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Congrats on the writing gig, looking forward to your 2018 projects.

Love that donut shop. Such a cool piece. And great news on the writing.

Some excellent minis, and gratz on the writing gig!

Looks like you had a really good year Graven, lots more to come I see, looking forward to watching you bash your way through that lot

Whats the magazine about comics or wargaming?

Gitsplitta wrote:Love all the new paint work graven and very excited about your writing gig! Great things have small beginnings!

Thanks mate, really chuffed.

Yorkright wrote: Congrats on the writing gig, looking forward to your 2018 projects.

Me too - I think,

youwashock wrote:Love that donut shop. Such a cool piece. And great news on the writing.

CommissarKhaine wrote:Some excellent minis, and gratz on the writing gig!

Cheers matey!

GiraffeX wrote:Looks like you had a really good year Graven, lots more to come I see, looking forward to watching you bash your way through that lot

Yeah, it felt like a turning point actually. Hoping I can sustain a decent paint rate: 10 minis a month or so, average that is. This month is about building, primarily, however.

Llamahead wrote:Whats the magazine about comics or wargaming?

Ah, sorry, gaming. It's part of Figure Painter Magazine but obviously with more :dice:

Ah, a Lazy Sunday! A rare treat, that involved reorganization of stuff. Got a Feldherr case thanks to my favourite autobot, Amazon Prime, so my DCU now all has a home. It fits neatly inside an empty bag I found in the garage too - win! Got my 2nd ed BMG cards and spell cards sleeved up also (sleeving cards, there's something I thought I'd left behind me...) On a more irritating note, discovered my Nightwing is missing a leg damn km and their quality control issues. Thought they'd got past that. I mean I know they'll send me a replacement - though it did take 5 months with the heavy troopers guns...

Repurposed, rebased and repainted (in places) the High Security Henchman from BMG as a High Security Survivor for the prison expansion.

He's got a new sculpt in 2nd, inexplicably - it's not like there isn't more than one person in high security in Blackgate - but I might as well use what I've got to hand. It looks like I'm getting a joker half of a suicide Squad boxset as part of a trade so Stan the Eyeball man may also be getting the TWD treatment

Still, the main event today was Star Wars.

Kylo Ren's shuttle


It's huge. Like crazy big.

Talking of big...



The first transport is away!

And it's got company -

Red ten, checking in.

Red squad! 2, 3, 5, 10

Couple of scale shots



So all in all,not a bad day
Anon,
Graven

Top stuff. Ren's shuttle is one of the best designs in SW and you're really helped it with the imposing, looming look. I didn't realise it was so massive either.

The transport is just great. Lovely texture work.

Nice job on the Doh-nut shop.

Good job on Mr. Big Green Armour.

Orange-clad henchman looks good.

And the ships are great.

And lol at "amazon prime the Autobot"

Not a bad day at all graven. Great job on the space ships and I love the re-paint on the prisoner. Excellent work all-round!

I hate when your browser wipes your comments...

Paradigm wrote:Top stuff. Ren's shuttle is one of the best designs in SW and you're really helped it with the imposing, looming look. I didn't realise it was so massive either.

The transport is just great. Lovely texture work.

Cheers, though I have a hankering to paint more tiny spesssheeps now...

Dr H wrote:Nice job on the Doh-nut shop.

Good job on Mr. Big Green Armour.

Orange-clad henchman looks good.

And the ships are great.

And lol at "amazon prime the Autobot"

I live to serve

Gitsplitta wrote:Not a bad day at all graven. Great job on the space ships and I love the re-paint on the prisoner. Excellent work all-round!

Cheers mate.

Back into normal routine.
HQ markers for DCU

Did a couple of extra bases for a mate also. Blue is Hero, Red is Villain. I think I can count that another 2 models off the list
And 12 markers wip (6 for me, 6 for same mate)

Hey ho,
graven.

Wow. There's so much going on here I'm going to pick up with the Star Wars and stay updated from there.

