More experiments in speed painting: GW and Ral Partha orcs

I'm always on the lookout for speed-painting techniques for miniatures. The Whitehack campaign I'm running for my kids and their friends benefits from a steady supply of new monsters - especially ones that the players haven't seen. I'd rather have hundreds of reasonably painted miniatures than a few well-painted ones - and I'm conscious that the gap between my "well-painted" and "decent" is narrow.

My usual speed-painting techniques involve drybrushing and "tinting" - either with washes or thinned-down layers of paint - plus a bit of highlighting on top. I set out some tutorials here and here and here. But I've long been interested in just using washes. So I found this YouTube tutorial interesting.

I've since applied the techniques to a batch of GW plastic orcs that I'm going to base up for Hordes of the Things. This is a very quick way to do an army: a standard HotT force has 24 points of troops, with an "element" (warband, blades, spears, shooters, beasts, knights, etc.) typically counting for 2 points. Heroes and magicians are double, but can only make up half your force in total. So 12 elements of troops is a full side - and such is the bulk of these GW models that they go just two to an element.

I was quite pleased with how the wash technique worked. I'm not a huge fan of these GW orcs, but they are allowing me to create a huge (72 or 96-point) army very quickly. A few individually based miniatures allow the horde to be used in games that require those, too. So these will work in Dragon Rampant or Saga (or in RPGs: I'm not averse to using multi-based hordes in those).

The washes work quite well with these big and cartoony GW plastics, I think, as there are lots of deep recesses to create shadows and large details such as tusks that create contrasting accents when painted normally. But I've also been applying them to miniatures at the opposite end of the 25/28mm scale: the superb Ral Partha orcs by Tom Meier and Jeff Wilhelm. The oldest of the Meier orcs, the "giant goblins" and their smaller kin, were first released in the late 70s.

The problem with painting these miniatures is that they're so finely modelled and delicately detailed that traditional painting methods tend to obscure their finer points (unless you're John Blanche, of course). I suspect that's why there are very few nicely painted examples on the web. But painting them with washes allows the detail to shine through, giving a reasonable result. In other words, I'm surrendering as a painter and letting Messrs Meier and Wilhelm take over.

This technique is also very fast. I'm rapidly creating a good-sized orc horde for Whitehack. I have dozens of painted orcs already, of course (Citadel, Chronicle, Oathmark, etc.). But I feel that our Whitehack campaign is due an invasion by the Black Skull tribe - a hardy breed, if smaller than the cave goblins and pig-faced orcs that have already featured. 

Going somewhere, Solo? Star Wars bounces back.

I took the kids to see Solo with low expectations. We left the cinema elated, after the best Star Wars film since the 80s.

This was a surprise - a shock, even. For the most part, the films released since Return of the Jedi have been a succession of disappointments. Rogue One was an exception, but even it suffered from a garbled plot, especially in its early stages.

Three things distinguish Solo from the dismal catalogue that preceded it. The first is the quality of its script. Its plot is coherent and clear - even as it takes in a succession of twists, reversals and double-crosses. You always know what's going on, and you never have to reach for an extravagant justification for some unlikely action. The dialogue is fine; it bounces along like that of the original trilogy. And the characters are good: clear archetypes that give the actors something to get their teeth into, which is just what this sort of film needs. When Star Wars attempts complex characters, it ends up with brow-furrowed blandness. There's none of that here.

Second, the film steals from the best. Its main influences appear to be Westerns and cinematic classics like Casablanca and Le Salaire de la Peur - not other Star Wars films and the awful weight of geeky expectations. After the turgid Force-warblings of The Last Jedi, that's tremendously refreshing. The original Star Wars cheerfully plundered cinema's riches (especially the films of Akira Kurosawa and John Ford); with Solo, the series goes back to picking the pockets of the great rather than pompously cannibalising itself. Yes, there are innumerable nods to other films in the series, but they're deftly done and don't feel forced.

Third, Solo is light-hearted in a way that works. Unlike The Last Jedi, the humour fits the mood of the film. The jokes work because they don't undermine the setting (as Poe Dameron's prank call to Hux did last time out). Solo's tone is similar to the first couple of Indiana Jones films - and that's entirely appropriate. At the same time, this is a caper film in which sympathetic characters die and in which the horrors of an oppressive universe are clearly shown - whether it's the Dickensian street life of Corellia, the grimness of the slave-planet where the all-important fuel is produced or the finale's traumatised shanty-town with its mutilated inhabitants. The balance is maintained - and that's infinitely preferable to any amount of droning on about balance in the Force.

