Moving Forward on the Maya

I received a package today from Gringo 40s containing a small assortment of their Maya figures - shamans, a chieftain, princess, a few peasants carrying packs of maize and some casualty figures. Ged at Gringo 40s went well above and beyond in my interactions with him - detailed communication throughout (some of the figures I'd ordered had had their mold blow out, necessitating substitutions), a bonus figure as a thank you for ordering, and some hints about a planned expansion to the Gringo40s Mesoamerican line.

Naturally, I couldn't wait to get them on the workbench, cleaned up and glued to bases. The weather should be clear and well above freezing the rest of the week, so priming them is going to be possible. The chieftain, princess, casualties and peasants went on 40mm round bases - to serve as Warlords, Panicked markers and "People" objective tokens under Tribal's rules. The princess, with her extravagant headgear, could easily be either a Warlord or an objective to be rescued, kidnapped, or even sacrificed in game. 

This cleared out the last of my stock of 40mm round bases from Renedra, so I will need more at some point in the not too distant future. 

I also finished some painting for the Maya tonight!

I was anxious to get a good handle on painting Mesoamerican skin tones, so I grabbed the five figures showing the most collective skin from my pile of Lucid Eye "Jaguar Tribes" ersatz Maya. These five absolute madmen, dressed in naught but a cotton belt, are carrying hornets' nests to throw at their enemies. 

While there is some questionable historical support for hornets being weaponized by the Maya in the Popul Vuh, the idea of picking up a hornets' nest, carrying it to the battlefield and throwing it at someone hoping they get stung more than you do seems to originate in the video game "Medieval II: Total War." Still, the legend is good enough to warrant a place on my table. 

I like the way the skin tone came out - over black primer, this is two coats of Reaper "Bronzed Shadow," washed liberally with GW "Reikland Flesh Shade" before getting re-highlighted with more Bronzed Shadow. Hair is Reaper "Coal Black," which has a bit of blue-green to it; I really like it for any sort of organic black like hair, and use it quite a bit for black leather as well. It's a color Reaper only offers in December - I've got about half a bottle left but I'll probably pick some more up next month just to ensure I don't run out! The cotton cloth is base coated in Reaper "Yellowed Bone," washed with GW "Seraphim Sepia" and highlighted along the edges with "Creamy Ivory."

I should probably go in with a micron pigma pen or a fine-tipped brush and apply some tattoos to these guys; I was reminded of the 2006 Mel Gibson movie "Apocalypto" tonight, so I'll probably try to rewatch it soon for inspiration. 

Tomorrow night I should really get my new recruits started for Dracula's America - can't play my next game with unpainted figures! 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 246

Figures Painted in 2025: 169

Anniversary Acquisitions

 So because my wife Gina and I dated for so long before getting married, we've opted to celebrate two anniversaries a year - our wedding anniversary, on July 28th, and our dating anniversary, on November 18th. This year marks 15 years since we first met, and we've given each other our gifts early.

We both have hobbies that we've been in for a long time, so to take any guess work out of giving each other hobby supplies we both maintain wishlists that the other can pick from for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc. 

This year, she got me a few Old West releases from Brigade Games - a chuck wagon, and a set of figures including a cook and two cowboys eating dinner. Perfect for recreating *that* iconic scene from Blazing Saddles!

I'll have to sort out a large enough base to put the wagon, mules, cook and dining cowboys on, and maybe a campfire as well. Then figure out how to assemble the wagon! 

She also picked me up a physical copy of "Wars of Insurgency," the modern conflict ruleset from the man, the myth, the legend, Mike Demana over at Lead Legionaries. I've got the PDF already, but I can only grasp a ruleset so much from reading a PDF. I really do need a physical copy in front of me, and Mike is such a great guy that it's a pleasure to support his game design endeavors. I do have most of a 200-point force for Wars of Insurgency already painted, with only maybe 13 figures left to go. Whether that ever sees the tabletop (I'll probably need to paint an opposition force as well for that!) or not remains to be seen. 

