Hotlead 2017

I've run out of cute titles for this report on Hotlead 2017, probably because I'm still suffering from sleepiness and random napping episodes after another fun-filled weekend in Stratford.  I'm just going to cover the games I played, other games around me, and my selling and shopping experiences in this post, then I'll cover my two (yes, two!) sessions as game host in a follow-up report.

My buddy Ron and I drove up together, so my Friday started with a mid-afternoon departure from Peterborough to meet Ron after he finished his afternoon shift as a crossing-guard in Pickering.  We hit the road ahead of schedule from his place, and despite some iffy predictions in the days leading up to the weekend, the weather was great.  Traffic was pretty good until we hit Cambridge, and then there was a lot of swearing in the car as traffic slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason (all the construction is off to the side of the highway) and turned our arrival into a bit of a scramble to eat, check in, and set up my Friday game.  I basically ended up doing all three at once.

I'll cover the game in another post, but here are some shots of what was going on Friday:

The shots above and below are general views of the crowd that night, folks were saying there was a lot going on for a Friday.  They're taken from my table, which was very conveniently right beside the bar :-)

I'm going through the schedule for the night to figure out which game is which, this is "Send Pirates, Guns & Money!" by the fellow who brings us "Mongols and Mausers" every year.  You didn't hear it from me, but word on the street was the Thai Rangers ended up with the drug cache.

Mark's "Battle of Slovchenko, Russo-Polish War 1920" game with TooFatLardies' Triumph of the Will rules, I heard this year the armoured train was captured!

These next two pictures must have been a late arrival to the schedule, unless I seriously misunderstood the Battle of Crysler's Farm in high school.

Charlie Company Vietnam game:

Frank from KEGS ran TooFatLardies' Dux Britanniarium games all weekend!  This Friday night one ended in a Saxon loss.

Brian's "Island in the Sun" Napoleonic naval game in a close-up view of the ships.

One of the set-ups at the Ontario Hobbit Adventures booth (they were selling terrain and bits too), a very, very, awesome Goblintown!

I also did almost all of my shopping that night, some PSC 1/72 Universal Carriers for Chain of Command, The Men Who Would Be Kings rules from Osprey, and some terrain bits and bobs.  After the gaming and shopping, many of us ended up in the bar for a few drinks and multiple wide-ranging discussions, and it was about 1 or 1:30 before I headed up to bed.

Saturday started with a run to get some fresh air and breakfast, then I was back to help Ron set up his operational-scale 6mm Kursk game, which he ran in the morning and afternoon Saturday (with an impromptu repeat Sunday morning) and get my stuff into the bring and buy.  I had some 15mm sci-fi, the bleeping 28mm not-Star Trek figures I've been unable to unload for about four years, some rulebooks, and one lone Osprey (that I'd accidentally bought two copies of) for sale.  All but the Osprey sold, so that was good and I basically ended up dead even for buys vs. sells over the course of the weekend.

While doing that, I also ran into Ontario Hobbit Adventures' other awesome set-up:

Before the morning's gaming started, I also did a bit of shopping at one booth (I'm guessing it was Empire and Eagle) and got some German and American WWII trucks, and Pz IIC's, all for Chain of Command.  And that was it for my shopping.  I've sort of run out of things to buy, there's a lot of 28mm pulp or VSF stuff from the vendors, but those projects are sort of on hold because I'm about 100 years behind on them; ditto for RAFM's 15mm sci-fi - and in that case I basically have everything.  So terrain, buildings, and 1/72 Chain of Command stuff made up almost all of my shopping list.  I did a couple of casual sweeps by the bring-n-buy table, but I wasn't committed enough to dive into the crowd.

Anyway, for Saturday morning I got into Brian's "Bloody Buron" battle with TooFatLardies' I Ain't Been Shot Mum rules, my first choice for the timeslot.  IABSM is my preferred set for whichever century I finally get my 6mm WWII stuff finished, and I love to play it.  In this scenario, three of us Germans defended a town in Normandy from a couple of Canadian companies.  It was a pretty bloody battle, like the name says, with a lot of artillery hits and burning Shermans, and was a marginal Canadian victory in the end, the Germans still held the town but were running out of resources to do so.