Excellent weathering on all your ships and the OSL on the transport is done well. Looking forward to seeing what you do next.

 Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:
Wow. There's so much going on here I'm going to pick up with the Star Wars and stay updated from there.

Excellent weathering on all your ships and the OSL on the transport is done well. Looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Cheers buddy, good to have you back on the dakk. Thanks very much, I do like a filthy rebel Appreciate the osl comment, I was really pleased with it, especially on the middle ventral engine.

On Tuesday I was lucky enough to organise a demo night at my local club with French company Monolith Editions (Mystic Battles, Conan) of their new Batman boardgame, that's hitting Kickstarter on 27th February (yes, I'm an addict, leave me alone).
Whilst this is certainly in keeping with the recent industry trend of hybridising Board and Miniature gaming, this feels like it will appeal more successfully to the non-gamer than most, not just because of the IP but it is still recognisably a board game, rather than a small-scale miniature skirmish game on a board (*cough*Shadespire*cough*). That being said, the game comes with 60 miniatures cast in the now-familiar plastic-resin (blue for heroes and red for villains), and having got my hands on some of the initial renders, I can tell you that the quality of the sculpts, and the level of detail is astounding:

Riddler's cufflinks, for example, are miniscule question marks. The overtly comic-y aesthetic (especially of Scarecrow, seen here, and of some other models such as Harley Quinn and Alfred) may not appeal to everyone but they attempt to capture the feel of the characters - and with 60 models in the basic game pledge (working out at around £1.50 per miniature), you get a lot of pretty toys for your money.

(for demo purposes, we were just using cardstock standees for the models)

The game is for 2-5 players, pitting an Overlord (arch-villain) against the Heroes. The Heroes play co-operatively - well, if they don't, they just lose horribly - and interestingly, there's no set sequence in which they have to do things, beyond alternate Hero/Overlord turns. You could, for example (as we did) sneak Batman along a gantry, then run Red Hood up to grab a gatling gun and pick off some goons, then have Batman hack a computer that he's standing next to. This means that there's a lot of discussion and planning, though not at the expense of time: the game is playable in an hour to an hour and a half. The core mechanics in the game are the use of Gems, which are essentially action points. You can use as many of these as your character has, but you only recover a limited number each turn, so the game is about careful asset management and weighing up risk/rewards. So, to continue our previous example, after Batman has hacked the computer, he might still have some Gems left to parkour down a wall and move elsewhere, but that could leave you short in a subsequent turn.


Gems also provide you with the dice you roll, with the different coloured dice having different averages and number of successes. It's actually much easier to get your head round that than you'd think, as they go yellow-orange-red (worst to best), and with white and black as a safe and risky option respectively. With skills covering melee, ranged, manipulation and intelligence, your various characters can assign their dice as they see fit based on a task, with the ability to spend for rerolls also (but again, you run the risk of running short of gems).



The Overlord player, on the other hand, has a smaller pool of gems overall but one that they can assign to any of their thugs in any ratio, meaning that whilst individually weak swarms of goons still present a threat - as we discovered to our cost:


It's a really fun game. We were really surprised by the emphasis on stealth and co-operation: it's very easy to over commit yourself, partly because the gameplay is so intuitive. Because it's narrative-objective based in any given scenario (here, we were trying to stop Bane blowing up an abandoned Subway station below a hospital), it feels very much like a comic story and, crucially, different enough to other games out there, both of the super/mini variety and of the board/mini variety. Yes, £90 for a basic pledge, £140 with all stretch goals, through to £320 for a full pledge might seem steep - but, as I said, remember that effectively at the basic price you're only paying £20 for a heck of a game, and £1.50 a model for some stunning miniatures, never mind great rules, dice, boards... It won't be to everyone's wallet, but it's an excellent, accessible game from a company with a track record of delivering on their Kickstarters.

Anyway, that's my two euro-cents

Best,
graven.

Looks like you had a lot of fun playing it -always the best indication of a good game IMO

I liked everything up until I read £320 for a 'full pledge'!!!