2026 Goals #1: 6th Century "Star Wars"

 

That's a heck of a title, isn't it?

Let me explain.

Looking ahead to 2026 and planning my hobby goals, one thing I want to do is a project centered on pre-European Contact Maya culture. This stems from my friend Chris gifting me copies of some Maya miniatures he'd had sculpted and cast, which got me reading about these fascinating people of Central America for the first time since the Mesoamerican history class I took in college almost 20 years ago. 

The figures Chris gave me. They're based and primed now.

In reading "A Forest of Kings," by Linda Schele and David Freidel, I came across the concept of Maya "Star Wars." The Maya of the first millennium CE were every bit as into astronomy/astrology as the Ancient Egyptians, and they had a specific type of warfare in which city-states would attack and even overthrow one another in conjunction with certain appearances of the planet Venus (known as Chak ek', the "Great Star") in the night sky. Linda Schele named these Venus-driven conflicts "Star Wars."

Well who could resist?

To go with these figures from Chris, I've bought about 30 figures from Lucid Eye's "Savage Core" range - their "Jaguar Tribes" figures are passable Maya/generically Mesoamerican - as well as a few Maya character figures from Paymaster Games (with an eye towards getting more) and a few days ago ordered another 10 Maya figures from Gringo 40s. 

I've also bought some terrain: two MDF temples and two pairs of engraved columns from Things From The Basement, and so far two Aztec-style houses and a pair of Olmec heads from Acheson Creations. I even got a Lemax cobblestone-stamped vinyl mat from my local craft store, designed for use with Christmas village displays, to form a city square. There will be more houses, grain storage, etc., ordered from Acheson in the coming months, and probably more columns (and maybe some walls/lookout towers) from Things From The Basement. 

So what's the plan?

I want to put on a game of Maya warfare at the June 2026 Wargames Among the Warplanes show that's able to seat four players, in which one side (ideally, two players each taking one "wing" of an invading army) attacks a Maya city-state being defended by the other side (again, ideally two players each taking one "wing" of a defending army). Each army has specific goals (capture slaves/sacrifices, loot a treasury, protect the King's daughter, etc) so that victory isn't simply a matter of "we move all armies to the middle of the table and roll dice until one side's all dead."

Ruleset: Right now I'm looking at Mana Press' "Tribal, 2nd Edition" rules for this. Each warband will be about 16-18 figures (three units of five, a warlord, and a hero, maybe two heroes), which feels very doable painting-wise. And it's a ruleset that's already designed to handle ceremonial warfare among pre-gunpowder peoples, where how much Honor (or, since the game is written by non-Americans, Honour) one gains and loses is as important if not more so than actual victory in the field. 

I haven't played Tribal, but I've got 7 months to practice and get enough of a handle on it to confidently teach the game at an event. I think Chris has played it so maybe I can talk him into giving me a hand. 

The figures I have right now are enough to yield two warbands. So I'm already off to a great start in terms of purchasing, I just have to start slinging paint at them. I've got four figures I need to paint for my Dracula's America posse ahead of them, but once those are taken care of I plan to jump on painting my Maya. The sooner they're painted the sooner they're on the gaming table. 

I might grab another eight or nine packs of Lucid Eye Jaguar Tribes to make up the second two warbands, or I might order a bunch of Maya from Gringo 40s; the only thing I'm maybe worried about there is I've heard their alloy is softer, so spears and atlatls tend to be on the bendy side. Ged at Gringo 40s has also let me know in the email exchange following my order that he's planning on expanding their Mesoamerican offerings in the coming year. So either way I'm anticipating another Gringo 40s order or two or three in the coming months. 

As mentioned above, I've made a start on terrain collecting. For a lot of my terrain I'm taking beaucoup inspiration from Mark Morin's 2022 Mesoamerican project; reading his blog posts reminded me of Acheson's offerings (which fortuitously came back into production exactly when I started considering this project). Things From The Basement also ran a 20% off sale on their Mesoamerican-inspired "Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago" line of buildings a few months ago, allowing me to get both temples and a pair of column sets at a discount. 

