept in in Dracula's wake, and other forces have arisen to combat the powers of darkness. The rules themselves are perfectly servicable for a solid, non-supernatural western game as well. 

The table we played on was absolutely lavish - the game technically calls for a 3' x 3', but we played on a 4' x 4', densely packed with the the town of Shady Pines, Nebraska. I brought my posse, a group of Native Americans with a pair of lycanthropes in their midst (one turning into a bear, and the other a wolf), while Chris, my first opponent, had a warband of voodoo zombies. Our mission was to collect as many loot tokens (out of four available) as possible within the 8-turn limit of the game, with an amusingly interlinked pair of side missions - Chris got extra victory points if my posse leader was killed, and I got extra victory points if his posse leader was alive at the end of the game.

Elva Growing-Thunder darts across the street, past a drunken mountain man.

We also had civilians on the board that could get in the way, become human shields, etc. Late in the game, a complication arose - the locals were sick of us shooting it out, and began unloading their own guns at everyone around! 

Ultimately, the game concluded in a draw, though my one shapeshifter did manage to grab a loot token, transform into a wolf, and hightail it away from where all the shooting was taking place.

loot tokens portrayed by fortune cookie-shaped beads!

The second game was between myself and Set, who was also the one hosting the game. We rolled up a mission that saw our respective posse bosses squaring off in the center of town with a pair of underlings close by, and the remainder of our warbands deploying in a corner of the table. He was playing the Dark Confederacy, a group of Confederates who had stolen the secrets of reanimating the dead for their own profit. 

My boss immediately transformed into a bear, but didn't have the available movement to charge the mint-julep-slurping necromancer standing across the street. The necromancer summoned a minor eldritch entity (portrayed by a Confederate zombie holding a flag) between himself and the bear.

Unimpressed, the bear mauled the unnatural thing and sent it back to whatever hell it had been whistled up from. 

Unfortunately, the second game was all downhill from there for me, with the bear being shot down and the rest of my posse being whittled away one after another - though thankfully, most of them bled out the turn after being shot, which denied Set the victory points for either killing them outright or finishing them off. The win went to my opponent, but it was fairly close, with him ending the game with 4 VP to my 3. 

With these being campaign games, there's rolls to make after each game to determine who survived, if there are long-term injuries, and how much money your posse collects between games. Chief Kicking Bird, my posse leader, lost an eye to the Dark Confederacy, and unfortunately one of his followers, Charlie Iron-Knife (the blue-shirted figure in the staredown picture above), died of his injuries and a replacement will need to be recruited. 

All in all, I had a great time, and I'm really glad I connected with these guys and was able to meet up with them for a few games. I'm looking forward to continuing this campaign!

Back of Beyond: One-Arm Sutton and the Sutton Skunk

 Major General Francis Arthur "One-Arm" Sutton (1884-1944) was an English adventurer and arms dealer, a larger-than-life personality that roamed China and Siberia in the 1920s. He held the license to produce Stokes mortars in China, and supplied arms and expertise to warlord Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique. He lost his right hand at Gallipoli while throwing German grenades back at their original owners. 

He had developed an improved fuse system for the Stokes mortar, which garnered him a small fortune, and tried his hand at gold-mining in Siberia before his operation was overrun by the Bolsheviks, earning them his enmity for years to come. 

In 1932, he designed the "Sutton Skunk," an armored tractor/mortar carrier (so named because "the heavy guns are in the rear"); while he had some plans to try and sell it to the Chinese warlords, by this point Zhang Zuolin had been assassinated and Sutton considered all of the other warlords to be poor imitators of Zhang. He also saw increasing German influence among the remaining Chinese warlords, which he found distasteful following his experiences in the Great War. 

Ultimately, Sutton's story ends in a Japanese internment camp in Hong Kong during the Second World War in 1944, age 60. 

