Please find attached my recommended reading for today:
Spodding
Dargorlad did carve a pillar just using Geboom´s dental plaster technic.
Tabletop Terrain
Stu did finish his carthagian 15mm DBA army. Really good stuff and a high discipline to finish that old projects.
The Hobbit
Del Toro´s good bye.
Incredible Miniature Collection:
The Ron Ringrose Collection
For our yearly German Lord of the Rings gaming Event on the Kauzenburg I decided this year to show up with a scenario from the Fellowship Hobby book – Fog on the barrow heights. Having painted all miniatures of the beautiful barrow height box, I decided to paint a barrow, which I bought via EBOB´s webshop. The centerpiece, which was excellent designed should be accompanied by more barrows.
I decided to build some by myself. The building was quite easy, since I used some boards, a lot of modelling clay and real stone. I tried some special effect coming from the model train universe: I did hide a smoke generator in the last barrow. The effect came out quite nice, but the oil smells and the model is covered with oil. So it is noth worth the effort I think. Good idea, but not very practical.
For applying the grass I used a Noch Grass Master, static grass comes out excellent with that kind of tools. The painting was nothing special.
The design of the wood pieces proofed to be very good for LotR games, since the hills inside the wood make more of the trees and they block line of sight. For sure this will be the way to model 28mm woods in the future.
Currently everybody in my Gaming Club, the Spieltrieb Frankfurt is preparing for our upcoming Ostfront campaign. I am painting an Hungarian Force. As with my other two armies, British 8th army and Fallschirmjäger, I am painting both a tank and an infantry company. I started with an motorised infantry platoon as this is the support choice for a hungarian tank force and infantry is with me at almost every game I play.
The hungarians in FoW have the excellent special rule that they may reroll their attempts to dig in. Excellent for me! I do fail this roll very often.
The hungarian motorised infantry was equipped with the hungarian Botond truck. The excellent Battlefront models can be glued together with or without canvas. I decided to populate one truck with shown infantry. I found several historical pictures for different painting schemes on Botonds. I picked one with a typical 3 colour camo scheme, which came out very nice. The hungarian arms is show at the door. I made my own decals for this.
Having quite a lot of seated infantry models was very important for me. Usually you see just a couple of models in transport trucks painted for FoW but I decided to make it look more realistic. For sure a truck contained more than 8 soldiers during war, but this abstraction was fine for me.
In our club we decided to design the scenery as a fall countryside seeing the first snow of the year. Literally this is perfect for showing a hungarian force just before the whole army was destroyed.
From the painter´s view I must say that the hungarian force is very nice to paint, since you may use some characteristic color.
For quite a while I am visiting Chevalier de la terres Blog, Crac de Chevaliers, on a regular basis. His clean and colourful painting style on 15mm Flames of war miniatures is really amazing. Currently he upped Pictures of his Carriers and 6pdrs. Again these are wonderful arranged, in a very smooth painting job, coming with excellent stowage and additional MGs. I really wonder how smooth the models are. Chevalier is more precise than the models are. I wonder how long he prepares a miniature before painting it. Great job!
For the first time I visited at the end of may my first Flames of War event in Germany. The community of www.flamesofwar.de met somewhere in the countryside in the middle of nowhere near Fulda. The event was planned and perfectly executed by Hotwing, an well nown player living near Hamburg. The event attracted Players from all over the country, gaming clubs from Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Braunschweig, Ludwigshafen, Saarbrücken, Frankfurt and more.
The 30 participants played two campaigns, one Mid War Campaign and one brand new Battlefrontcampaign. Moreover there were several Big Battles at Saturday evening. My gaming club Spieltrieb Frankfurt showed two of our Tactica Gaming Tables the „Road to Messina“ and the „Tunisia Wadi“ tables, which were shown on the famous german Tabletop event in Hamburg in 2008 and 2009.
The Sommerwind 2010 was an excellent experience since I got to know a lot of people who played in an really easy and relaxed way far away from beeing too competetive. Mister_Pink may be an exeption 😉 but I like to play with guys who kill their dice. Especially mid war players wanted to laugh and have fun. The good food and drinks made it easy to play in a good mood.