I'm still so damn proud of how these turned out.

I also have my jungle terrain that I scratchbuilt; it surprisingly does not provide that much coverage on a 3x3 table, much less the 4x4 I'd want to use for an event game. So producing more bases of jungle terrain will be a necessity; fortunately, they're pretty fast and easy to make all things considered! Maybe do another 20 terrain bases? 

I've got a pair of Olmec stone heads from Acheson, one intact and one ruined; I'll incorporate these into terrain bases for variety and because the Maya were aware of the Olmec people and saw them as their ancestors, so having Olmec ruins on the table is not anachronistic or anything like that. Less anachronistic than having "Aztec" branded architecture, though from what I've seen in my readings so far there was probably a lot of overlap between cultures in that regard. I'm not expecting any tenured Maya studies scholars showing up at my wargaming table! 

So let's start breaking this down into steps:

1. Paint 34 figures that I already have cleaned, based and primed.
2. Begin practicing Tribal, using the solo rules provided in the rulebook and Chris' help if he's amenable.
3. Buy and paint an additional 34 figures (plus additional figures for objective markers).
4. Assemble and paint the terrain I already have.
5. DETERMINE HOW MANY MORE BUILDINGS I WANT TO HAVE ON THE TABLE. This is a project I can easily see growing dangerously, to the point where I end up with a village filling half the table and that's probably not necessary. I just need to evoke the feel of a Maya city on the tabletop, not build an accurate recreation. My love of cluttered urban table setups does not need to come into play here! It helps that the Maya didn't have wheeled vehicles or carts, domesticated animals, crates, barrels, garbage cans or any of my usual street scatter. 
6. Buy, assemble and paint the remaining buildings I want/need.
7. Produce another 20 bases of jungle terrain. 
8. Make sure I can pack it all securely and ensure it fits in my car. Another vitally important step in the process! 

This feels like a big project but one that breaks down into manageable chunks; one eats an elephant a bite at a time, and I feel like this divides neatly into phases or sub-projects that I can hopefully rotate between to keep things feeling fresh. Having an outlined plan will also hopefully help me stay motivated and moving forward. 

I do also want to make sure I'm allowing myself grace to paint other things along the way; if I need to paint new posse members for Dracula's America, or if I want to paint aliens for Majestic 13, I should feel free to do so and not let my anxiety convince me that I'm meaningfully taking away from the larger Maya project by doing so. 

I think that sums up the project outline, at least for now. As we wargamers know all too well, no plan survives contact with the enemy, so we'll see what needs to change as I work my way through it. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 244

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

How Have I Done? A Look Back At My 2025 Goals

 Last year, I wrote a blog post laying out 2025 goals for myself for the hobby - "an actionable plan for responsible hobbying," I called it. And while it's not been quite a year since writing that, I think it's a good time to look back over what I've accomplished towards that set of goals. Also, I've wrenched my knee good and hard and hobbling downstairs to my work bench is more hassle than I'm eager to engage in right now. 

I set three goals for myself:

• Focus my efforts on one era and locale - modern urban skirmishes.
• Play at least two games a month, solo or otherwise.
• Paint more figures than I buy. 

So how'd I do?

1) Focus my efforts on one era and locale: I did really well with this for the first six months of the year. And I think part of that came down to me having a specific goal I was painting towards - the Spring Wargames Among the Warplanes show, where I put on a modern urban skirmish using Fistful of Lead. After that is where I started to drift and flail about, picking up new games, new eras (ECW with Devilry Afoot, Mayans, Modern Africa, Dracula's America) and falling off the wagon of discipline. I had initially intended to demo Devilry Afoot at the fall Wargames Among the Warplanes, but I didn't feel confident enough in my grasp of the game, and defaulted back to a modern urban skirmish using Perilous Tales. 