Copplestone Castings offers a figure of Sutton in its "European Advisors" pack in the Back of Beyond range, along with a couple of other unique personages from the era. And Company B Miniatures and Models offers a resin and metal kit of the Skunk in 1/56th scale. I painted up both tonight:

The kit's a simple one, consisting of a resin hull, a pair of resin tracks and a metal hatch, along with two pairs of metal Stokes mortars - two folded flat for transport and two set up and ready to fire. I painted it pretty simply - over black primer, I drybrushed Army Painter "Venom Wyrm" pretty heavily, and once dried I washed the full kit with "Strong Tone" shade from Army Painter. Once that dried, I gave it a follow-up dry brush of Venom Wyrm to bring the detail back out. Tomorrow I'll go back in with some black and clean up the tracks. 

While the Skunk was never put into production (and only a single photograph attests to the existence of even a prototype, built over the skeleton of a borrowed Holt tractor), it represents too good a story not to include in games set in the Back of Beyond. To that end, I've got some Chinese Warlord decals arriving tomorrow, which I'll apply to mark the Skunk as being in the service of the Fengtian clique. The Copplestone Chinese warlord figure, which I have primed and awaiting my attention at some point over the coming months, does appear to be based on photos of Zhang Zuolin; it only takes a *little* massaging of the timeline to have Sutton put a Skunk into Zhang Zuolin's possession. 

Unfortunately the kit doesn't come with the forward-facing machine guns...and holy shit, was the intent to fire mortars from inside the cab? Goodbye driver's eardrums!

All in all, a charming little kit of an oddball tankette, and one I'm excited to be able to put on my table at some point. Sutton himself is an interesting man, and I did manage to get my hands on a battered old copy of General of Fortune, a biography of him written by Charles Drage; the biographical information above is taken from Wikipedia and a few other websites, but I'm looking forward to reading his full biography. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 199

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

Homemade Jungle Terrain Completed

 I've deleted the previous post; it doesn't make much sense to have the process of making these jungle terrain pieces spread across two posts when I can just have one that covers the whole thing. Truth be told, I was expecting these to take much longer than they ended up being!

Just trimming the pegs on the tree trunks and hitting everything with some matte varnish left.

These are based on irregular Terrain Bases from Things From The Basement; I bought one of each set, and had one base left over from a previous set I'd bought; now I have one left over in a different shape! These were primed black, then the tree trunks glued into place. Once that was done, I painted over the MDF and the base of the plastic trees with a medium brown craft paint. 

Once that had tried, I painted some thinned down PVA glue over the painted areas, and gave everything a good coating of Woodland Scenics blended "Earth" ground cover. Once that had dried, I thinned down some more PVA glue even further, splodged it on in irregular patterns, and added my own mix of coarse "Light Green" turf and fine "Green Grass" turf. 

Once that was all well and dry, I hit everything with a very heavy coat of varnish to seal the flock down. 

The next step then was to get to work on the foliage! I'd bought two assortments of plastic "diorama" plants aimed at children's school projects off Amazon, yielding a total of 200 pieces. Some of them weren't really usable, but I had probably 150-odd pieces that were. I also bought a roughly-foot square rubber mat at my local craft shop, studded with little ferny bits. That right there was probably the biggest expenditure of the whole project, but I only ended up using about a third of it. 

I started by trimming the stems down on the Amazon plastic plants, mixing them all together in a bin.

After that, it was just a matter of warming up the ol' hot glue gun and grabbing bits of foliage at random out of the bin and gluing them down in a pleasing pattern around each tree trunk. As needed to fill space, I popped a ferny bit off the rubber mat, trimmed the socket down, and glued it down between other plants. The process went very quickly, aided by the relaxing tones of Ken over at the Yarkshire Reet Big Wargame Podcast; trimming the plants and gluing them down took roughly the duration of the latest episode. 

I had to move to a secondary desk in my basement; my main work bench doesn't have anywhere to plug a hot glue gun into!

Once the glue was all fully dried, I popped the canopies back on to the palm trees and sat back to admire my work, as seen at the top of the post. I'll still need to trim the pegs that the canopies fit on to, and hit everything with a coat of matte varnish once we get a dry day (maybe the end of this week). 

I'm out of palm trees, but I still have probably 30-40 bits of foliage left as well as 2-3rds of the ferny mat; it might not be immediately but I probably will do another bunch of these since they went together so easily and turned out so well. Maybe do a few with some elevation added with tiers of cork? 