Yikes!

Isn't this one supposed to be 'Kickstarter Only' and not likely to make it into retail?

Or was that I different game of theirs?

I hope that £320 includes a lot of stuff I don't want and maybe I can get all the game content for significantly less...

Right corrections: base box 140$ (around £103) or all-in 320$ (around £237). 90 will be the number of minis in the base box without SG
so more minis at the end with all the SG unlocked during the campaign
Lost in translation...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And yes, Kickstarter only

Those revised figures sound a lot more tempting. £100-odd for 90 minis, a game and all that associated jazz is a good deal in and of itself. In terms of SGs, will they be added to the base box level or just to the all-in one?

And while this isn't necessarily the way to think about it, if one were to be looking at this as a way to (massively) expand a BMG collection, how does it stack up? In terms of basic goon/cops are there sufficient numbers/variety of each to use as the core of a BMG gang or are there a lot of duplicate sculpts ect that would make them more difficult to use in BMG in that manner?

 Paradigm wrote:
Those revised figures sound a lot more tempting. £100-odd for 90 minis, a game and all that associated jazz is a good deal in and of itself. In terms of SGs, will they be added to the base box level or just to the all-in one?

And while this isn't necessarily the way to think about it, if one were to be looking at this as a way to (massively) expand a BMG collection, how does it stack up? In terms of basic goon/cops are there sufficient numbers/variety of each to use as the core of a BMG gang or are there a lot of duplicate sculpts ect that would make them more difficult to use in BMG in that manner?

There will as I understand it be different ways of accessing the stretch goals. Ironically, things became easier when we switched to talking in French. Ah well, allons-y!

The core models have plenty of variety but BMG has very few generic models these days. That being said, some of the sculpts of the generics are just cracking, especially the civilians. There are some monolith sculpts I far prefer - tweedledee and tweedledum notably - and some that we don't have bmg versions of like Man-Bat, OMAC, Cornelius Stirk etc.

On a separate note, I cleaned up my resin Grodd crew. Wow, what a nightmare. Crap mold lines across fur and organic shapes. Glad KM moved to plastic- and, tbh, that monolith have decided to also.

And I've washed the new KM figs. We'll see how they build and prime...

To be honest, generic style doesn't bother me too much, I'm not really a fan of the more specific gang henchmen like the Riddler guys in the spandex suits or everyone working for Joker dressing as a clown ect. So long as the sculpts themselves are decent, and there's a decent variety of weapons that correlate to BMG (really just the old staples of pistols, ARs, shotguns, knives, baseball bats ect) then they serve my purpose, I'd rather have a pool of nice minis to pull various gangs from than have to build 4 or 5 separate crews or chase the 'new stuff' meta. And if there are some duplicates I can always theme the paintjob anyway.

One to keep an eye on then.

What a great game, do you think it will be available from LGS's in the future?

When it comes to the £320 pledge for Mystic Battles this is what I got.

Monoliths miniatures for monopose are honestly some of the nicest out there. Batman does seem to be a pure reskin of their Conan game which I've got but haven't played (I want to rebase the models for use with my fantasy collection). 8 of those models are basically on par with Mortarion in size. Excellent quality on pure production miniatures. Even better they are supporting the games with further scenarios and content on their forum. Batman does intrigue me but I'm probably saving up to go all in on Joan of Arc so I might give this one a pass.

Yorkright wrote:
What a great game, do you think it will be available from LGS's in the future?

Nope, that doesn't appear to be the case here.

Unless I'm mistaken (possible!), this one is "Kickstarter Only".

Of course, success has a way of changing things...

Paradigm wrote:To be honest, generic style doesn't bother me too much, I'm not really a fan of the more specific gang henchmen like the Riddler guys in the spandex suits or everyone working for Joker dressing as a clown ect. So long as the sculpts themselves are decent, and there's a decent variety of weapons that correlate to BMG (really just the old staples of pistols, ARs, shotguns, knives, baseball bats ect) then they serve my purpose, I'd rather have a pool of nice minis to pull various gangs from than have to build 4 or 5 separate crews or chase the 'new stuff' meta. And if there are some duplicates I can always theme the paintjob anyway.

