Painting Plans!

With the preview of the new Yu Jing remotes over at Beasts of War and Angel Giráldez' blog I thought it might be wise to plan ahead what to paint. I was thinking mainly of Infinity, but naturally other games will pop up as well. Let's have a look at what we've got ahead of us!

First off, I've actually finished the Yu Jing doctor and engineer. They haven't been featured on the blog yet  because I want to finish their two servant bots as well first, but you should see them on Saturday or Sunday for sure. I wanted to get these out of the way mainly because they're good models to have available to your force, but also since the upcoming campaign/scenario book (damnit CB! Give us a title already!) seems to have scenarios where they are needed.

Same goes for the baggage remotes that were released a few months ago, the Pangguling. I'm all kinds of excited about playing proper scenarios in Infinity so really want to prepare for them! Also, remotes in general is someting very unique to Infinity and I simply want to bring some into my gaming force. I started on a Yáokòng last year, but it's been pushed to the back of the line by some of the new releases.

I usually get tired of painting large(ish) models like the remotes so after that I think some regular infantry is needed. The Kuang Shi are definitely the unsung heroes of my Yu Jing force as they're cheap enough to throw away recklessly but also have enough tricks up their sleeves to play havok with my opponent. So naturally I would like to try the Shaolin monks as well. They're similar but have different abilities like smoke grenades and martial arts training. I've held off because I wasn't too fond of the sculpts but with the new box released things have certainly changed! For starters I'll probably just do two of them as I don't think I'd be comfortable with more two Irregular models in my force. The chainrifle and one of the staff wielders are likely candidates.

Ok, I've got some specialists, some remotes and some smoke tossing skirmishers... what would work well with that? Well, a Hsien with a Heavy Machine Gun of course! The two Hsien models were among the first I got for Infinity since I both liked the look of them and they seemed brutal in game as well, but I still haven't played played with or painted one. This needs to change! I know just what they're going to look like and everything. Having a model with Multispectral Visor and a HMG coupled with models capable of laying down smoke is a nasty combination that I thought would be fun to try.

Finally I want to get some fightier remotes on the table and the new Rui Shi and Lù Duan (up top!) fit the bill perfectly! While they are just as big as the baggage remotes (meaning harder to hide) they look really cool and I simply want to have them scamper across the table confusing enemies with holo-echoes and gunning down camouflage troops thanks to their Multispectral Visor! Hmm... with all these new remotes I should get another hacker or two painted, for variety's sake if nothing else.

So that's my Infinity sorted for a while I think. I really want to get my Guija painted as well, but I won't try to squeeze it into the schedule quite yet. Now, what else do we have that I'm eager to get started on? To be honest there's simply way too much! But trying to focus on the games I play mostly at the moment there's Dust Warfare and Judge Dredd.

The infantry in Dust Warfare lends themselves well to fairly basic painting techniques and I hope I can get an entire squad done in one sitting. Not quite sure about what kind of colour scheme and camouflage I'd like to go with yet. Likely someting similar to the studio paint jobs, but with some variations. I'll probably start with the Fakyeli close combat squad as I really like the look of them. Next up will be the Medvedi command squad and after that I would really like to try my hand on either a walker or a helicopter. However, for that I would need to use one of my friends airbrushes for the first couple of steps. We'll see how it turns out.

I must admit that I'm more focused on painting Infinity at the moment, partly because my friend has finally started working on his Acontecimento force but I think mainly because the Zverograd campaign book still isn't available. It's currently listed as "On the Boat" at FFG's site so hopefully it'll be here in time for Gencon and I imagine my motivation level will rise considerably when that happens. Then again, we might (please, CB!) see the Infinity campaing book then as well. Hmm...

Finally we have the Ape gang for the Judge Dredd skirmish game. I love these models! Perhaps not as technically accomplished as the stuff CB puts out, but competent enough and, more importantly, they are full of character! I think they can be a good middle-ground between painting Infinity and painting Dust Warfare. Being able to take a break from the serious business and get cracking on some monkey business seems like great fun!

First off will be this little fellow, since it's a basic "trooper" and since the scratching my head pose is simply awesome! I've been listening to old episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show lately so monkeys keep popping into my head all the time, this might be a nice outlet for it...


So, that's my plan right now anyway. I'm sure it'll change as we go along, but I will at least try to stick to it. Especially the Infinity bit. You guys have a general idea of what might turn up here in the next few months or so. Actually my vacation starts on Monday so I'll likely have more time for painting and stuff for a couple of weeks at least. Hopefully this will result in some more models getting finished.

Anway, expect some specialists in a couple of days.

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Dredd Trailer - Some Thoughts

As you might know I've dived back into the futuristic dystopian world of Judge Dredd that I used to spend a lot of time reading about during my teen years. I've started exploring the (free) miniatures game from Mongoose, I've bought the first three Complete Case Files albums to refresh my memories and I've eagerly awaited the trailer for the new Dredd movie starring Karl Urban and Lena Heady. We were shown a brief glimpse of it yesterday but here it is in glorious HD. Let's watch...