Indeed, I don't think the Force or jedis are ever mentioned in Solo, and that's also refreshing. A light dusting of cod-mysticism is all very well in Star Wars films: a training montage here, a spot of telekinetic strangulation there. But once you get into its deeper cosmological meanderings, it gets very tedious indeed. The Force's absence from Solo is welcome relief.

And Solo looks great too. It shows us backwater planets, grimy saloons and dusty townships. And it populates these enclaves with a tremendous range of squirming, grunting and growling entities. That's exactly what's needed from a series whose spiritual heart has always been Mos Eisley.

And on that note, we get not one but two nods to the first film's showdown with Greedo. Han shoots first, of course.

The Monster Man podcast

Anyone with even a glimmer of an interest in monsters or RPGs should enjoy James Holloway's Monster Man podcast.

James has read his way through the Monster Manual already, discussing the origins of the book's monsters and their use in games. He's moving onto the Fiend Folio in June.

The special episodes on trolls and valkyries are particularly good.

Half-hour dungeon - and the guard-room without a guard.

The afternoon called for a D&D (specifically, Whitehack) session with the kids and their friends. I'd had plans for them to revisit the portion of the Devil-Warrens they investigated a couple of weeks ago, but an accidental upside-downing of the second-level map in transition to the table last time out meant that some detailed retrofitting of corridors and rooms was required.

So, rather than get all fiddly with graph paper, flip mats and dungeon tiles, I just scribbled some caves on one-inch graph paper and fitted them together to make a smallish cavern complex leading to an outdoor section that I scrawled on a flip chart.

The governing idea was pursuit. Although the PCs were charged with destroying a wight who had struck some awful pact with the Lords of Chaos, they made their initial entry into a "guard room" from which the guard was absent.

That set up a nice dynamic: the point being that the guard would return at some point. As the PCs had to cross a fast-flowing subterranean river, with an enticing portcullis and lever arranged at one end, they spent a lot of time faffing around once they were past the guard chamber. Then, when they were attacked by orcs from deep within, they panicked when the orcs started shouting "Bruglod! Where's Bruglod?"

Bruglod, a beefy bugbear, had gone hunting in the hills outside. And when the PCs heard him coming, with half the party still stranded on the far side of the river and a troll clawing at them through the portcullis, we had a terrific set-up for a panicky, fast-paced chase scenario.

Where THE HELL is Bruglod?

The PCs released the troll, which eventually dispatched Bruglod and then pursued them deeper into the orc-warrens.

The climactic encounter with the wight was enlivened by his summoning creatures of chaos from some demented dimension. My Hordes of the Things chaos hordes featured as swarms of chaotic beings - all multiple attacks, huge hit points and low AV and AC.

Using multi-based miniatures in RPGs works pretty well. There's something satisfying about a big block of things crawling across the table. It's an idea I'll revisit at some stage with multi-based hordes of goblins or the like.

Fast and furious: speed-painting techniques

Fast ... and at least a little bit cross!

I'm by no means a great miniature painter. But I am a reasonably fast one. And for gaming, speed is often more useful than skill: better to have lots of half-decent miniatures on the table than a handful of good ones.

As several people have asked me about my speed-painting techniques on my Lead Adventure Forum thread, I thought I'd put up a bit of a tutorial here.

I use various different speed-painting ruses. This is probably the fastest. I start off by undercoating the miniatures in Pebeo's black gesso, which costs about a fiver on Amazon for an ample tub. It covers very smoothly and dries quickly. I then paint in all the base colours except for metal things.

Base colours over black gesso

Next, I drybrush the whole thing with Vallejo's silver grey (equivalent to Citadel's Wych Elf Flesh). This takes seconds and picks out the highlights (rather too starkly, but we'll fix that later).

Drybrushed in silver grey

After that, it's time to paint the metals. You could do them before the drybrushing, but that would leave them with non-metallic highlights (which might work OK, depending on the effect you're after). 