I'd guess I spent about $62 on supplies for this project; given the amount I have left over for future projects, we can probably treat this as $45 worth of supplies, or about $4.50 per piece of terrain. Given the last time I bought pre-made jungle terrain, I got three bases for about $40, or about $13 apiece. Making my own has resulted in big savings! 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 199

Figures Painted in 2025: 162

More Modern Terrain

 Casting about yesterday for something I had primed and ready to take to my usual Monday night paint and chats, I settled on some scatter terrain I'd primed months ago but never gotten around to - some 3D-printed wrecked cars that I'd glued to MDF terrain bases with some Mantic "Terrain Crate" bits, and a set of six barricades from the same Terrain Crate box. 

While I'd gotten a lot done on them last night, I was able to polish them off this afternoon (I'd scheduled myself for a half-day at work to avoid the quarterly in-person meeting, and with it, a two hour commute and three hours of mandatory "fun"). I think they turned out really well:

I used some acrylic paint pens I'd picked up on my last trip to Harlequin Hobbies to ink some angry slogans on a few of the barricades, which I think turned out really well although the blue ended up weirdly metallic. 

The rusty silver car and the car on the bottom of the stack are done with Army Painter speed paints "Broadsword Silver" and something-"Copper," respectively, over black primer. The upper two cars in the stack are done with a couple of coats of TurboDork colored metallics. My friend Dave offered me a bottle of "Dirty Down Rust" effect to play with, but I either failed to shake the bottle sufficiently or failed to splodge the contents on heavily enough, because it looked more like a grease stain on the silver car than rust when it was dry; I sponged on some "Chestnut Brown" and "Carrot Top Orange" over it. 

Overall, I'm happy with how everything turned out, and happy to have these no longer hanging over my head waiting to be painted. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 199

Figures Painted in 2025: 162

African Warlord Army

 I've finished the 12 African Militia figures I'd started at the beginning of the week, bringing me up to a total of 17 finished figures for this project. These figures, from The Assault Group, were an absolute delight to paint - nice chunky sculpts, detailed without being bogged down in it, they paint up quick and look good without putting an exhausting amount of work into them. 

Group shot of all 17.

General Mutende oversees his troops.

First Squad

Second Squad

Character figures

Naturally, as soon as I took these pictures, I realized I'd missed a detail - three of them have two magazines taped together affixed to their guns, and I'd forgotten to paint the tape. This has been corrected. 

These figures give me about half of an army for Wars of Insurgency; I placed an order with Badger Games here in the USA for a few more packs of TAG Africans to round things out. I also ordered a few packs of TAG modern British, who will be painted as UN Peacekeepers; not a full force, but the beginnings of one, and as much as my hobby budget would allow for this paycheck. 

Also on my workbench currently...

I've begun work on a set of jungle pieces that I've been accumulating stuff for; irregular MDF terrain bases from Things From The Basement, cheap plastic palm trees and smaller plants off Amazon, etc. Looking at these, I probably should have ordered more palm trees. 

Next step for these is going to be painting and flocking the ground, and once that's done and sealed, I can start hot-gluing smaller plants into place. And in the background, you can see one of the more whimsical pieces of scatter terrain in my collection. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Inflatable Discount Monkey:

In the '80s and '90s, it was fairly common, at least in the US, to see giant inflatable gorillas used in advertising - especially on top of car dealerships, for some reason. In the 2000s, they were slowly replaced by the Wacky Waving Arm Inflatable Tube Men:

These over-cheerful schmucks.

I found an STL for an inflatable gorilla holding an "All Stock Must Go!" sale sign on MyMiniFactory, bought it, and brought it to my 3D printing guy, since it was very in keeping with the economically depressed "Rust Belt" environment that's inspired my modern urban tables. He's going to be an eye-catching addition to my tables, and served to use some of the neon red spray paint I accidentally bought thinking I was getting fire engine red. I'm just waiting for a dry day to prime his base (a 4" MDF disc) and he'll be ready to go. I feel like I should count him towards my figure count for the year, but how should I count him? As one figure? Counts as multiple?

