Rangers of Shadowdeep

After another long hiatus, with not very much happening hobby-wise, I thought I would put up the few things that I have been working on for my son's Dark Age army and my Rangers of Shadowdeep collection.

Today, I will talk about my Rangers collection. I had already cleaned them up and glued them to their bases last time I spoke about them back in April, but they have moved on a tad since then. I decided to photograph them where they are currently in the painting process so I can keep a journal of how slow I have been in getting them to the table in a fit state to game with.

Here are the first five Rangers as they stand today...

As you can see, the hollows in the lipped bases have been built up a little with wall filler to make a ground surface upon which the Rangers now appear to stand, and then they have been given a matt grey undercoat (courtesy of Halfords - a local UK car parts company). I may begin to use this spray undercoat more in the future as it server two major purposes for me: firstly, it is a lot cheaper than Games Workshop's spray cans and thus saves me some cash (which is always a good thing), and secondly, unlike with black undercoat, I can actually still make out the detail on the miniatures in order to paint them.

Here is the second set of five Rangers...

These ones seem to be a little more dynamic than the first set of five, so added together with the first five, there is a good range of activity going on. I can already see the specialist skills many of them have that they can take to the Shadowdeep.

I know this is going to be a slow burn project, but the idea is that I will kind of follow the story set out in the rulebook and scenarios. These ten Rangers are an elite force known as The Grey Cloaks (yeah, original I know - there are other units and teams which I may flesh out at a later date). Each Ranger has a small band of loyal, specialist companions from whom they can guarantee support when they go adventuring into the Shadowdeep, plus the city has its militia and standing army from which to draw extra volunteers (I will need to think of a paint scheme for the militia's and army units' uniforms, as well as a brand of miniatures from whom I will purchase said figures).

Real life (mostly work and illness) has got in the way of gaming quite a bit this year, and therefore my output both painting/hobbying and playing wise has diminished considerably; as a knock-on, my blogging has suffered too. I am hoping to rectify this situation next year by attempting to put aside a few hours each week, on a regular basis, to get something done. I have so many ideas and unfinished projects that I really do need to crack on with some of them.

Next post will feature some of my youngest son's latest army - he is collecting a Dark Ages "Celtic" army. I have already shown you the Welsh archers in a previous post, but this weekend saw me working on his Irish warriors - a Wargames Atlantic plastic box set that will form the backbone of his army.

Glueing and Prepping

Long time, no post. I have been busy doing lots of stuff other than gaming recently - real life has a habit of taking over sometimes. Luckily, I have been able to dip my toes into my hobby from time-to-time, but not really had much I can comment on for the blog. I have read a few rulebooks and supplements that I received as gifts for Christmas, kept on with my 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics reading, and started re-watching Game of Thrones on the DVDs I have. I have not seen series 8 yet (I must be the only fan not to have done), so I am re-watching them all over again to prep for the final series. I have managed to avoid spoilers thus far. I have heard it is very disappointing, but I have my own ideas for an ending, so I may not find it so.

Anyway, over the last couple of days we have had some very nice weather in the UK. The brighter days have meant that I can actually kind of see reasonably smallish details again. So, in order to get stuff done whilst the light holds, I broke out the most recently purchased miniatures (from the last few months for my son's but up to a few years ago for mine) that have been staring at me from their vantage points on the book shelves.

Alongside his interest in The Lord of the Rings, my youngest son has begun to show an interest in historical gaming; or, more accurately, he likes the miniatures and, as he now gets some pocket money, he decided to buy some. He has recently picked up a box of plastic Dark Age Irish warriors from Wargames Atlantic, some Welsh Archers from Gripping Beast, and a few Roman slave-type minis from Footsore, due to one of their likenesses to Grumio out of  the TV series Plebs.

My figures are from a mixture of manufacturers (Hasslefree, Otherworld and Northstar) that I went to to create some fantasy wabands for RPGs and Rangers of Shadowdeep, and the Nickstarter set of ten pairs of wizards for Frostgrave. The wizards are several years old now, but the Rangers and other fantasy miniatures are maybe only a year or so old. I have kind of set myself a limitation now due to the huge backlog of unassembled and unpainted figures that I have, where I can only buy new figures when I have finished painting my latest additions to the lead and plastic mountains. I am almost there with painting those Otherworld skeletons from a few posts back (if the light holds, I will get them finished in the next week or two), and I have now broken out my other latest purchases in order to get them completed too. Once these are completed, I may treat myself to a few more of the figures to make up the last of the adversaries for some of the games I wish to play.

Anyway, enough chat, and onto the lead (well pewter as it is nowadays). First up are my son's Welsh Archers. As mentioned above, they are from Gripping Beast. There are four poses and he got three of each pose. They are tidy little figures, and will make great standard warriors for any games we play with them...