2) Play at least two games a month: This one I aced, because if I did have a month where I only played one game, I made up for it with three games the next month. And I don't see myself falling off the wagon with this one in the last month and a half of 2025. No notes, I'm great at this.

3) Paint more figures than I buy: So as of right now I'm 80 figures in the red. And a lot of that is directly attributable to the post-June flailing I mentioned in point 1 above; picking up new eras meant picking up new figures. Some of these purchases are more forgivable than others, in my eyes. Getting invited to join a group of guys playing Dracula's America and consequently buying 15 or so Wild West figures and getting half of them painted up to start playing with immediately is one thing; adding 20-30 figures to my "Back of Beyond" leadpile because I'm interested in the period and I've got a pipe dream of running a game (that I would have to paint 2-4 separate armies for!) at an event with them is something different. 

So what can I learn from all this?

I think going forward I want to set some more specific goals for myself, in the form of "I am painting these figures because I want to play X game with them on Y date." Having Wargames Among the Warplanes in June kept me pretty well focused from January on, with a few small side forays along the way. 

I also think I've done pretty well overall with not impulse buying (at least not too severely). Any time I made a purchase it was "I have a project in mind for this," even if that project (*cough* Back of Beyond *cough*) was a bit nebulous. Dracula's America is where I've done the best at that - I bought my initial posse, and only ordered 7 additional figures, of which only one was really an "impulse" figure (I couldn't resist throwing a Rooster Cogburn-lookalike into an order from Brigade Games!). Again, I think the more tightly focused and detailed my gaming plan is, the better I do with the shopping aspect of things. 

For 2026, I am looking at running games at both the spring and fall Wargames Among the Warplanes again, so maybe this means I set a "first six months" goal of prepping for the spring show, then a "next three months" goal of prepping for the fall show, and then after September I begin planning for 2027. I am thinking about attending "Fall-In!" convention in Pennsylvania next November (I've got a couple people tugging on my sleeve to attend, and the pictures on Facebook were enticing to say the least) if I can swing it financially; our driveway really needs to be redone and that is going to be a hefty chunk of cash. 

It's all going to take more thought; I'll get a blog post up in the coming weeks outlining specific hobby goals for 2026. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 244

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

Nickel City Smoke Shop (As Finished As It's Gonna Get in 2025!)

 Last night it began to snow here in Buffalo, NY. And it's been snowing all day today so far. Which means my window for priming and varnishing outdoors has closed until next spring.

The view from my WFH desk today.

Which means I can't get a coat of spray varnish on to the Nickel City Smoke Shop, and consequently can't glue the window panes into place (since I need to varnish first so the glass doesn't "frost"). It also means any furniture I order for this building likely won't get primed and painted until spring. 

So that means that, with the signs, posters and ads I glued on over the weekend, the Nickel City Smoke Shop is as done as it's going to get this year.

I'm really proud of the sign over the window. I eyeballed sizing on the sign itself when I was making it in MSPaint, cut it out and put it up against a 20x40mm base I'd sprayed black - and barely had to do any trimming to make it fit right. 

"Anaconda Malt Liquor" is a reference to the 2009 Blaxploitation spoof "Black Dynamite," in which the drink is a major plot point. I won't spoil it, but the scene of Black Dynamite and his companions decoding the hidden message in the label is a side-splitter. 

While doing Google Image Searches for posters and ideas for signs and, admittedly, with an eye towards emphasizing a run-down seediness to the terrain, I stumbled across an ad that ran on Facebook for a strip club in California offering "Welfare Wednesdays," offering discounts to patrons who could show proof they were receiving government assistance. It was so low-brow, so tacky, I immediately saved the picture to my terrain folder.  

And on the inside of the Smoke Shop, posters for "Up in Smoke" and "Nice Dreams" from Cheech and Chong.

I do still need to figure out something to put over the pegs from the awning that stick out on the inside. 