Time to update the tracker:

Figures Acquired in 2025: 199

Figures Painted in 2025: 162

WIP: African Rebel Army

I needed something that was already primed and ready to go earlier this week to take to Monday night's paint and chat, and casting about I found the rest of the Modern African Militia from The Assault Group - I'd painted the first five a few weeks ago, and had another 12 primed and waiting their turn. In two hours' time on Monday, I finished all of their clothing and had painted the metal of their guns. Another two hours today and I got skin, hair, leather, wood and belt buckles finished as well. I also repainted the stocks on the first five's guns to be less yellow-looking. 

I'd bet that by the time I go to bed on Saturday I'll have these 12 finished, including flocked bases. 

What then? 

I admit I don't have much of a plan in mind. There'd been some thought when I purchased them as using them as local insurgents supported by Cobra in my GI Joe games, but not much beyond that. These have been a relaxing joy to paint and the Assault Group figures are very affordable; it's sorely tempting to get more and make a bigger project out of this. 

To that end, I bought a copy of Wars of Insurgency, written by Mike over at Lead Legionaries. It looks like a solid ruleset from a first read-through, and I think it should prove inspiring. Of course, I'll need one or two more forces...oh no...

Figures Acquired in 2025: 167

Figures Painted in 2025: 150

.45 Adventure Part 2 -This Time With An Opponent!

 Over the weekend I got a visit from Dave, a buddy of mine from Rochester (not to be confused with Dave, my 3D printing guy, here in Buffalo), who I've been running roleplaying games for for probably the better part of a decade. He's been incredibly generous with gifting me books over the years, and he expressed interest in trying out a skirmish wargame for the first time. He's got a taste for the old pulps, and actually played the Green Hornet in a Pulp Cthulhu game I put on some years back. So it was a no-brainer to get out my painted Green Hornet and Kato and use them for his first pulp wargaming experience. 

We played the same scenario I previously played solo, and played it twice, since the game went quick (though still a learning experience for both of us). The first game ended in a draw, with the Hornet and the DiMarco gang each taking one ledger off the board - and Kato being beaten to a pulp by gangster brick shithouse Fat Paulie! 

The Hornet goes through the pockets of knocked-out Perfect Tommy.

The second game went better, with the Hornet scoring a solid victory, claiming both Ledgers and having much, much, MUCH better rolls when firing his knockout gas gun at the gangsters. 

Dave had a great time with it, and even better, he felt inspired by it - he's struggled for years with both inspiration and fear of failure at the thought of running his own RPG games, but this gave him an immediate sense of "I can do this." He was kind enough to gift me a PDF copy of the second edition .45 Adventure rules, and even offered to have them printed and spiral bound for me. He also requested if it would be possible to play the Shadow in a future game, so this is not the end of our pulp gaming. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 167

Figures Painted in 2025: 150

.45 Adventure - "Shootout in the Park!"

 It's been delayed a few days due to just having busy evenings, but I finally got the table cleared off tonight and set up to test drive Rattrap Productions' ".45 Adventure (1st edition) using one of the sample adventures in the book - "Shootout in the Park!"

In this thrilling installment, the Green Hornet and Kato are in hot pursuit of "Little" Bobby DiMarco and his henchmen, Perfect Tommy and Fat Paulie. Little Bobby was fleeing the Hornet with an armful of ledgers detailing bribes made to various public officials. As they crossed the park, the ledgers were fumbled - and now both the Hornet and DiMarco are trying to find them. 

It's a gritty '80s reboot of the Green Hornet, with Uzis instead of Tommy Guns.

The Hornet won initiative on the first round, and everyone began spreading out to investigate the six clue markers spread across the table (laid out after I took a picture of the setup!). Pretty soon, clue markers were flying off the table - two revealed police snipers that took ineffectual pot shots, two were duds, and Fat Paulie stumbled across one of the ledgers without realizing what it was.

Confronting Little Bobby, the Hornet fired a soporific shot from his gas gun, which the mobster backpedaled away from. 

Meanwhile, Perfect Tommy and Kato converged on the clue marker hiding the second ledger.

The Hornet dodged away from DiMarco's bullets, right into the ham-sized fists of Fat Paulie. With the Hornet distracted, DiMarco dashed after the ledger that Fat Paulie had overlooked. 