The table as the forces were setting themselves up:

My half-section of Pz IVH's, hiding.  I had a full platoon as reinforcements, but the game ended before they did more than race up the road.  These two guys did do a bit of damage, including later firing HE into those two buildings on the right.

This is probably about mid-game, before the German ATGs got revealed but after the Canadians dumped all sorts of smoke onto it.  The red-roofed buildings on the left are now occupied by Canadians, and you can see a couple of TDs following along.

Saturday afternoon I played in a six-player game of Frostgrave.  To avoid it turning into a deathmatch, the victory conditions encouraged us to do things other than kill each other's wizards, but that didn't last long and my magic-flamethrower-armed dwarves got into a drag-out battle with the wizard across from us (he started it, I swear!).  I think I killed more of his guys, but he killed the important guys in my warband.  Anyway, the terrain was spectacular and the GM did a good job of getting us all up to speed on the rules and magic; four of us hadn't played Frostgrave before.

This is just a plain awesome observatory.  I magically leaped one of my guys up there, and he did pick off some opposition but eventually got nailed himself.

My warband, pre-battle:

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The later stages of the game, an icewall has been thrown up and I've got some opposition interfering with my attempt to read the ancient writing on the walls of the ruins at the centre of the table.

For Saturday night I had a crazy number of games I wanted to try and get into, in the end I had two that I agonized over, One was a big samurai battle using Chipco's Chrysanthemum Throne rules, which I have and have thought may be the best solution for middle-ground samurai rules and the other was an ECW big skirmish game using the new The Pikeman's Lament rules from Osprey.  I went with the latter and it was superb, a lot of fun and I ended up earning the most Honour by achieving my major and minor victory conditions (perhaps the only time in the history of the world that's happened to me).

The scenario had three Scottish forces and a Parliamentarian one (I think, it was at the other end of the table) vs. four Royalist forces.  The game was set up through so it was basically four two-player games, though with a bit of side to side action.  I think that was a good call, as it let the game flow and my opponent and I just had to worry about each other and we could work our way through the rules on our own.  Our main challenge was figuring out how hits turned into figure losses (it wasn't on the QRS) and after reading the rules again when I got home, I realized we'd been doing it wrong.  Luckily we kept turning to our host Mark to solve things for us and that didn't affect the game.

From left to right on the Scottish side, there was a battle over the body of a martyr who'd been tossed from the tower of a church, a battle over that same church, a village battle to find the guy who'd tossed the guy from the church tower, and then a fight over the high ground to see the town, church, and martyr.  I was the immortal Donald McHaggis, hero of the Covenant, fighting over the churchyard.  Here are my guys early into the battle, having not moved far because three of my first four activation rolls were 3s (and I needed 5s or higher on 2d6):

I had two shot units, a pike unit, a Scottish forlorn hope of crazies, and two Scottish trotter units, who were a bit handy with the pistol, but not up to fighting off a Royalist charge.  The photo below is mid-battle, the Royalists had seized the church and churchyard first because of my crappy rolls, but now I was fighting back.  I've driving off their pike in the centre (they're way behind the churchyard now) and my shot is working over the Royalist shot, with my forlorn hope ready to charge the church.  My cavalry on the left are protecting that flank (the Royalist horse never came after me in the end) and my pike block is doing the same on the right.  My other trotter unit has been drive back through a random event, they had been shooting at the Royalist shot unit in amongst the graveyard.  They did return though.  Shortly after this, the forlorn hope took the church, my shot took the churchyard, and though things got a bit crazy when some Royalist horse jumped over the wall and into the fray, ultimately things weren't sustainable for them.

I'm now super excited to get a TPL project underway.  Well, probably a few projects, you could do the ECW, TYW, WSS...

