A space ettin!

I realise that I've had this fellow in the works for more than three years (!) now, but he's finally done. He's a converted ettin from the Descent boardgame. 

Ettin, of course, is an archaic English word that means 'giant'. It's cognate with the Norse jotun: both words seem to stem from a root that means 'eater'.

 In the Monster Manual, Gary Gygax describes ettins as two-headed giants that are evidently "closely related to orcs". He probably got his concept of the ettin from the fairy tale Red Ettin, which features a three-headed giant who keeps two-headed cattle. I thought a sci-fi version might do nicely as a space-orc chieftain.

Space gnolls!

 Kitbashing Frostgrave gnolls into sci-fi versions is something I've been doing since the kit came out. These guys are the picking up of a project I was working on about a year ago. Happily, the kitbashes I made then work as a unit of "jackal" trackers for Grimdark Future plus a couple of heroes (one very big - a converted Wizkids gnoll).

I painted these figures very quickly, chiefly through drybrushing, with a few select layering-and-highlights areas (the black hyena-like features and the red weapons and armour). Drybrushing can look quite rough, but I reckon it's appropriate for dusty scavengers on some desert planet.

Caravan guards

 My first completed miniatures of the new year - some sci-fi caravan guards for a desert scenario. Kitbashed from Victrix Napoleonics and Oathmark goblins and orcs.

And yet more space rats!

 Here are some more ...

The gang grows ...

 

Here's another brace of rodenty types. Like the other two, they're quite simply painted and then heavily black-lined with ink to sharpen them up. Black-lining is an unfashionable technique, but I'm quite fond of it - especially on old plastic miniatures with soft details. 

Space rats!

 Here are a couple of scuttling aliens for sci-fi skirmish games. The chap on the right is a straight-up Mantic Veermyn; the one on the left is a converted GW Skaven night runner. There are few things more puerile - or more satisfying! - than glueing a blaster on a fantasy miniature and calling him a spaceman. 

Marauders of the Wastes

Any dusty sci-fi setting needs some primitive marauders to come howling out of the wastes at inopportune moments. These Copplestone half-orcs looked the part, I thought.

I envisage three main uses for these fellows in our sci-fi games. 

First, they'll offer a challenge for players who want to eschew the pew-pew for some brutal hand-to-hand action. 

Second, they'll provide a consolation prize for any player who gets knocked out early from a multiplayer game ("OK, these guys turn up - you're in charge. They want to take as many heads as possible/steal some tech/destroy all technology."). Because they don't have guns, they'll represent a fair step down from the starting force, regardless of the rules we're using. 

Third, they'll act as a band of wandering monsters, which we usually include in our games to add some spice. We typically set aside x monsters with stats and then roll dx if a d6 rolled at the end of the turn comes up with a 6. 

I'm going to add some accompanying beasts with the same markings as the shields. And I have a few more on the way: some with bows, which will give them at least some ranged capability.

Speed-painted Stargrave troopers

 

These are some grunts for our sci-fi skirmish games. For speed-painting, the holy grail is a miniature that can be very quickly painted up in one or two colours with a few details added to create the illusion that more care has been taken. These fit that bill. After undercoating them black, I drybrushed them in two shades of turquoise, then slopped some black contrast paint over the guns. All that was needed then was to pick out the visors and add some markings. 

This technique depends on just ignoring differences in materials. So belts, armour, clothing and pouches all get treated the same, and hands are assumed to be gloved. But it's reasonably effective - and very quick. 

They had a suitably ruthless first outing in a game of Mutants and Death Ray Guns, in which they managed to dispatch all of their mutant and robot foes without so much as a scratch.

A cannibal

The marvellous Mutants and Death Ray Guns rules from Ganesha Games make provision, in one fo the supplement, for "cannibals". They're represented as tougher than normal humans, but they're restricted to primitive weapons. I thought this fellow and his ilk might fit the bill.

This one's a test - I might add some warpaint or tattoos.

He'd also pass muster as a Fomorian, I think.

Mutants and Death Ray Guns!

A selection of mutants

So far this year, the game I've played most is Mutants and Death Ray Guns, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi skirmish ruleset from Ganesha Games. Work, travel, holidays and the Six Nations have conspired to deny me time for preparing RPG adventures, so I've been running MDRG games for my son and his friends (and one of their fathers) most weeks.