While the Hornet eventually managed to duck out of the way long enough to give Fat Paulie a faceful of knockout gas, and Kato pummeled Perfect Tommy into giving up and fleeing the battlefield, leaving the ledger behind. Unfortunately, it was enough time for DiMarco to flee with his half of the ledgers.

With only half the information needed to bring to DA Scanlon, the Hornet was forced to concede that this adventure had been...a draw!

***

I'm calling that a really successful test play. There were a few things I found myself having to adjudicate because they either just weren't covered in the rules or the text was unclear. All in all, I think the game only took about 45 minutes; I'm excited to put this on on Saturday for my friend Dave, who's a Green Hornet fan. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 167

Figures Painted in 2025: 150

Getting Out of the Funk

 Two weeks without a post - I think that's the longest I've gone all year! Truth be told, I hit a bad slump in the aftermath of Wargames Among the Warplanes and I just had so much trouble even just sitting down at my hobby bench. Or I'd get there, get set up, and realize I'd been staring blankly at my miniatures for 15 minutes while paint dried on my palette. I'm not 100% sure what caused it, but I just didn't get the buoyed enjoyment/urge to hobby after this WATW that I'm used to having after a convention or show. 

I've spent a lot of that time thinking about what I'm missing, what might be bringing me down, and trying to figure out a way forward without going "Why sure, I'll buy a big bunch of miniatures for another new time period - that's sure to inspire me!"

Ultimately I had to remind myself that I'm painting for *me* - not for attention on social media, not for the purpose of putting on games for others (which has been a bit of a crapshoot this year, to be honest), but for my relaxation and peace of mind first and foremost. 

After that it was putting my butt on the stool and saying, "I'm going to sit and paint. Even if I only do one thing, that's something I wouldn't have gotten done otherwise. I'm just going to paint the hair on my Dracula's America figures and see how I feel once I've done that."

And I've got some stuff done.

First up, a group of five "African Militia" from The Assault Group - I had painted these in the immediate aftermath of Wargames Among the Warplanes, with a vague idea towards playing some Zona Alfa with the setting shifted from Eastern Europe to Central Africa. I don't remember exactly why I bought like five packs of TAG Modern Africa figures earlier this year, but I've got 'em and these were a fast, easy paint up - basically one session of painting plus a night to flock the bases.

Secondly, I finished* my initial six figures for Dracula's America - the beginnings of a campaign posse! 

OK, so not finished-finished, I need to do another coat of brown on the rim of the bases and flock them, but the painting figures part is finished! Most of these are from Northstar's official Dracula's America line, but I did include a Crow Warrior Woman from Clearco Miniatures, complete with elk-tooth dress, to mix things up a little. I'm really pleased with how they've turned out. 

What else, what else...

A buddy of mine loaned me a stack of rulebook from Rattrap Productions, covering their ".45 Adventures" pulp crimefighting skirmish and some of its supplements and spin-offs. The rulebooks are a little rough and could use another editorial pass or two (and this is apparently the first edition, not the current version) but I'm interested in giving them a try. 

The downside is they're making me go, "Oh, I should buy some 1920s Gangsters and rewatch 'The Untouchables!'"

I'll be doing a solo playtest this week, and on Saturday I have another friend coming into town to give it a go - he'll be playing the Green Hornet and Kato, I'll be some modern-ish gangsters using the figures I painted earlier this year for Fistful of Lead. 

So that's everything going on here. Time to update the tracker... Oh hey! I'm at 150 figures painted this year! Cool! 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 167

Figures Painted in 2025: 150

Go West, Young Monster

 I got an invite to join a group of gamers locally who are gearing up to start a fresh campaign of Osprey's Dracula's America - a western skirmish that can be played perfectly straight as a historical western game, or can be played as gothic horror in an 1870s America where Count Dracula has become President. Yes, you read that right. 

The game had been kind of vaguely on my radar, I knew I had friends (not local) who were fans, but I hadn't been interested in picking up a new period and a new ruleset. 