One to keep an eye on then.

Well in that case you're laughing although riddler does get some spandex pals Looking forward to your take on things!

Yorkright wrote: What a great game, do you think it will be available from LGS's in the future?

Nope. KS only. Believe it or not, it's brought the cost right down.

Llamahead wrote:When it comes to the £320 pledge for Mystic Battles this is what I got.

Monoliths miniatures for monopose are honestly some of the nicest out there. Batman does seem to be a pure reskin of their Conan game which I've got but haven't played (I want to rebase the models for use with my fantasy collection). 8 of those models are basically on par with Mortarion in size. Excellent quality on pure production miniatures. Even better they are supporting the games with further scenarios and content on their forum. Batman does intrigue me but I'm probably saving up to go all in on Joan of Arc so I might give this one a pass.

That's a lot of stuff. Very nice.
Actually, despite appearances it's not just a reskin, there's some other tactical elements particularly the different uses of Intelligence and Manipulation skills to complete missions. Also multi-level terrain is very important in this, with the addition of a character's Parkour rating indicating how easily they can move between levels without using Gems (actions). But yeah, Joan of Arc is hellapretty.

Alpharius wrote:

Yorkright wrote:
What a great game, do you think it will be available from LGS's in the future?

Nope, that doesn't appear to be the case here.

Unless I'm mistaken (possible!), this one is "Kickstarter Only".

Of course, success has a way of changing things...

Definitely won't be in stores... in its initial incarnation, anyway. I think as well the £100 price point would be a deal breaker for most folk. For what it's worth, I'm a strong advocate of a cardboard only version of the game (and have had long chats with Monolith about this!)

Quick and rather rushed pic just before I ran out the door this morning, so apologies for quality (or rather, lack thereof):

Portals! Well, Rift Markers for DCU. They're pretty much done, a little wash needed on the purple to take the tones back down, and edge tidying. Such fun to do
Rest of BMG 2e models in soapy water to remove release agent. Torn as to how to base them, as I actually just want to crack on. Probably just regular rubble bases, a little gravel, maybe a weeeeeeeee bit of scatter (shell casings etc) for the vast majority. Ivy and her plants will be overgrown, I imagine, and I might go for marbled floors for magic users (well Constantine and Zatanna, anyway). We'll see.

In other news, looks like I'm getting a review copy of Wave 4 of Walking Dead - woo! That'll save me a pretty penny. This writing gig is a lark

Cheers chaps,
graven

 inmygravenimage wrote:
Right corrections: base box 140$ (around £103) or all-in 320$ (around £237). 90 will be the number of minis in the base box without SG
so more minis at the end with all the SG unlocked during the campaign
Lost in translation...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And yes, Kickstarter only

@grave

Are the minis size wise spot on with BMG by Knight models. Also what is your opinions on going all in on this KS because I probably will just want to know the gossip

angel of death 007 wrote:


Are the minis size wise spot on with BMG by Knight models. Also what is your opinions on going all in on this KS because I probably will just want to know the gossip

Pretty much. I mean there are some inconsistencies within KM generally but yeah, they're basically dead on regardless. Slightly more comic-y aesthetic, so slightly bigger heads I guess?
Hello gang,
Sorry dropped off the map for a couple of days there. Writing articles - turning the above into one for BCP, starting to write a couple for Initiative etc. And y'know work, life etc

But a little something. My rift markers (and pal's) are now done these are also the test for how I'll be basing magic users generally - Zatanna, Constantine and Enchantress in the first instance.

Speaking of Enchantress, that's the spindliest most delicate model I've ever built. Not hard, but terrifying. Really worried about how to keep her intact in the long term. I think gribbly tentacles being summoned is the answer (haven't attached her arms yet - think they'll be towards the ground). Zatanna (and Batgirl for that matter) isn't much better though. Constantine is ok but I've noticed his fingers are miscast he's holding a vial with a spirit emerging. I'm tempted to replace it with a pack of Silk Cut

So here's what's built so far.