Now with a glint of steel

Things look pretty rough at this point, but that can be remedied with washes. For these ratmen and similarly scruffy types, I slop on Citadel's Agrax Earthshade wash on wood, armour and bits of clothing. In a real hurry, you'd be fine using it on everything. I usually use sepia on reds and greens, but sometimes use red or green washes instead or as well. For flesh, I usually thin down some of the Citadel blood-effect paint with medium, to get a ruddy glow in the recesses.

Washed

All that remains now is to paint in the eyes, teeth and other details, and then add a few highlights here and there. For this, I use silver grey thinned with glaze medium. The silver grey (or Wych Elf Flesh) is sufficiently opaque to provide a visible highlight even when thinned heavily. I use it on everything that requires it, regardless of the underlying colour. This is a very quick process - just a couple of minutes on each figure. 

A final step is to thin down some black paint with water and add the odd bit of black-lining or darkness where required. This and the highlights could be comfortably skipped. A quick drybrushing of the bases, and we're done.

Done!

The results aren't anything spectacular, but they'll do the job. In the group below, the two closest to the camera were painted with this method, while the others were given more time and care. The others hold up better to close inspection, but who bothers with that on the tabletop?

Were-rats!

Some more Jacks-in-the-Green

Here are the first six Jacks-in-the-Green. They'll feature in our next Whitehack session, I imagine.

I generally prefer the Perry twins' goblins to Kev Adams'. The Perry ones are more Tolkienesque: nasty little subterranean soldiers. The Adams ones are more comic. But that means that they're better suited to a more whimsical, folkloric role: fairies or elementals rather than orcs.

These were quickly painted as part of a larger batch; I have another seven just about finished and many more in various stages of preparation. This first six will make a nice little unit of scouts for Dragon Rampant.

The one with the boulder is a crewman from a stone-thrower. He'll double up quite nicely as a 15mm forest troll, I reckon.

Correlated stats and The Fantasy Trip

Plenty of strength, plenty of hit points

One thing that a lot of RPGs get wrong, I think, is allowing characters to have uncorrelated physical stats. A character with STR of 18 and CON of 3 makes little sense - and nor does a character with STR 18 and just one or two hit points.

RuneQuest does a little better than most old-school games, in that it also has the SIZ stat. Your damage bonus comes from an average of STR and SIZ, which seems logical, and your CON and STR can be trained up to the level of whichever is the highest out of the other stat and SIZ. But the fact the starting stats are uncorrelated still leaves problems. A very strong person, even if small, is likely to be muscular and therefore relatively heavy, which suggests greater hit points (based on CON modified by SIZ and POW but not STR in RQ2). And it's hard to imagine a small, strong person who is yet physically frail.

Equally, though, it's easy to find examples of fit, tough people who aren't particularly strong. But not, I think, to the CON 18, STR 3 level. It's also easy to imagine people (or creatures) that are very strong but not particularly healthy: an obese hill giant or ogre, for example. But it's hard to imagine that unhealthiness impinging on their hit points. The chances of a heart attack are not, one suspects, correlated to the chances of being killed with a single sword-blow.

How, then, to resolve this? One approach might be to adjust below-average CON up when STR is higher than average. Something similar could be done with hit points.

But there's another approach: shed some of the stats. I was looking at some retroclones of The Fantasy Trip and Melee (the combat game on which TFT is based) yesterday, and was impressed by the way that the STR stat is both physical power and hit points: you simply lose STR as you take damage. So, as you are wounded or fatigued, you become a less effective grappler and less able to accomplish physical tasks.

For combat, TFT and its clones use the DEX stat. That also makes sense; skill in combat is very different from brawn. Brawn certainly helps, of course - not least because it provides more mass to absorb damage, as reflected in TFT's system of declining STR. Of course, as in most RPGs, DEX encompasses much more than dexterity; deftness, agility and skill (and thus, presumably, training). For a game using a similar two-stat system, I'd be inclined to go with "strength" and "skill" to describe the attributes.

Now, there are myriad holes to pick in this. Someone can be a skilled swordsman but clumsy in other respects. And a skilled swordsman can certainly be a poor climber and otherwise unathletic. But I think that reducing the physical stats to STR and DEX (or "strength and skill") is actually preferable to having uncorrelated attributes of STR, DEX and CON (with SIZ too, in RQ).

Steve Jackson has reacquired the rights to TFT, which is to come back into print. I'll certainly pick up a copy when it does.