I still need to glue their bows on (unfortunately we only seemed to get 10 bows instead of 12 - the bag they came in had split). They are shown alongside the Footsore Roman slave figures for a size comparison. My son wanted these mounted on Saga-style bases which came with the Welsh miniatures (I also had some spares in my bits box he could use for the Romans). Here are the Roman figures alongside a pair of plastic wolfhounds he got with the plastic Irish warriors set...

Next up are some of his new Lord of the Rings miniatures. Most of his figures for LotR are second hand from eBay. These are from a few packs he recently bought for himself, that he liked the look of...

The Bilbo miniature is metal, and the Elf warriors and Thranduil models are resin. The Elf warriors all need their shields glued on, and Thranduil needs his sword arm glued on. These are lovely miniatures but do not scale in at all with the historical figures above; the LotR figures are a fair bit smaller and finer (more anatomically accurate), and the quality of the sculpting is much better. That said, sometimes quantity is a quality in itself, and that is where the historical figures come into their own - good value for money for decent enough figures - armies can be built much more cheaply.

Next up are the last of my son's figures from this batch and the first of mine. They are Noldur's D&D figures bought from our local comic and gaming store a few months ago. Here we have a griffin and an umberhulk...

The griffin will be glued to a base the same as the umberhulk to fit in with more of my son's fantasy miniatures (all of his Lord of the Rings figures are on GW style round bases of various sizes). These figures are really nicely made and not too pricey for their size. For some reason my umberhulk came without one of its antennae - it was not in the box, so I could not have glued it back on even if I had found it. I am not too fussed actually, as it gives it a bit of character.

Next up are my Rangers and RPG characters...

They are from a variety of manufacturers and I have stuck them all onto 30mm lipped round bases. I am going to begin to standardise my basing if I can from now on, so they all fit in with my Lord of the Rings figures - 20mm for hobbits and other small creatures, 25mm for standard humans, elves, orcs etc., 30mm for heroes and medium-sized creatures like wolves, 40mm for mounted figures and medium-large monsters, 50mm for large monsters, trolls and giants, and larger bases for dragons etc.

The back row consists of Hasslefree figures, the second-rear row are from Otherworld, and the two front rows are Northstar's official Rangers of Shadowdeep figures. I have yet to glue on some of their arms and weapons - hopefully at some point this week I can accomplish that?

Finally, here are the first of the Frostgrave wizards that I bought a long time ago. Again, they are glued onto 30mm lipped bases to match in with the Rangers and adventurers above. Each school of magic is represented by a pair of wizards...

From left to right, these are; a Chronomancer and apprentice, an Elementalist and apprentice, an Enchanter and apprentice, an Illusionist and apprentice, and a Necromancer and apprentice. I have yet to decide which is the master and which the apprentice - that decision will most likely come once they have been painted, or not. I still have five more pairs to prep and glue, but the light has run out for today. I am working overtime all day tomorrow (another Bank Holiday in the UK), so will not get any modelling done then - hopefully there will be some good days through the coming week that will allow me to complete these.

In addition to the figures above, I have an eleventh pair of wizards (not sure what school they belong to until I look them up again) and some treasure tokens/markers for Frostgrave. There is also a box set of 20 plastic Frostgrave Soldiers and a sprue of 5 Frostgrave Barbarians which need assembling. Hopefully the next post will see all of these glued up at least.

I am really hoping to get some tabletop gaming going again very soon; either solo or with my youngest son. I have my eye on a few new rulesets too - Sellswords and Spellslingers (for solo gaming) and the latest version of Runequest; a game I played extensively back in the day. I no longer own these rules (I have owned three different editions in the past) and the new rulebooks look lavish, so I am very tempted.

So, there is plenty for me to be getting on with for now. Once the above miniatures have been fully prepped, they will need undercoating and then painting. Also, once the long summer days roll in, I may take another look at my LotR miniatures - I have over 800 to complete, although many are almost there.

Battle Systems - Northern Homestead

Good morning everybody - long time no post. This is due to a number of reasons, mostly good, but primarily because I have been working. After another long time out of work I managed to secure back-to-back contracts. I am still in the second role and it seems to be going well - hopefully at the end of this contract I will be back to where I want to be financially, so I can begin spending a little more time, effort and money on my hobby.

So, what have I been up to hobby-wise over the last few months? Due to my new work roles and various other reasons, I have not been able to see my youngest son often enough to do any actual playing, but we did do lots of sorting out and chatting about gaming. He has managed to put some paint onto some of his Ebay bought miniatures (not finished yet, but when they are I will feature them in a separate post) and also bought some new figures from a local comic and games shop. I bought a few one-off figures from the same comic/game shop (four halflings which are a bit smaller than the GW LotR ones and an Owlbear - one of my fave monsters from D&D), some Ghost Archipelago rule and scenario books, and some card-stock buildings from Battle Systems.