I say built, the starter models (coloured) are all one or at most 2 piece. So really based and filled. The resin for Grodd and his crew was fine in the end but it annoys me that you need to remove their base tabs for them to sit on their bases. Just don't cast them with full tabs. FFS.
There's a metal Harley there next to new one (red) and the size is, as you hopefully can see, dead on. Scaling is generally more consistent. Still terrified of the fragility of tiny females.

These guys are waiting on green stuff filling:

And an AzBat and Enchantress, mostly armless, for scale:

I think she'll look good with her arms by her sides (as opposed to how they should be, at 90 degrees to the body). Did some test placement and it should look like she will be drawing power out of the ground.

So, merrily we roll along!
Graven

Crikey, she looks very fragile, you'd almost need to put a cage around her as a protective barrier (tentacles would work as you've mentioned)

That's a nice haul . I'm assuming those arms are way too thin to pin?

Knightley wrote:Crikey, she looks very fragile, you'd almost need to put a cage around her as a protective barrier (tentacles would work as you've mentioned)

It is crazy. But here's the (remarkably stable) solution:

Chaos terminators, the gift that just keeps giving. I wonder whether to add another power cable actually out of GS, in keeping with the SS movie gribbly aesthetic - or is it ok? Don't think she needs anything in the other hand.

CommissarKhaine wrote:That's a nice haul . I'm assuming those arms are way too thin to pin?

Oh, yeah, they are wafer thin. About 0.1mm diameter.

Generally, basing stuff is making me scratch my head. I think generally things will end up being painted in the order I figure out what the decoration is going to be. I'm considering breaking up some ~0.2mm resin or plastic into shards, and adding as slabs of broken concrete. I'm going to mix up my basing grit with some assorted gravel from the garage for a bit of variety, too. I found a gs skull mould I made years ago, so I can add some grimdark bits. We'll see. I think I have some (real) carnivorous plant seeds somewhere for Ivy and there's always posters, police tape, newspapers etc. I guess.

Still, Thomas Wayne has a snazzy base, and also I got my Jason Blood/Etrigan!

Love their sculpts, though slightly annoyed by Etrigan's tactical skulls/gravestone; I feel obliged to give Jason Blood's base similar decoration. I'm thinking of giving Zatanna something too. Not sure yet, but again, she's insanely fragile (the crossed leg is a separate piece, meaning she's connected to the base by the thinnest of bits of plastic-resin). I'm thinking a plume of smoke rising up from the ground, maybe even curling around her feet, to her hand? I'd use a bent paperclip as an armature of sorts I guess. It's the cage principle again.

I also made a start on a few of the remaining metals (Superwoman, Reverse Flash and Power Ring) too, pics anon. Meanwhile, AzBat has arms and Catwoman has... a cat!

(The hard part wasn't stealing it. The hard part was how she got it up onto the roof.)
I like the cat as a bronze statue, rather than a pet (it's from a Mantic KoW elf sprue, if interested) but I wonder whether I should have gone for a completely flat base to put her on. I don't have any more of the tiled bases but do have one spare plain base. Hmm. Was going to use it for Constantine though, with an Elder Sign on it.

That's pretty much where I'm up to. It's still really all prep work, but that's ok, we've got snow so priming in the garage is kinda out just now anyway. I'm slightly wary of priming the new plastic-resin with car spray also, even though I know it'll be fine.

Adios,
graven




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Gravel tests :


or ?

Gravel tests are looking good! And 0.1 mm? yikes! I like how you're protecting the more fragile models, looks very natural.

Loads of progress! Can't wait to see what you do with Zatanna, Etrigan, and Enchantress.

Oh man, that arm looks so thin! looks like a great solution however, is there anything inside the tentacle (like a pin) or is it just GS