So naturally, having been invited to join a group who were playing it and loved it, I picked up a new period and a new ruleset, along with one of Northstar's prepackaged warbands. Or, I should say, my wife Gina picked it up for me - the two Wargames Among the Warplanes days excluded, 2025 hasn't been a great year for gaming, especially (non-solo) wargaming, for me. She was so excited that I'd been invited to join this group that she handed me her credit card and told me to buy whatever I needed. 

It arrived today:

And after dinner I set to work getting everyone cleaned up, flash trimmed and mold lines filed before gluing them to bases.

I also recalled I had another Native American figure in one of my project boxes - a Crow Warrior Woman from Clearco Miniatures, a very small (one-man) operation out of Spain that offers an eclectic mix of Native Americans, Neanderthals and modern zombie hunters. I'd received the figure as a complimentary inclusion in an order I'd placed with Mana Press last year and, not knowing what to do with it at the time, I dug her out and assembled her (her right hand, holding a rifle, is a separate piece), adding her to the collection; she might be subbed in for one of these figures, or be available as a future member of the posse. 

Tomorrow I'll get these 10 figures primed and then I can start painting. The current plan is to begin playing some time in October and I will not be caught with half-painted figures, I can tell you that! 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 167

Figures Painted in 2025: 139

Wargames Among the Warplanes Fall 2025

 Yesterday I spent a pleasant few hours at the National Warplanes Museum in Geneseo, NY, attending my second Wargames Among the Warplanes show (write-up of the first here). I was scheduled to run demos of "Perilous Tales," a solo/co-op game from Mike Hutchinson, the creator of Gaslands about heroes taking on supernatural threats and trying to fulfill objectives before time runs out. 

I'd optimistically hoped to squeeze three games into my time slot (9am to 1pm), but ultimately managed two; the first with three players, and the second with two (who stuck around from the first game). I did not take nearly enough photos.

The first match was against the Gargoyles, which in my experience have been a tricky villain to fight. The heroes had to Stop the Ritual, Rescue the Prisoner and Call for Help as their objectives. They opted to largely ignore the objectives and clear the board of enemies; by staying in groups and planning their actions carefully, they were able to eliminate both master Gargoyles and the various bat swarms flocking in their wake. With all enemies eliminated and time left on the countdown clock, they then easily rescued the prisoner and called for help. 

The second match was against the Wolf Man and his lycanthropic minions. This time, the objectives were Flip the Switches, Get the Evidence and Kill the Master. Again, the players focused on killing villains - to their own detriment, as they killed the Wolf Man before they could take a photo of him! The players tried to argue for taking photos of the Wolf Man's corpse, but I reminded them that upon dying he just turns back into a human and if they want trophy shots of that then the police are going to get involved. 

I once again didn't give myself time to play in anything, but I had a really nice chat with the guy running demos of Osprey's Zona Alfa on the next table over. He had an incredible set-up and like me he likes to furnish the insides of his model buildings. He'd shifted the setting from Eastern Europe to Zanzibar and listening to him pitch the game to players made me pull the rulebook down off my shelf when I got home and give it another look. 

I did a little bit of networking and got in touch with some local wargamers who aren't beholden to Games Workshop and the Warhammer juggernaut, which was very nice, and spent some time in conversation with an older gentleman who'd been wargaming locally since 1976 and he walked me through the history of wargaming clubs in the Buffalo-Rochester area and how they've largely disintegrated into small groups of guys meeting at home versus any sort of larger community. We do have new clubs that have formed - the Whiskey 7 Wargamers, the Greater Niagara Wargamers, etc - and events like this one suggest we're working our way back towards that larger community; he described a time when the clubs consisted of some 200 people between the two cities, with about 10% traveling from one to the other in any given week for game.

I had a really good conversation with the organizer for the event, and he made a point to thank me for running these smaller indie games, and showing players that there's more out there than just Games Workshop and Bolt Action. That really meant a lot and made me feel good; I'm thinking I might run a similar demo table of Perilous Tales at Running GAGG next year as well. Maybe finally pick up some winter terrain like I've been meaning to, since the convention's in February. 

All in all it was a really good day; I don't stay for the whole show because I hate being away from my wife for very long given her health issues, coupled with a 2 1/2 hour round trip drive. I do need to invest in some good inserts for my shoes for next time though; only six hours standing on a concrete floor and my feet were feeling it!