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Monday 30 April 2007

Man, I feel like a woman!

Ma joie est grande! Pourquoi? Parce que j'ai l'honneur de vous présenter la toute nouvelle bande fraîchement peinte de Stanzi. Elle mènera désormais une bande d'orcs et de goblins (et de squigs!).

C'est une bande, pour ainsi dire, unique car elle est composée d'orcs, goblins (et de squigs!) ayant renoncé à la violence. Et oui! Ils veulent divulguer leur message de paix et d'amour parmi les bandes belligérantes de Mordheim, et ils sont prêts à défendre leurs idéaux à grands coups de... fleurs? Oui enfin, des fleurs qui seront naturellement traitées comme des épées au corps-à-corps. Et qui donnent Force +2 au porteur. Et une sauvegarde de 2+. Et causent la peur. Et rajoutent 10ps au mouvement.

Bref, en tout cas voici les images, pour que vous sachiez à quoi vous attendre messieurs.


"Tremblez, méchants, car nous sommes les... les... gentils!" Clair que plus "gentil" que ca tu meurs...


Ci-dessus: le capitaine de la bande baptisé "Malabar".


Voici les deux squigs. Stanzi m'a dit qu'elle comptait les appeller "Chupa" et "Chups".




Et voici, pour le plaisir des yeux, une petite vidéo:

Sunday 29 April 2007

The roof is on fire, we don't need no water...

Une biengue triste nouvelle'a, qui risque d'entacher'a la bonne réputation de notre belle cité balnéaire'a... La "Campagne d'avril 2007" doit être repoussée.

Patrick a annulé car il avait trop à bosser, Hari idem car il passe son bac, et Nico, mon dernier éspoir, le dernier rempart, mon fidèle compagnon d'armes, a réussi à se faire inviter par un ami pendant les TROIS jours et demi libres qui restaient... Merci bien.

Comprenez donc mon désarroi. J'aime bien Mordheim, oui, mais pas au point de jouer contre moi même. Il a donc fallu repousser cette rencontre à un moment ulterieur qui sera encore à préciser. En clair: ca a COMPLÈTEMENT foiré. *Rideau*
Tant pis, ce sont des choses qui arrivent.


Friday 27 April 2007

Tom's Experimental Lab

Plastic models, although great for converting and assembling, have always been a problem for newbie painters. Why? Because unlike their metal counterparts, they tend to melt when dipped into that acid-etching stuff used to remove the paint from metal or wooden furniture.
Plastics have always been some sort of a one-way tickets. If you screwed up the paintjob, then you scewed up the mini, and that meant 5€ you'd never see again.

There is no way to get the paint off without turning the poor warrior into a horrid, amorphic blob of plastic. So unless you are planning to buy a new possessed/mutant for your warband... NOT a good solution.

I recently heard rumours that ordinary "brake fluid" from cars should get the paint off plastic models without damaging them. In the interest of science, of all exasperated noobs and of satisfing my own curiosity, I decided to test this rumour.

I bought "Synthetic Brake Fluid" from the local petrol station and found myself a victim.



I poured the fluid over the mini hoping for some fizzling effects. Nothing happend.



Let's wait a while. I observed that the fluid grew darker ("Dark Angels darker" if you get the meaning). That means that at least some of the paint is beeing solvatised by the fluid. Great!



After 5 hours (and a little rubbing around on the miniature with an old brush) i took the miniature out.

It haden't changed much except for the colour which had gotten lighter on some parts. So I washed it and rubbed a little with my finger. Some of the paint went off. The plastic underneath looked as if new.



Unfortunately the fluid did not yield the results I had hoped for. After 30 mins the paint went off easily on approx. 40% of the miniature. Waiting longer did only slightly improve that (5 hours). I had to scrape the rest with a needle. Although it then also came off rather easily, it is tedious work to manually "clean" every detail of the figure (I did NOT completely clean the miniature for the picture!)

My conlcusion:

This method is NOT suited for cleaning large amounts of miniatures.

Although I think it might be comforting to know for some people, that their botched plastic warband captain is not forever lost. You CAN save him, if you invest a little time in the cleaning.
Still, I believe I must run more tests to see if this also applies to my beloved Vallejo colours.
The test-miniature I used also had many layers of old paint. Maybe that makes a difference...