Our club agreed to come again next year to this really nice event. Thanks to Hotwing for organising Sommerwind for the third time!
I never mentioned the war (of the Ring) on unfinished armies, although I am a passionate fan of LotR. Currently I am revisiting Rohan and Isengard. In 2003 I started with both armies and built up an 500 Points LotR Skirmish army. Rohan got in the game weaker and weaker and I was not able to play them well, although a polish Rohan army did win the Grand Tournament in Nottingham 2009. However I wasn´t that successful with rohan. However I always loved that army and War of the Ring was an excellent excuse to reboot the armycreation of Rohan. What I did not like about WotR was the height of the company bases. Therefore I built a flat version only using magnet bases, metal sheet and a multibase that I designed using polyacryl profiles and sand. With this master I made resin bases and glued them to the metal sheet. The result works excellent although the height seems a little bit higher on the picture than in reality. More Eorlingas to come…
For years I tried to blog with the Content Management System I used for the other hobby pages, Typo3. I now decided to give up, since wordpress is simply the better choice although it is not the best software ever written. However I will use the very simple tool to get connected to other wargamers, letting you know what I read in the webs and show you what I am painting, gaming and building.
I hope to convince some of the wargaming people I know to be co-authors like Glorfunzel is. Personally I prefer to show up in a group since this is a hobby which cannot be made by yourself without company.
Dagorlad, the man behind One Ring, is working for quite a while on a really outstanding gaming table: Jurassic Reich. I followed his efforts for quite a while and now he has finished the gaming table. What I really love about the table is that Dagorlad really managed to understand german medival architecture and bring this to live in his model. The castle, or german Burg, is beautiful and moreover looks exacly like in all those war movies with castles and Nazis. For sure the board could be used for historical wargaming, too. I really like the design of the board, the position of the castle is very skilfully chosen, still there is much space to play on.
Way back to 2005 Stu, a wargamer in New Zealand, started to paint his Portees. During that time is was painting a Commonwealth Flames of War force, too and I visited his great page on a regular basis. I really like Stu´s stuff and his opinion on our hobby. However a reason for me writing this comment on this blog is the fact, that I switched Unfinished armies to WordPress in order to communicate better with other hobby guys. Therefore I start with Stu, since he was one of the pioneers of wargaming blogging for me! Great, that you managed to finish those excellent Portees! New Zealanders do have cool insignia by the way!
When I first saw the television show „Battlestar Galactica“ I was a little child. I loved the episodes and dreamed about reenacting the adventures of Apollo and Starbuck with miniatures. A few years ago I saw the re-imagined show and was really impressed that the series got even better than its parent.
It is now my favorite television show an last year I started searching for tabletop miniatures of Battlestar Galactica.
A few month ago I found the miniatures from Ravenstar Studios and I ordered them. When they arrived I started painting these great models. For the first steps I painted some ships of the civilian fleet of the show to get a feeling for spaceship painting. Most of the paint job was drybrushing the models in few steps and painting some highlights an details. The miniatures are very small (see the coin in the picture above) and I like how it worked. The pictures are an enlargement of the real miniatures.
For information of the ship names I used the Battlestar Wiki which is a great resource for the television shows. They have a lot of iamges of the spaceships, too, so feel free about comparing my models with the real ships.
When I finish my fleet, I want to use the models for the tabletop-game „Starmada“ from Majestic Twelve Games. The game is very fast but still detailed and has a great physical movement model which is best for playing in science fiction universes like the Babylon 5 and the Battlestar Galactica universes. It has a ship build ruleset which allows to add any spaceship concept to the game. Later my friends and me want to add some playsheets for the BSG ships. In the next weeks I will write a review of the rules on this site.
Below you see a better lighted photo of the „Cloud 9″ on my gaming mat. The stand is scratch build of 2mm plasticard with a metal pin. I varied the pins in 0,5cm steps for all my ships in the fleet. There are only 2 models with the same pinlength. The base is 3.5cm long and 2cm wide. So it fills out one complete hex of the gaming mat (1.5“ hexes).
In the next week more ships of the fleet will follow.
Greetings
Glorfunzel