WIP: Nickel City Smoke Shop and Community Center

With the weather getting colder, I jumped back into an MDF kit I started a few weeks back - cold and wet means no taking stuff outside to prime or varnish! This is a two story "Mean Streets" brownstone from Atomic Laser Cut Designs, the manufacturer of many of my recent modern buildings. In fact, I think ALL of the MDF buildings I've built in 2025 have been ALCD kits - the pawn shop, ramen restaurant and Off-Track Betting buildings I've built have all been Atomic Laser Cut Designs kits. This is my first two-story building, the beginnings of an effort to add more verticality to my modern terrain layouts. 

There's a street about five minutes from my house, Webster Street, which is all older two and three story buildings with a shop at ground level and apartments above, all looking very much like this kit. So Webster Street is going to be my point of reference in collecting a few more of these taller buildings from Atomic Laser Cut Designs. Incidentally, while we're still very much a Rust Belt town, Webster Street has gotten significant sprucing up in recent years thanks to efforts from our phenomenal mayor and is now a great place to go and eat or shop; my models might end up a bit more of a blend of Webster Street of today and 10-15 years ago. 

I still need to hit my local Office Max and do some color printing for signs, bill boards and interior art, but otherwise the building itself is pretty much complete. Gluing acetate into the windows will probably have to wait until spring, because I'm not sure the weather will cooperate for spray varnishing the building, and I'd like to do that before I glue the windows in so the "glass" doesn't frost. 

There's graffiti decals from both Green Stuff World and Dave's Decals on the walls, most notably the XL "pinup" graffiti next to the back door. I threw a sheet of these supersized decals in an order with Dave a while back on a whim, and this is the first one I've used; I'll leave it to the viewer to guess if the full word behind her is "SWANK" or "SPANK"! Hopefully not "STANK"...

Part of why I chose to use the XL decal is because I decided to make the ground floor shop a cannabis dispensary/head shop. A lot of these have cropped up around here since New York State legalized marijuana, ranging from high end dispensaries that look like Apple stores to grubby spots that look like they should have Cheech & Chong versions of the venerable cigar store Indian out front. There's one right on Webster Street that has a huge, lavish mural covering one side of the building done in the style of an EC Comics' scifi cover from the 1950s, so I knew I wanted some more color for mine. A detailed graffiti mural centered around a buxom blonde pinup felt right for my seedier, more run-down tabletop town. 

While my terrain is fairly generic as to location (other than America's Rust Belt), this one actually will have a reference to location; Buffalo, NY is nicknamed the "Nickel City" due to the American Bison (also called a Buffalo) on the back of the old "Indian Head" nickel, and the sign I've made for over the front window identifies the dispensary as "Nickel City Smoke Shop."

The most challenging part of the build was actually the awning over the front door - It hooks into the wall instead of just slotting in, so I had to spray each piece individually with beige spray paint and then assemble it in the wall - slotting the sides in, letting the glue dry, then fitting the top and front pieces in. 

Inside, each level has a paper floor pattern from Sarissa Precision glued down into place:

The black and white tile floor is, for me at least, a bit dizzying to look at for too long - which might be either great or terrible for a shop catering to stoners! As far as interior furnishings go, I'm thinking about grabbing the "Spice Shop Interior" from Miniature Building Authority and repurposing it. I scaled down some Cheech & Chong movie posters and some counter-culture art from the 1960s and 70s - the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural, etc. - to decorate the walls with as well. 

The second story, with the wooden floor, is going to be a community center of sorts, an open space for people to congregate with like-minded sorts. Of course, I love hiding things in my builds that reward taking the time to look at them, so it's probably not going to be quite so straight forward as that! I won't say any more until I can show off the completed, furnished room. 

I am debating what to do with the roof; it's a lot of wide open space. I could put a 3D printed air conditioning unit up there, maybe some teeny tiny little pigeons; I have some picnic-themed bits from a Mantic Terrain Crate box, maybe someone got up there for a private party. Just something to break up the expanse of gray and add some visual interest while keeping it largely playable. 

I did do some test-fitting on an Atomic Laser Cut Designs billboard set and placed it on the roof to see how it would look; once completed it'd be something I'd keep separate so I could place it on different roofs or next to roads to maximize it's usefulness on the table.