So that was my personal Saturday, here are some shots of the rest of the day:

Above and below are some more crowd shots, this must be from before the BnB opened.

A great Death Star set-up for X-Wing:

Beside the Frostgrave table was this Metaverse game that lived up to its name, Star Wars vs. Star Trek vs. Battlestar Galactica vs. Babylon 5!

That's alotta space ships!

An awesome village (Huron or Iroquois?) for Flint and Feather:

And of course Mongols and Mausers, as I said in a text with this photo I sent to my nephew: "Rule #1 is wear an awesome hat!"

The big "Fenian Raids 1866" game run by Pete and Keith:

Saturday ended with some chats with friends, another drink, and then a run to A&W to get a second dinner, things had been pretty hectic helping Ron take down his game, getting signed up for the evening game, so I just had another sandwich for dinner, which is about 1.5 sandwiches too many for me.  Not sure A&W counts as real food, but it hit the spot at 11pm.  After that I hit the sack as I had to get breakfast, check out, and set up my Songs of Drums and Shakos game all before 9 on Sunday morning.

So that wraps things up until my post of my own game hosting experiences, it was another great year of Hotlead, lots of familiar faces and friends and new ones as well.  Clearly the social event of the season!

Reapermas Arrives at Twothreesixmm

Last night I came home to find a large, large box left on my front porch by UPS - my Reaper Bones Kickstarter package had arrived!  Reapermas at last!  I had pledged at the Vampire Level (all that that ended up entailing is in the picture below - click to see the whole thing) and picked up some extras:

• Cthulhu (a huge, huge figure!)
• Undead (Bone) Giant
• Clockwork Dragon
• Mythos Monsters
• Deep Dwellers
• Extras of the IMEF Marines and Nova Corps
• Carrying case for figures

When I originally pledged, my plan was to use some of the Lovecraftian figures for pulp gaming, the non-fantasy Zombie Hunters and Chronoscope for pulp, VSF, and/or modern spy gaming, and the sci-fi figures for topping up Star Wars.  The clockwork dragon is for VSF as some mad Prussian science project.  Some of the fantasy I'd paint myself to top up my collection of plastic collectible pre-paints and 1980s-era metal for Warhammer Fantasy-universe and Conan/Kull skirmishing, with some also being set aside for my young nephew as his first painting projects.

However, since then, despite my best efforts, I started three new projects this winter - and without really planning it this way, Reapermas actually supports two of those projects better than it does anything I outlined above (other than getting my nephew started at painting).

One project gathering steam has been Mythic India, and a ton of the figures above will work for it - the familiars, a couple of the necromancers, the skeletons and mummies, swamp things, owlbear, griffon, and the female storm giant (imagine her painted blue as the avatar of an Indian goddess...).  Even the spiky dark heroes and elves can work in the setting with the right paint job and mindset.

The other project is gaming with miniatures in the world of the Feng Shui RPG - for those not familiar with it, it basically encapsulates the best of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong movies in one grand setting.  So Chinese eunuch sorcerers with Shaolin monks with gun fu mobsters with strange science fiction.  I'm not sure of what rules to use yet - Osprey and Ganesha Games have announced a Hong Kong set based on the Song system that will be my first stop - but I've started collecting minis for it.

Reapermas helps with some gun-toting heroes, including a perfect figure for Furious George, second in command of the Jammers faction (yes, I know Furious was a chimp and that's a gorilla, but I'll work with it).  The IMEF and Nova can work as Buro soldiers/police, perhaps the Wheel too.  Some creatures will do as demons for the 69 AD timeline too, although I have some other figures (in metal) from Reaper that will be better (and work as cyborg-demons, aka abominations).

My third new project is the Monster Hunter International setting in 15mm, so theorectically out of scale for this, BUT that giant head monster (can't remember its D&D name), the green and fire haunts, the vermin, the swamp things, and the specials I got - undead giant, Cthulhu, Mythos monsters, deep dwellers, ALL will work for 15mm too!

It's like I'm a genius but don't even know it.  Of course, it's probably 50 years of painting to get this all done, but I'm looking forward to it.