My initial thoughts is that I like the overall style (however derivative) but that a lot of what made Judge Dredd unique is missing. It feels like director Pete Travis wanted to go the Chris Nolan/Batman route and make it into a grittier more "realistic" take on the original comic, problem is that the original comic is way over the top silly most of the time! And I mean this in a good way! The whole eighties sci-fi aesthetic is gone, which is to be expected, but it hasn't been replaced by oughties sci-fi aesthetics it has simply been replaced with a by-the-numbers near future trash dystopia. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that per se, but if Karl Urban would've worn a different helmet you wouldn't bee able to tell it was a Judge Dredd movie.

While the 1995 movie with Stallone as Dredd was horrible in all kinds of ways it did manage to transfer the comic book Mega City 1 onto the silver screen fairly well. While it embraced the camp of the comic a little bit too much it seems to me that the new movie doesn't embrace it enough. Could you imagine the Dredd of this trailer battling the infamous ape gang featuring Fast Eek and Joe Bananas? Or discontent fatties with bellywheels?! Nope, I don't think either exists here. Perhaps there will be yet another version in another 13 years that manage to find the right balance.

Now, I shouldn't be too negative about it since I actually like a lot of what we're seeing here. I'm a fan of near future dystopian settings so in that way I shouldn't complain. I'm hoping to see a cool sci-fi action movie featuring Judge Dredd but not really featuring the true craziness of Mega City 1. It's like a mirror image of how I view John Milius' Conan - as a movie set in Hyboria but not featuring Conan - and I love that film! Hopefully Dredd will manage something similar and actually bring its own piece of flavour to the ginormous cake that is Judge Dredd!

Finally I can't end this post without talking about how similar the movie looks to Indonesian produced (but Welsh directed!) action move The Raid - Redemption. The plot is pretty much identical only we get two judges instead of 20 SWAT troopers (seems like an even trade, right?). To save you some time, here's the trailer for that movie:

I read somewhere that Dredd actually began production before The Raid, but still... striking similarities, eh? Check it out by the way, it's pretty cool!

In other Dredd related news a package arrived the other day containting an Ape gang for me and a Sky Surfer gang for Anders. Thanks to @SnowyHoobinoo over at ThisWayLeads (excellent blog, check it out!) for letting me know of the IGUK sale! We need to put these guys together so we can start bashing it out properly. I haven't looked at the surfers yet but I really like the ape minis. Very nice sculpts! As soon as I'm done with my Yu Jing doctor and engineer (and their servant bots) I think I'll try painting a chimp. Ha!

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New Project: Judge Dredd

I am the law!

I mentioned earlier that a post by that sneaky Hendy Badger got me interested in the Judge Dredd Miniature Game by Mongoose Publishing again. The game is the spiritual successor of Gangs of Mega-City One but is in itself an entirely different game. It was released last year as a free PDF by Mongoose and they have since then expanded their miniature range so there's now a fair amount of Judge Dredd miniatures available. The rulebook is also being continually updated as new miniatures appear and rule tweaks are added.

I downloaded it back in 2011 but only skimmed through it, kind of dismissing it as a Necromunda copy. But when I came across that article about it at Tales of a Tabletop Skirmisher I decided to give it another look as it sounded like a lot of fun. Now, me and my group of gamer friends played loads ands loads of Necromunda back in the day. Of all the GW games that is the one we played the most (perhaps rivalled by Epic). In a skirmish environment the somewhat clunky 40k rules work a lot better (as that is how it was meant to be played of course!) and even though it could be a bit fiddly at times we had lots of fun with it. The campaign aspect especially was often the major motivator, both from a gameplay standpoint (more xp!) and from a campaign standpoint (cool stories!). We grew attached to our gangs and our gangers and generally had a good time. Things started to get out of hand as the gangs became too powerful, since the game wasn't really able to handle that level, so now and then we simply started over from scratch.

Necromunda having a special place in our hearts we have often talked about reviving it in some way, simply running it vanilla or using some different rules system (like AE Bounty). Having played some more modern miniature games like Infinity going back to the old 40k rules has been the largest hurdle for me. They just feel so slow and... uninspired in comparison. However, neither would I like to play Necromunda with Infinity rules, it simply wouldn't feel right as Necromunda needs to be more "pulpy" in the rules department. 

So what does this have to do with Judge Dredd? Well, leafing through the book it felt like a great middle ground between the two; more modern and quick playing than Necromunda, but not as lethal and punishing as Infinity. My initial thoughts of using the system to play Necromunda slowly made a 180° turn as I kept reading. You see, Mega-City One is really the original Hive and whatever you can find in Necromunda you can find something ten times weirder, ten times more deadly or ten times as funny in Mega-City One! So instead of thinking about how to adapt it to Necromunda I started thinking how the different Necromunda gangs we have lying around would fit into Judge Dredd. Most of the regular gangs would simply become street gangs, whereas scavvies and ratskins would become Cursed Earth denizens (or a Zombie Horde!) etc. Back during my early teens I used to read Judge Dredd in 2000AD so it all felt familiar in a nostalgic kind of way.