And the only other big thing to do with this kit is going to be some advertising posted on the side walls of the second floor. A big "Camel Cigarettes" ad or maybe a billboard for a local restaurant kind of deal. Otherwise, the walls are a bit bland! I thought about some "Ghost Ads" decals from Dave's Decals, with the faded remnants of decades-old ads still lingering on the walls; I absolutely see some of those walking down Webster Street! I'm iffy though because the decals tend to have the brick pattern printed on them which won't match up with the incised brick patterning on the MDF. It might look fine, it might not. 

With the OTB next door for height comparison.

I'll probably head to Office Max tomorrow morning to do my printing, so I can finish pasting things on to this building in the afternoon. I've also got my internal furnishings for the Off-Track Betting finally primed so I can start painting those and gluing them into the building as well. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 234

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

Support Indie Miniature Companies!

 I impulse bought some miniatures yesterday. I've had my eye on some of Mortal Arrow's supersized arachnids for a while now, but there was a stretch where they were just out of stock. I saw on Facebook that Mortal Arrow was running a Kickstarter for some new fantasy monsters, and I checked the website...and bought some bugs and fungus.

I've always had a fascination with the natural world, and I'm perfectly comfortable with most invertebrates - spiders, wasps, slugs, scorpions, none of them bother me (Exception: I have a knee-jerk reaction to centipedes where I just get hit with an overwhelming urge to flee from them. I blame it on one falling off my bedroom ceiling onto my face when I was a kid). One of my favorites are a lesser-known family of arachnids known as Tailless or False Whip-Scorpions. Non-venomous and pretty much entirely harmless to humans, these flattened creatures have "arms" similar to a mantis and a pair of limbs lengthened into sensory "whips" that function like antennae. Mortal Arrow first caught my eye because they produce a couple different miniatures of oversized Tailless Whip-Scorpions to menace your D&D players with when giant spiders get boring. A vivid green one is visible on the cover of the classic AD&D module "Queen of the Demonweb Pits," so they certainly have a respectable pedigree in that regard! 

Naturally, I ordered a pair of them, along with a "Corrupted Myconid Rasper" - a fungal centipede monster with a marvelously dour and alien face, which I'm eager to put into my games of Majestic 13 as an extraterrestrial threat. 

Well, it turns out Mortal Arrow is pretty much local to me, because the miniatures arrived today, about 35 hours after I placed the order. This must be how wargamers around Nottingham feel. 

Mike at Mortal Arrow was generous enough to throw in a resin 60mm base crusted with sculpted mushrooms and a nice note. And this right here is why I'm so fantastically loyal to indie miniatures companies. I don't buy from Games Workshop, and if I did, I wouldn't get extras and a nice note. But when I buy from someone working out of their garage or basement - someone like Mortal Arrow, or Forge of Ice, Crocodile Games, Wargames Foundry (on the bigger end of things for me but still fundamentally a family business), Bad Squiddo, Brigade Games - I know I matter as a customer, that my purchase makes a difference to them. There's no shareholders, no payola to influencers on social media to keep them shilling product, just one, two or maybe at most five or six people who are passionate about the hobby and eager to share that passion. 

The figures I got from Mortal Arrow are all beautifully crisp casts with minimal clean-up necessary; it'll probably be ten minutes total with an X-acto and file for all three figures, at most. The assembly for each figure is straightforward, with well defined pegs and sockets to guide placement of pieces. The Rasper in particular is really well designed in how the pieces fit together; I was able to put the pieces together on my desk and the pegs and gravity held everything together. When I'm ready to go in with file and glue, it's going to be a snap to complete. And that's something I think deserves to be shouted out because not every company, big or small, does the same (I'm having flashbacks to gluing hands to wrists on too many figures over the years as I type that!)