Monday 23 April 2007

If you never know failure, how can you know success?

La nouvelle planche de la table de Mordheim est bientôt prête, Thoumas ! J'ai gravé environ 50% des dalles pour le sol.


Pfiou ! C'est long !


Au premier plan, tu peux arriver à distinguer une zone que j'ai un peu ratée. Les dalles sont trop carrées et trop charcutées. J'essayerai de corriger ça à la fin en repassant dessus avec un crayon moins taillé.
Dis moi si tu as des conseils à m'apporter !

[EDIT]:




[RE-EDIT]:

Table terminée, ô maîîîîître des maîîîîtres absolu de la gâlâxie universelle !

Wednesday 18 April 2007

Open Air

Nico arrived in Vienna April 15th. Yesterday he came to my house for a little game-testing of Gorkamorka. Here's a report of how things went during our "Open Air" event. Enjoy :)


Nico reads the scenario rules, measures distances, places scenery, defines zones, reads the rules again, shifts terrain, measures again, reads the rules, hops around the table, measures some more... "Done! Table is set up!"

Here's the situation. There is a fort in the middle of the table, occupied by Nico's team. My own team is trying to storm that fort (the ork way of laying siege) to get it's hands on the precious scrap lying around inside. Nico has to hold out until his reinforcements arrive.


Nico's team occupies the fort. I believe this pictures deserves a little explanation: Nico, finding the 40K ork models ugly, brought his space marines. We treated them as orcs for the purpose of the game, which worked really well actually.


My boyz have to storm the fort and get the loot.


The gate.


"If only i could get that marshmallow onto the stick..."


I manoeuvre my pick-up truck towards the gate.


The driver puts the pedal to the metal, slams in the thrusters, and crashes the vehicle into the gate, which bursts open. The vehicle is imobilized for the rest of the game... But who cares? It did it's job!

(I think we spent half and hour undestanding the rules for crashing/ramming damage... who organized the chapters in this rulebook?!)


Nico's ... marines (!?) try to fend off the orks that I sent to scale the back walls of the fort, thus giving Nico two fronts to defend. The problem is that aparently none of his guys did pack enough ammo... :)




"Get up those walls you maggots!"


My boyz and their boss are in.


Nico measures the shooting distance of his last warrior capable of shooting. He fires, misses, runs out of ammo (again!)...


... and scrams!


One of my orks approaches a marine (?!?!) from behind to take him out in a so-called "stealth kill". Only that orks tend to be the opposite of stealthy.


Ever wanted to see how orks cook? Here you can see 2 orks making mincemeat of Nico's captain (background).


My boyz are beginning to tire a little bit, but everything's going rather well for me... for the moment.


But then Nico's reinforcements arrive. Lacking a proper "Truck" we used one of my old 40K Ravenwing Speeders, which lends itself admirably to the task, having 2 crewmen and a heavy weapon. We ignored the fact that it hovers... and after all, it looks cool, doesn't it?


Meanwhile the situation has changed. I managed to push Nico's troops out of the fort, and am now facing a reinforced space-marine force (?!?!?!?) that is determined to get back what is her's. I desperately manage to kill another marine, before Nico mowes down my battle weary mob.


Admire the proud winner (right) and the not so pround loser (left). It was a very tight game though.

As for the result of the test: Nico, thought the game was nice, while not as good as Mordheim. He had most trouble coping with the "design" of the ork miniatures, saying that he couldn't really relate to the green-skins.

I thought the game was fun and I really want to play another one. For my part, I believe orks are precisely what makes the game so funny, since they are utterly unpredictable but tough. I particularily liked the rules for vehicles, for grenades, the fact that ammo can (and DOES) run out, that warriors get more and more tired/wounded with every hit they take and the combat system where players roll dice simultaneously and then compare results. Nevertheless I agree with Nico that Mordheim is - all in all - better, insofar as it offers a richer universe and more diversity.

I'd give it an overall score of 6/10. Worth playing again.

Monday 16 April 2007

J'essaie de ne pas vivre en contradiction avec les idées que je ne défends pas.


Toute table de Gorkamorka se doit d'avoir, en son milieu, un fort (ork). Ma petite table à moi (bien qu'elle ne mesure que 1,2 modestes petits mètres de large) n'y fait pas exception.

