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

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