Mortal Arrow is running a Kickstarter currently as previously mentioned, for those interested in such things, all themed around brain monsters - drawing inspiration from the Elder Brains, Mind Flayers and Intellect Devourers of D&D, but also spinning off in several new and exciting directions from that wellspring.

I've placed a small pledge which may get enlarged in the pledge manager when the time comes. I definitely want the "Intellect Constrictor" giant brain snake, but the flying brain octopus also tickles the Basil Wolverton comic fan in me. 

On the topic of Kickstarters, my friend Joshua Slater is also running one at the moment, for a small set of Paul Muller-sculpted grotesqueries themed around the idea of "twins." I've backed this as well; Josh is one of the nicest and most generous people I've met in this hobby, and that's saying something given how eager so many hobbyists I've met are to help each other succeed with their projects. I have a (woefully half-painted) regiment of mid-90s Orcs, half of which Josh surprised me with just because he found them in his stash and thought of me. I've made a modest pledge to this one as well that again, may expand in the pledge manager. That two-faced creature with the tail is the sort of thing that I'll find plenty of uses for in my games. 

So yeah, I expect I'm preaching to the choir to some degree here on my blog, but support small companies and passionate hobbyists working to bring their vision to life in resin and metal for the world to see. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 234

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

Majestic 13: Operation Dirt Nap

 "They call him 'the Lieutenant.' Supposedly he's a 'Nam vet; nobody knows his real name, what rank he held or if he even served in the US Army - or any army. No one even knows if he's got a permanent address. He knows every NATO weapon better than you know your own phone number, that's for certain. You can't sneak up on him - and if you try you're lucky if you get off with just a broken jaw. He's getting some sort of task force together, real hush-hush; something about 'the Big Enemy'..."

***

With some of the modern terrain I've finished this year, it was about time I got another modern game on the table, and I decided to go with Snarling Badger's "Majestic 13" - and rather than continue with the team I started back in January, I decided to start fresh. In truth, I felt like I'd given myself the game on easy mode with my previous team - two rocket launchers and a light machine gun made short work of monsters and the base upgrades I'd collected meant that special missions would be heavily slanted in my favor. 

The new team is "The Last Liners" - a group of ordinary (for a given value of ordinary) citizens who have gotten involved in the fight against the villainous alien invaders of FORCE. Led by the Lieutenant, a veteran of the ongoing war against FORCE. Having survived horrors that butchered the rest of his previous team, he went underground and recruited his own agents, off the grid, to continue the good fight for humanity and the Earth. 

Left to Right: Becky, Hank, the Lieutenant, Maria (in back), and Sarah-Jane

Catching wind of something slithering into a run-down trailer park, the Lieutenant activated his team. It was time to prove themselves!

Arriving in the trailer park was a monster known as a Terraformer, a hulking entity that warps and degrades the landscape around it, turning stone into mud and rusting steel with its very presence. I'd previously fought the Terraformer back in February 2024, with my first team. The Last Liners' secondary objective will be to collect tissue samples from pieces of terrain the creature comes into contact with. 

The Last Liners deployed in cover, scattered across the board. The Terraformer failed to spot any of them, and wandered towards the center of the board as the Lieutenant clipped it with a shot from his M-16, ducking into one of the trailers to avoid its alien gaze. Becky collected a tissue sample off the trailer the monster had slithered over, while Hank and Sarah-Jane chipped away at the Terraformer's hit points. Unfortunately, Maria found herself in the creature's line of sight as she took a shot at it.

The Terraformer pummeled her again and again with its pseudopods, though she resisted the stunning side-effects of the creature's touch. Spitting blood, she grinned defiantly. "Is that the best you've got?"

The Lieutenant took a shot at the monster, and scored a Critical Hit, doubling his damage - but also granting the monster an extra activation, which it used to continue clobbering Maria. On her activation, she darted over towards Sarah-Jane and her med kit, and Becky ran to get line of sight on the creature before calling down a drone strike. The monster lashed out again at Maria before getting bathed in fire.

