Pirates on the Sea of Strangers (and homeless birds)

I believe I mentioned my cog finding in a Michael's, and I got around to putting it together last night. It took about two hours, some bad words, glue, and plastic clamps. I think it looks pretty good for the Splintered Lands setting (or at least my take on it):

I'm looking to get another one, but for now this one will be done up as the good guys' ship, with a darker brown base colour and light brown decks. I'll spray paint the base coat, so I'll lose the plank and cut-outs the puzzle comes drawn with, but there's no way I'm painting in between the lines for all of this! I thought of spraying a lighter coat to let the lines show through, but I don't think I can keep that consistently applied.

The ship comes with sails, but I'm not going to use the mainsail (but will attach the yardarm later). I'm going to print new banners doublesided on cardstock and then trace the outline of the original banners onto the cardstock, allowing me to customize this for the fleet of Riversend.

The bad guys' pirate version will be mainly black. Some MegaMini's rowboats will also come in handy, for in-harbour boarding actions.

I figure I'll base my Splintered Lands minis on pennies, so I tested out how much room the deck of the ship has - it held these 10 pretty easily, so I think a decent fight could be had.

On the pirate ship I'll probably cut down on some items - the spindle will go, for one thing.

I also tried the ship out with some 25mm figures sitting out for priming (testing Gesso) - they look ok too, so I figure up to 32mm will be ok, allowing me to use in other settings (e.g. I have Kull and Conan lookalikes from D&D's collectible miniatures games coming).

My default 40-42mm test, these guys are too big, they make it look like a racing sailboat.

Earlier this week I went looking for a rocket-shaped birdhouse I'd heard was at Michael's, and while I didn't find that, I did find this:

Only $8.50, and if I had the patience I could have held out for a 40-50% off coupon, but there were only 3 on the shelf and I didn't want to lose it. There was also a log cabin that might work too, but it was pricier and there was a perch or two that would need cutting off.

I figure this will be a bad guy's remote fort for the Splintered Lands setting. I'll add an upper story door (sort of like a Dutch door thing), and a door and iron bar gate for the lower entrance. I'll coat with textured stone spray paint, except the roof tops, which will be done as wood. Now I need to decide if I need the two I left behind in the store...

Song of a Splintered Focus

I need new projects like I need new holes in the head. But I've always had an interest in anthropomorphic animals, probably due to (a) being nearly-named after a character in a much-beloved childrens' series, (b) loving the Wind in the Willows and the Reddy Fox stories (and others by Thornton Burgess), (c) being taken to see the WinW offshoot, Toad of Toad Hall (a play) as a kid, and (d) the Planet of the Apes movies. Oddly, I'd only run across the Redwall series recently and had avoided reading them.

So when I came across Splintered Light Miniatures' Splintered Lands range, I resisted as long as possible. One reason to resist was as a biologist I didn't like the all of species X (usually carnivores) are bad, everything cuddly is good. However, before Christmas, while in a skirmish mood, I picked up the well-regarded Song of Blades and Heroes rule set, then while accidently cruising through SLM's website again, I noticed the Splintered Lands mini's were matched with a sourcebook for SBH.

That got me thinking in the background while I worked on some other projects, and then I came up with the idea of using the mini's for more than a single species (e.g. hares being painted as a couple of species of hare/rabbit) and creating a background storyline of invading species, a real world biological concern. I also ditched the goblins, kobolds, and dwarves from the scene, but kept the minotaurs, satyrs, fauns, and lizardmen; the first three now belong to the invading side, and the lizardmen also being split based on the species I will paint them as. It will get a bit complicated with good deermice vs. bad housemice, but the starter kits provide plenty of variety.

So five more books for SBH later (I picked up the three expansions plus Splintered Lands PLUS the Mutants and Death Ray Guns ruleset), with $100 of well-armed animals on the way and a bit of doodling on paper, followed by hexmapping, we have:

To the north are what I'm just calling the Homelands, village-states with most villages being the home of one of the good native species (some villages are polyglots though). Across the Sea of Strangers lies the Empire of Horns, source of the Invaders - geckos, European hares (the Homeland is NE North American centric), Norweigan and black rats, housemice, swift foxes, shorttailed shrews, minotaurs, fauns, and satyrs (and more). The area of the homelands outlined in red is what the Invaders have conquered to date. Each hex is a couple of miles across.

While starting this new project up, I was in Michael's using up a coupon, when I came across their selection of Creatology wooden 3D puzzles. I'd heard about them before, but decided to flip through them to see if anything interesting came up. For $1.50 Cdn. I bought this castle and with some textured stone spray paint turned it into a facade for Highcastle, home to the deermice. It can't really be fought in or on, but can be fought in front of.

This is after spraying, I still need to do some touch ups, base, add some features (e.g. moss/vines climbing the sides) and then roof. I want to seal it really well, the textured paint has turned out to be kind of wussy even after drying a couple of days.

This hopefully gives some indication of scale. The lady is a Crimson Skies hero clix figure, so about 40mm. Way bigger than the 15-18mm animals, but it gives you some idea of size, I think the Splintered Lands figs will fit in nicely.

These are the roof pieces (they fit onto the pointy bits in the previous pics). The wood came with brick markings, which got sprayed over on the main structure, but I've painted them over here in black, then filled in with cranberry wine for the roof slates.

I'm not going to fool anyone that I've recreated Helm's Deep, but I think it should look great as a fairy-tale terrain piece.

My tip to give you the edge is paint after assembly; I tried to be efficient and just spray the boards before punching anything out, but needed to re-spray everything anyway.

There's a London Bridge puzzle for $7 I'm thinking of now; just not sure how often I'd have anyone skirmish on it or near it.