There's been good threads on how to work with the "Bones" material circulating around, so I now have to read up on that, certainly some of the figures need a bit of re-shaping after their travels.

6mm Scenic Frenzy

As you'll recall from my (now-retired) schedule for 2012, I was going to spend August on 6mm terrain and scenics, so here are some belated pictures from that effort. Most of these are still ongoing, and will probably linger on my table for the rest of the year. When I'm bored with prepping figures, I'll spend on time on these.

First up is a massive ruined factory from Gamecraft Miniatures. This is made of acrylic (thin plexiglass), but the roofs, doors, and interior walls and floors are scratchbuilt by me. The interior walls are actually ruined floors from Gamecraft's city ruins line, just turned on their side. I had some spares when I put together the city ruins (no photos of that project yet, it got packed away).

Some 6mm ACW figures for scale:

The kit gives you the option of putting the entrance together with a Soviet star or German swastika, and I went with the latter since my project plans call more for late war fighting at the moment.

I also have been working on the sci-fi outpost buildings available from Angel Barracks, mainly painting them with leftover paint from other paintjobs.  Mostly I'm doing these in metallics, as if they're being built from the scraps of ruined spaceships.  The terrain will be a grey, moon-like finish when done (needs a final drybrushing).  These aren't quite done yet, but I've blocked in most of the bigger panels.

These are some sci-fi Jetson-like urban buildings built from trophy/plaque bases, as someone demonstrated once on The Miniatures Page.  These are 3 of the 5 I did, and have been primed, but the grey was darker than I anticipated, so I need to hand paint them a lighter grey.  The others will be yellow and white.  I need to improve my technique a bit, as too much grain is showing from up close, but I'll live with these ones.

Some JR Miniatures huts, for fantasy and any future ancients or medieval projects in 6mm.

A wall section for my 6mm High Elven city.  A few years ago I picked up some fancy wood trim on sale for cheap at the local craft superstore, and finally found a use for it.  The wall itself is just a strip of balsa, with the blocks scribed in, and the trim glued to the top and later cut.  I have enough for a 36" wide by 12" deep portion of the city (sitting on the table's edge) and a small 8"x6" or so fortress.  The wall sections will be interrupted by towers, also scribed and then capped by some fancy wood bits to look like organic-inspired towers.  Those will be shown once I get them coated with sandable sealer.

Inside the elven city will be a large water fountain, with these statue of an elven hero standing in the middle.  He's actually an old 25mm fantasy figure, making the statue about 25' tall.  As usual, photographing white didn't turn out so well, but he's been painted a winter white and drybrushed with a metallic white to make him look like marble, with a gold staff and sitting on a jade base.

And here's most of what else got started in August.  At the back centre-left is a Simply 6 ruined building; back centre-right is one of those Gamecraft city ruins I mentioned above.  This was the demo one (to see if the matt board warped when primed - it didn't), it still needs to be painted properly.  In front of it is a ruined cathedral, in the process of being primed with black gesso.  Also in the pic are two ruined castles from JR Miniatures, a ruined bridge and farm complex from Simply 6, three Baccus bridges, and some Baccus stone fences (bottom left).

Pic Plentiful

I've now emptied my camera onto the computer, so this is the first of at least 3 posts, all with glorious pictures.  Some I'd forgotten I'd even taken, so you'll get a 3mm rubber tree tutorial out of this eventually. 

First though, I'd like to say Blogger's new editor is really bloody annoying.  I was using the old one as long as possible, but they're making that harder to do.  But I'll persevere. 

This post is less coherent than the follow-ups will be, as it doesn't really have a theme, it's all the oddities.  First up is a re-purposed Blarney castle from a music box I found in a local thrift shop.  It's about 6mm, so I did it up as an evil Warhammer Chaos or Vampire Count lair, with some warpstone showing through the walls and up on top.  Perhaps it was hit by a falling warpstone meteor.