I've had the rules for three or four years, and we've played them fairly often over that time, but usually simply as a sci-fi take on Song of Blades and Heroes, the marvellous fantasy skirmish game that provides the 'engine'. So, we typically just stat up some characters, keep the page with modifiers for high-tech weapons open and then play SBH. 

The field of battle

In our recent sessions, though, we've been paying much more attention to the differences between MDRG and SBH. And the game was much the better for it. That shouldn't be a surprise, of course, but I think many of us are guilty of carrying assumptions from one ruleset into similar but subtly different games.

So what have we been doing differently? Well, for starters, we've been using the profiles for each species in the book: Q3, C2 for humans (the default in SBH tends to be Q3, C3) and Q4, C3 for mutants. We then gave each side the appropriate leader and champion updates. That meant that Captain Zero, a human leader, is Q2, C2 - very easy to activate, but not especially formidable in combat, even when decked out in power armour (+2 C) and equipped with a jetpack (the Flying trait) and a sub-machine gun (+2 C).

Captain Zero

We've also paid much more attention to the differences between weapons. It was only fairly recently that I noticed that the titular death-ray guns don't just add 2 to combat rolls, but are also Lethal (killing on a 'win' rather than a 'doubling': something that should have been obvious!). So we've been making sure that was observed. And we've also been using multiple-shot rule for most high-tech weapons - a big departure from SBH - and the slower rate of fire for primitive weapons like bows and crossbows (which need an action to be reloaded in MDRG).

All of our SBH and MDRG games involve wandering monsters, which add a bit of extra spice. Before the game, I line up six beasties in order of power, with stats assigned to each. At the end of each turn, someone rolls a d6; a six means that a wandering monster (d6 roll for which) appears at a random table edge. This adds a lot of unpredictability to the game: players have to watch their backs.

Our most recent game put a twist on this. The game centred around cargo from a downed aircraft that had broken up over an alien hive. The players' squads had to retrieve some of this while avoiding or fighting off angry, bug-like aliens that emerged from several 'spawning points'. A d6 was rolled for each of these at the end of a turn; only a 1 failed to produce aliens, with other numbers spawning various types of bug.

Bugs

This lead to a set-up in which the table was often swarming with agitated aliens, meaning that the player goals often had to be subordinated to sheer survival. That forced temporary cooperation among the players, who were otherwise opposed to each other.

Bugs and their spawning points

I also recently played back-to-back games of GW's Kill Team and MDRG. I enjoyed KT (a game with an old friend is always fun), but I was struck by how slow the game is compared with the Ganesha rules. We used a small section of the table for KT and the whole table for MDRG, with two warbands a side for the latter game. But MDRG played out much more quickly. It also offers much more elegance in the combat system: shooting delivers five possible results from one opposed dice roll, whereas in KT, it's three possible results from four or five dice rolls. In close combat, MDRG gives a spread of nine possible results from the single opposed roll; in KT, it's three results from four rolls - and the process is repeated if the defender survives.

That got me thinking about how MDRG and SBH combat is generally much more enjoyable and dynamic than most RPG systems. And that in turn prompted me to dig out the Tales of Blades and Heroes RPG rules from Ganesha. I'm planning a hybrid skirmish/RPG run-out with those this weekend.

Snake Plissssken and friend

Two more mutants (or aliens) for Mutants and Death Ray Guns ...

Space monkeys!

We've been playing quite a bit of Mutants and Death Ray Guns recently - largely on the basis that organising a session takes minutes rather than hours. I suspect our Whitehack campaign won't resume until the halfway break in the Six Nations.

Yesterday, I had an idea for a warband: space monkeys! I kitbashed five of them from GW skaven bodies and Mantic orc heads, with Wehrmacht arms from Warlord Games. The leader got a pair of Frostgrave gnoll arms. I started painting them last night and finished this morning, in time for this afternoon's game. They won't win any painting prizes (but they did win the game).

An alien

Requiring some mutants and aliens for a big game of Mutants and Death Ray Guns this weekend, I tried to get this fellow done in exactly an hour. I see from the podcast I was listening to that he took about an hour and a quarter.

I used a very simple recipe: base colours, a quick drybrush in silver-grey, then a wash over each area.

I might give him some more attention tomorrow, but I suspect that a good dollop of gloss varnish will obscure his shortcomings sufficiently.