At the start of Turn 3, I rolled FUBAR and it came up "Sudden Storm" - reducing all visibility to 12" for both the Last Liners and the Terraformer. Maria ran from the monster, luring it away from Sarah-Jane and into range of Hank's LMG; unfortunately for Maria, Hank rolled a critical hit in shooting the Terraformer, granting it a bonus action that resulted in Maria being put out of action. 

Fortunately, though, this dealt enough damage to put the monster "In Extremis" - from here on out the monster would get an extra action but take 2D6 damage every time it activated.

Enraged, the Terraformer charged Becky (the next nearest team member), lashing out with its pseudopods; unfortunately she did fail her save and became Stunned on top of taking a lot of damage. The Lieutenant ran towards her, med-kit in hand, but the Terraformer struck her again and she failed two saves; even if I rolled all 1s for damage, it still would have been more than she could take, and she went out of action as well.

Hank and Sarah-Jane both opened fire on the monster, and it finally collapsed, dying in Turn 4. Victory for the Last Liners!

I always feel like Majestic 13 brings out the best in my terrain set ups; maybe I should start using the game's terrain layout charts for other games as well. I took the opportunity to put some of the more amusing and less-serious terrain pieces I'd done this year on the table, in the form of the alligator-infested swimming pool and the giant inflatable gorilla holding an "All Stock Must Go" sign. 

I was really impressed with how well the Last Liners did; even with two characters going out of action, they scored two critical hits on the monster (versus the last time the Terraformer was on my table, in which it rolled FOUR critical hits against my agents!) and managed to call in the drone strike fairly early on in the game. If I manage to kill the monster, it's usually in the fifth and final turn of the game, so killing it on Turn 4 today was pretty cool. 

Continuing on into the post-mission part of the game, I rolled to see if and how Becky and Maria survived, and both of them came out just fine, with no lasting injuries, psychological trauma or alien parasites from their time on the battlefield. Even more impressive, I managed to successfully requisition two new pieces of gear; the Last Liners fall under the category of "The Dispersed," in game terms, which gives them some advantages in deployment, but penalizes them on bureaucracy rolls to requisition new gear. So now the Lieutenant has a Scanner, which will make it easier to detect hidden threats, and Sarah-Jane has a fancy new scope on her rifle. Unfortunately, their efforts to requisition an upgrade to their base, in the form of an Internet Monitoring Station, were lost in bureaucratic red tape. 

Everyone also scored enough experience points to buy an improvement in one attribute; the Lieutenant boosted his Combat ability, Hank his Fortitude, Becky her Acuity, Sarah-Jane her Fortitude, and Maria her Combat ability. 

All in all, a really good game and an evening well spent. Looking forward to the next one! 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 231

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

More Arrivals for the Back of Beyond

 Just a quick note of a couple new arrivals at Casa de Adcock, geared towards the Back of Beyond.

I'd had a meeting with my immediate higher-up at work where she was expecting to have to tell me to work harder, smarter, and more efficiently, but quickly realized that I'm doing the work of three people, have been screwed over by two others, and I'm doing everything right and not cutting corners in the process. After being told that I'm doing everything right, and to keep up the good work, I decided to reward myself; I'd had my eye on this painting guide, available from Caliver Books, since it released a few months ago. It's a lovely volume, and it's given me a lot of ideas for painting my various sundry Russians (as well as giving me plenty of ideas of figures I'd like to acquire!)

I also received an order of Copplestone Bolsheviks - two packs of infantry (one in greatcoats, one without), a blister of Commissars, and a field gun; I thought I'd ordered the Maxim Gun team, but this works fine for my purposes as well. These were much cleaner casts than the last pack of White Russians I'd ordered; a few straightened bayonets and a few mold lines filed and all of the infantry were ready to be glued to bases. My window for priming is closing rapidly, so I'm trying to get as much ready to go before it's too cold and damp outside to start anything new. I'll probably work on the artillery over the next few days, but it may prove to be the case that it needs to wait until spring to be painted. 

Figures Acquired in 2025: 231

Figures Painted in 2025: 164

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