My now 2yo nephew helped paint the green at the base, so I've begun his training.  The glare is from a glossy coat of sealant, I'm dulling it with Dullcote for the table. 

I've previously posted some of the Creatology wooden puzzles that I'm using as cheap terrain, and have finally finished a few.  These are the same building, but converted to different scales, on the left is 28mm, intended for fantasy or the like, and is meant to be a fortified stone house.

On the right is a 15mm stone church, intended for Solomon Kane or other settings.  The cross is a spare bit from one of the other wooden puzzles.  Both were spray painted with a textured paint, then the roofs added and painted later.

I recently took advantage of Black Cat Bases' September sale, and amongst the things I picked up were three planets for space gaming.  This is the one I'm going to do up as an Earth-like planet.  I've just started the land masses, and need to figure out how to give them some life so they don't look like one flat colour.  Once I get the land and oceans done, I intend to paint some cloud cover over everything.

The other two planets will be an ice world, like some of Jupiter's moons, and a Mars-like red planet.  I think I need to order some more planets though, as I have lots more ideas for colour schemes.

Finally, from JR Miniatures, this is a 10mm tower that is slated for use in my Imaro (African fantasy) setting.  I need to do a final drybrush of the roof, but it's otherwise done. 

Next up will be a ton of 6mm terrain and scenics pics.

6mm Dollar Store Finds & 2mm Cities

Here are some more photos of what I've been up to. First we have four scenic pieces I found in the pet supply section of a Dollar store (Pound store for my UK friends):


Most of these will be for 6mm, but I think the bridge/tower combo might be better as 2mm, or could be used for both. The bit under the bridge is kinda dumb, to lay down a river beneath it will mean the river goes up and down a hump. I'm also thinking I should buy a second Aztec temple and spray paint it a sandy colour to use for 10mm Africa. I may even just do it for this one - since I don't have a single Aztec or Aztec-like fantasy culture in my plans! (well, maybe Warhammer's lizardmen)


Based on an idea I saw on The Miniatures Page, I've started putting together some 6mm sci-fi city buildings from cheap trophy stands available from a local craft superstore (Michael's). I've glued the matching pieces together, I just have to sand them, then glue them together as towers. I noticed last night the craft store has different shapes available now, but I'll wait for their next 25% off everything coupon before I buy more.


I'm also working on some 2mm cities to use either as representational scenics for Aeronef (based on CDs) or as edge-of-the-table pieces for Land Ironclads, Kull, Imaro, and my 18th/19th century historical projects. The latter aren't meant to be fought on, rather as the obejctive behind a defender.  I'm basing them on 2 12"x6" flooring tiles, and they're meant to be a bit closer to true 2mm scale than those on the CDs, which will be more like 0.5mm.

For the CD-cities, I'm doing several for my take on Victorian Venus (basically Space 1889's Mars), Ottoman-esque, and a generally European city or two (should work for North America as well). I may do an Aeronef NY, but bigger and on a tile, using my mini Statue of Liberty. For the bigger 2mm cities, I'm doing a bigger version of a Venuvian city, Victorian Mars (Wells' idea of Mars), a general European one, 18th century India, Valusia (Kull), one of the Giant-Kings' cities (also Kull), and an African-esque city (Imaro).

Then as a special project, I'm doing a "New London", aka Sky City, for Aeronef. Here are some early shots of the basics. Each CD is supported on a heavy bolt, glued to the cap of a toothpaste tube (Sensodyne makes great caps for 2mm scenics), which in turn is glued to the centre of the CD. The three CD's were then joined with popsicle/craft sticks underneath, which will be painted as monstrous girders.


One CD will be the industrical area, one the rich/administrative area with parks and the like, and the other the main city. I have anchors planned, as well as bridges, a telegraph line cable, aeronef docking and repair stations, factories, skyscrapers, etc.

In my universe, it will roam the Atlantic, as sort of a floating place of business for the British Empire (also a backup capital, if the Germans/French/Russians/Turks invade England!).  To defend itself, I'll be picking up some British turrets from Brigade this summer.