The Angel Gang.

Using the minis we have at hand is certainly attractive as we can get away with not painting all that much, but both me and Anders felt like it wouldn't feel right not adding some iconic Mega-City One inhabitants to our rooster of available minis. Some Judges, fatties as well as perhaps some apes and sky surfers are on the shopping list. I also have my Kolony Ferals that would make excellent Cursed Earth mutants or similar.

The rules are fairly straightforward (roll a D10 with stat modifiers vs a threshold of six or your opponents roll) but has a number of small details that takes it to the next level. My favourite rule is probably that Judge's must use an action to try and arrest a perp before opening fire, making an opposed Will roll the perp will simply be removed (ie arrested) from the board if the Judge wins! Awesome! Or the Vid-reporter (see right) you can take as a mercenary for your gang and if he can get enough action on film you'll get a lot more money after the game from interviews and royalties. Haha!

There are a number of nifty scenarios and they all seem fun. Of course, I'm already thinking of how to adapt the old Necromunda scenarios to this new setting, should be pretty straightforward. When creating your gang you're given much more freedom than in Necromunda (or the strict AE Bounty system) which I think will make it easier for us to really get going. The only area the game falls a little flat is when it comes to playing a campaign. The rules for receiving XP and resolving injuries are fine, it's just that the rest of the campaign structure is fairly minimalistic and abstract; there are no territories and the scenarios have no impact on how much money you receive. It's a simple 20% of the value of the larger gang if you won or 10% if you lost.

Basically it's just a simple framework and you would have to flesh it out yourself if you want the feel of a more living campaign. My thoughts was to either adapts some rules from Necromunda, or the predecessor Gangs of Mega-City One. Although, this is something for the future as a simple, no-frills campaign system might be just what we need to get going (and keep going).

I've been talking to a few of my gaming friends and I think we could get a small campaign with maybe four or five players in it. Me and Anders have offered to lend models to anyone who want to join in to remove that obstacle and with games being quick I think we could have some game nights dedicated to Judge Dredd where we could possibly all meet up and play a couple of games each. I hope so anyway.

To go with this project I started looking at different kinds of urban terrain and what we might be missing in our collections. I know some people disagree but I think the Necromunda terrain is pretty great and overall it would work well for Judge Dredd as well. We have three sets in total so there's that. We've never really had a good table to play on though as having a nice grassy green table doesn't feel right and just a black cloth is a bit boring, so I started looking around for alternatives. I had seen Mr. Harolds excellent looking Shadowrun table over at Clear Horizon (here and here) and was impressed by how much difference the street layout made! 

So I started investigating Worldworks Games a bit more. I've been there many times before but never actually bought anything. At fist I thought I'd use the same as Mr. Harold, ie the Mayhem Streets of Legedn set, but then I came across Streets of Titan and I wasn't so sure anymore. It seemed like Titan might go a lot better together with the Necromunda terrain and perhaps more fitting to Infinity as well. Problem is the pictures on their site doesn't give a good view of what the Titan set really looks like but after some googling I came across the Incunabulog where the author is using cardboard to make raised sidewalks etc.

The holes will be filled in of course, I just haven't had the time to cut those parts out yet.

It looked really good so I decided to get Streets of Titan and pretty much do the same thing. Having a friend with access to an industrial printer made my choice easier as I could get away with it for cheap. He even supplied me with enough foamboard to do the entire 120x120cm board! I've printed out what I need to to make it although, I'm not sure what to do about the layout. Right now I've created the one you can see above and thought I'd simply build it the same every time, my reasoning being that trying to construct an actual modular board was too tricky. But then again, it would be a lot of fun to be able to change it up according to the scenario. I'd be more than happy for any advice on how to make a modular board layout that really works well. At the moment I'm wondering if I have put too many streets and not enough "sidewalk" in there. But then again, streets are cool and there's nothing saying you cant plonk down some scatter terrain on them. Besides the good old Necromunda terrain I'm thinking about getting one of the Downtown sets as well to make more traditional housing blocks. 

Oh, and it bears mentioning that I'm planning to assemble them with four sections to one foamboard 30x30cm squar, not the way Worldworks originally intended it. I feel this would make for easier storage and  alot quicker construction. Of course, it makes creating a good modular layout more tricky. Hmm.

Anyway, that's a little bit about Judge Dredd and this new terrain project! I'll update it as I go along and I'll write more about Judge Dredd as well. So far we've only tried the first intro scenario but a full on gang fight is in the cards in the near future! If you like skirmish games and perhaps wouldn't mind something a bit more layed back than Infinity or Tomorrow's War have a look at Judge Dredd. You really don't have anything to loose as it's free!

Until next time, citizen!

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