Voici donc 9 photos de ce fort, indispensable à 60% des scénarios. Comme toujours, je serais heureux de pouvoir lire vos réactions dans les commentaires ;-).

à bientôt!



















Naturellement j'ai veillé à ce que toutes les pièces soient détachables, permettant ainsi un grand nombre de configurations, et par là, la construction de plusieurs forts différents. Pour les photos j'ai placé les murs de facon à créer un fort plutôt carré.

Sunday 8 April 2007

Red team on offense!

J'ai crée un petit scénario Mordheim pour pâques. Je me suis dis que ca pourrait être amusant pour notre campagne. Dites-moi ce que vous en pensez! :) Si vous avez des propositions d'amélioration ou si vous voulez le .pdf, n'hésitez pas à laisser un commentaire!

[EDIT]: Voici le version 2.0 retravaillée.

Click to enlarge

Friday 6 April 2007

Bob's Iguana Bits

Okay now. I have finished painting my mob, and so this will probably be the last Gorkamorka-related post before some time. I hope you enjoy the minis, please tell me what you think (even you are welcome to, dear Nico, although i know you don't like orcs :)





That is, by the way, what the "truck" should have looked like, hadn't i come over it with my devilish cutter and drill. It used to be a Revell model :D



Below is the Orc "Nob" (= Boss) crammed into his Vehicle along with his smelly warriors.




Don't Panic!

Hari has started painting his amazons.

Since I can't give him advice personally on how to paint miniatures, here's a simple little guide to the basics of painting and shadowing of miniatures. Maybe that can be useful to Nico and Patrick too.

The following describes how I paint my models, but of course there are as many other ways as there are painters. Still, i believe my technique to be a good compromise between effects and time, resulting in rather good-looking models obtained in a reasonable amount of time.

Here are the basic rules you should stick to:

1) Undercoat well! The spots that are missed by the primer-spray should be undercoated with paint and brush.

2) Three shades minimum! I ALWAYS paint at least 4 layers (= shades) on every model, for every type of zone.

e.g. The leather parts get 4 shades of brown, the skin parts get 4 shades of skin-colour etc...

You can paint only three layers to save time, but at the expense of realism. You should never paint less, lest you regret it in a week time.

3) Darkest colour first! ALWAYS start with the darkest colour and work your way up to the brightest.

4) Shrink the layers as you go. Every new layer you paint onto the model should be smaller than the previous layer, thus creating the wanted "3-dimensional" effect.

e.g.

5) Drybrush metal parts! Parts that are to look as though made of metal, should NOT be painted as described above, but should be painted by "drybrushing" (explained later).

6) Dip the brush carefully. Try to avoid paint going up to the metal part. It makes the brush last longer without loosing it's tip.

That's about it.

Let's see an example. I painted an orc arm here, but it is the exact same technique with EVERY miniature. Only the colours change.

Here I used 3 colours for the skin. Light green, dark green and black. I used black to make my dark green even darker (= 1st layer!)



Step 1: Undercoat.



Thick brush for drybrushing and thin one for the painting of the skin.

Step 2: drybrushing weapons.

- Paint/Undercoat the part in BLACK.
- Take some "rust" paint onto your (thick) brush and wipe off 80% of it into a piece of cloth (or other).



- Now brush the weapon with vigorous strokes. Make sure some of the black undercoat still shines through. Don't take too much paint or you will clog the detail of the miniature!



- Reapeat the same only with "metal" colour, and stroke more gently. You should now see both, very little black AND a little "rust" shimmer through.



Step 3: Painting the skin.

As described above, paint the layers.

1. 90% dark green + 10% Black



2. Pure dark green (smaller areas)



3. 50% dark green + 50% light green (even smaller areas)



4. 10% dark green + 90% light green (only highest areas, like knuckles etc...)



Below I did the same for the orc's wristband, only with 3-4 shades of brown. Tadaaaa!



For human skin you would rather have used Brown and Pink. Starting with pure Brown and finishing with pure pink. The intermediate shades would be mixes of those two.

e.g. The layers would be as follows:

1. Pure brown.
2. 40% brown + 60% Pink
3. 10% brown + 90% Pink
4. Pure pink on the nose, cheeks, fingers...

The percentages should depend on the paints used, and on what you think looks good. There is no ideal recepie. Be creative!

I hope this helps.