The card buildings are the main-stay of this post. A month or so back, out of the blue, my son sent me a few pictures on my phone and a link to a company called Battle Systems. He suggested that they might be good for our tabletop battles as they were quite cheap (relative to resin and plastic buildings they certainly are). They looked really good in the photos (not promo shots by the company but in-use shots by a gamer), so I thought I would buy a few to see how they turned out for myself.

There was a sale on at the web store (result!), so I was able to afford to buy enough buildings from my gaming budget to hopefully kit-out one of the scenarios in the Rangers of Shadowdeep rulebook. I chose three of the Northern Homesteads as my mainstay, plus a couple of outbuildings, as they could double-up for use as Rohan, D&D, Pathfinder and so on buildings for a quasi-Dark Age/Medieval setting. There are also options to buy snow effect roofs (rooves?) to allow gaming in Frostgrave or other cold-set climates (Winterfell or beyond the wall for Game of Thrones perhaps?).

The order was delivered in double-quick time and sat on my workbench (well, pile in the corner of the room) until two weekends back when my son was over and we decided to build the first homestead. Out of the box you get three sheets of card-stock building pieces (two the same plus another different one) and a small bag of plastic connection pieces.

The pieces push out very easily, with no cutting required. The only thing you don't get is a set of assembly instructions. Now, I have made many kits over the years so thought I would be able to construct these easily, but I went about these in completely the wrong way. I tried to put the connectors at the bottom of the walls etc. thinking they would be least visible there. However, after my son looked up an online tutorial and we found out that they should be joined by slots in the middle of the walls, the building went together in seconds. We literally built it in under two minutes. Once constructed, they are very sturdy.

There are three choices for the doors, two singles and a double. We decided on a simple single door for this building. As these kits are multi-purpose; they will fit in with all the other kits for completely customisable building construction, so many of the pieces can be used on other buildings. We will look at the watch towers and mead hall next so the double-doors can be used there (Meduseld anyone?) - they do look impressive.

The entry way - the door is off to one side with a porch to cover the entrance for times of inclement weather. You may also notice some holes in the thatch and flooring. There are pushout pieces to give buildings a more run-down look if required. We decided to go full-out on this building. The good thing is, the little bits that get pushed out can be used for scatter terrain later on too!

The front view - with attendant horse-head posts. Perfect for a Rohan setting.

The rear of the building has a platform upon which your archers can stand to defend their homes from marauding uruk-hai.

The side opposite the entrance shows the horse-head posts in better detail.

And finally an internal shot. With the kit you get internal flooring, beds, bed rolls, weapon racks and weapons; in fact all sorts of paraphernalia to sprinkle around the table top when gaming to add flavour. The weapons are a little over-sized, so I won't use them, but plenty of the other bits will be very useful as scatter.

Next time my son is over we will construct a few more of these buildings, most likely in different formats to make up a small hamlet. We can then fight over it with his Rohan (once re-painted) and orc miniatures before moving onto rangers of Shadowdeep once he has figures for his small warband for that game.

The system also features more medieval style buildings that would suit D&D and Pathfiner more, but they could also double-up as buildings from places like Bree or towns around Gondor and the fiefdoms in Lord of the Rings.

Overall, I am happy with my purchases. I will most likely try to find suitable basing material to put these on so they become even more sturdy and hard-wearing, and it will stop the flooring falling away from the buildings too when they are moved. The rest will hopefully be built in a few weeks' time, so I can photograph them all together to see how a hamlet or small village would look.

Rangers of Shadow Deep

Well, I finally saved up the pennies and ordered the Rangers of Shadow Deep rulebook from Modiphius. At the same time I also purchased a few packs of the official range of, erm, rangers from North Star. I will try to grab a few more miniatures from other manufacturers over the coming months to add to them to provide a bit of variety.

Anyway, here is my little haul that arrived during the week...

I will be reading through the rule book over the next week or so, so when my son is over again we can both stat up a ranger and their companions. I am hoping to give my son that sense of wonder that I had when I first started tabletop gaming back in the early days of Basic D&D. Unfortunately we do not have the time at the moment to play as often as I did back then, so I need a set of rules that will take me at least part of the way there.

This new version of the rulebook is nicely presented with plenty of beautifully drawn incidental pictures that add atmosphere to the book, as well as lots of tables and diagrams to make things easier to understand. There are plenty of scenarios to start a ranger off on their adventures, so I am hoping that this book will give my son and I several sessions of gaming in which to get used to the rules and mechanisms.

There are many supplemental PDF adventure packs available to download too, so I can add these to the missions my son can adventure on. I have read a few other blogs of people who have played through the available scenarios and all their takes are different, with some gamers adding in their own linking aventures too. From what I have seen and heard so far, this is quite a flexible game, and should provide hours of enjoyment for us. I will write another blog entry once I have read and digested the rules.