Cerridwyn1st

I've noticed that some mages have a ranged attack of six inches. What is that? Like, the spell caster shooting fire from his or her hands or something?

Hey Digger, I posed your question to my son - what factions look good and are good in melee? He suggested Crusaders and Reptus. Cedric plays Dwarves, by the way. He thinks the Crusaders look cooler, but the dwarves are great fighters. If you are going to get more than one faction, might I suggest you get something that excels in a different area? That way, if someone has a group that is good against your Basher faction, you can hit them with something different, say distance fighting.

Doh! Boy, sometimes it doesn't seem like I'm having a blonde moment, I'm having a blonde lifetime. I think I have some Orgins pix of the dungeon, just got to dig them out, make necessary adjustments and publish. I'll take another look at my disks.

If the spiders were dogs, Giant Spiders would be Great Danes and Spider Famliars would be beagles. I think. In the picture, the one in the uppper left is a Giant Spider. In the middle is a spider familar and to the right is the one from the Giant Spider with Victim pack.

I'll third that vote for the Crusaders or Reven if you like head-bashing. Go Crusaders if you like models that look good. Bonus is the grunts can be painted quick and still look awesome. Having solid helms instead of faces means they are easier to paint than just about anything in the game, except maybe skellies. If you want your army to look good and you aren't a great painter yet, try the Crusaders. Heck, if you are a great painter try the Crusaders. The Leadership and Elite models could definatelty use a deft hand in getting them painted to look nice.

Dag nabbit, Tim, I asked you for some pix from Origns to add the the ones I've already got on the site. You still interested in a painting commission? I'm finally digging myself out from under my backlog. Mel

Same here, though I'm curious about trying ivory instead of white, and I may have to give it a go to try yellow for goblins. I have much more luck and far better results with a pen than a brush, and there are many color choices with the pens, too. Using white for the, uh, whites looks starey and unnatural; that's why so many use an off wite color.

Hey...when you're hungry you're hungry. It takes time away from the minis to go to the kitchen, and time counts, man! It's just so much easier to slam a bottle of RP Shamrock Green... Damon Ew... Naw, I'll just stash some of the Hurrican Supplies I didn't use under the paint table and hit those. Vienna sausage anyone?

The important thing is to define your style and choose something that goes with it. If you can play a few demo games and try different factions, that would be great, but I do understand it might not be possible. If you can't, then when the book comes out read the different faction discriptions and see what appeals to you. Archers: Elves, bar none, especially when it comes to vollies. Reven aren't bad either. Goblin Skeeters rock as archers and can be ranked in front of Bull Orc Archers because of their "small" ability. The archers for one faction (I think it's Overlords; please correct me if I'm wrong) have Ranked but not Volley. They can't mass an archery attack, but they can be held safely behind your melee lines and shoot from there. Magic: Two of the most powerful spellcasters in the game are the Warlords for Darkspawn and Overlords. Naomi of the Necropolis also kicks some serious magical butt. The elves are very versitile magically, having an archmage and several other spellcasters, including the Warlord. You could say the same of the Crusaders, but more towards Clerical magic. All the factions have magic, but each is a little diffeent in focus. For instance, there are no clerics in the Necropolis faction. Melee: Reven are very powerful melee fighters, having good offense and defense. Dwarves and Crusaders are particularly good in formation fighting. In the Overlords, the captain Iks has the Mob ability, as do the grunts for that faction. So if you like to throw out lots of stuff, there you go. IMO, Skellies should be a little cheaper and have mob, with at least one leader model that also has mob. You can still get quite a few of them on the board, though. Hope this helps you a bit.

That one is Dwarven Forge. There is a big Hirst Arts Dungeon that Tim made; if anyone has pix I'll give you my email address and then run them up on the website.

At Origins in June, I took some pictures of the table set ups. If you go to my website, you'll be able to see the pictures. Origins Picture Directory Be patient with it; sometimes the server is slow.

There is a lot of talk about the techniques for painting eyes. Anyone care to wade in on color choice? It seems common practice to use off-white for the eyeball, since pure white looks odd and "starey". But what about the pupils? I've come to like using a brown/black instead of pure black; it just looks better to me. Anyone else have any ideas about this?

Well, Qwik, it sounds like you are doing everything right, just need the practice. Don't forget to hold the mini tilted back and use the lid of the eye to catch your brush, practice lots, and you'll get it. Maybe. I'm a fairly good painter, and eyes still make me nuts. It does always seem that one eye is perfect and the other looks nasty,

Well, yeah, I see your point, but if it's used for tabletop, sooner or later it will need to be stripped and redone, all that chipping from being dropped, don't you know.

Boy, Freefall, that was a late night for you. And we were back the next morning by 9:15 for a meeting. You know those jerks at Steak and Shake shorted me cup of chili? Thanks for the input, . So it was roughly 700pt player troups versus a 900pt GM troup? I love a scenario that you can retool for a broad array of uses. The Lost Sword seems to be very scalable. It might be good for the Book Release tournament I'll be running. It will be a three round elimination tournament. The winner being the swordbearer would give a clear objective for who would advance to the next round. I kind of need to advance two people per round so I'll have four in the last session. (Two smaller 3 - 4 man rounds, then a final). What would you do to have two winners for the scenario? Since you have experience running tournaments at conventions, any ideas would be appreciated. You sent me one scenario about mercs running through a graveyard. I modified it, making stone caerns instead of gravestones, and called it BOHICA Hill. I think I mentioned this idea to you before and it's worked pretty well. I've used basically the same set up for anything from 500 to 1,000 points for the players, varying the strength of the opposition accordingly.

Yeah, several of us were at GenCon until 10pm Wed. night helping Freefall pull minis for the different scenarios. In the big convention demos, I don't think we are as concerned with point values as with having a equal numbers of the same kinds of troups - say, Leadership, Spellcaster, 6 Fighters, 2 Archers. This makes it a lot easier to reset at the end of a demo, but it can be hard on the players, since six Skellies are NOT equal to six Crusaders. Since I'll only run a scenario once and then pack everything up, I tend to plan out my stuff points-wise at home, print the sheets and use those in the damo. Going by points instead of numbers of figs seems to make for more balanced groups for the players. Or if I am going pretty much with numbers, I'll give the factions with weaker grunts a couple extra. For example, if Crusaders and Reven have six grunts, Necropolis and Elves will have eight. Tell me if you've noticed this. The players seem to have more fun if there is a scenario, not just throw the troups out there, last man standing wins. With a scenario, they focus on the objective, not on killing each other off. If the focus is on killing off the other guys, there is usually someone who gets wiped out early, something that isn't a lot of fun for the players. There is always some clown who stays out of the fight and cleans up the leftovers. It ends up with only one guy - the one who held back - actually having fun, while the rest just get slaughtered.

Yeah, same here. I should have created an email list for it, but I didn't. It was kind of a pain going through my old auctions, clicking on the ID's of old buyers and sending a message to each one. It was kind of helpful, since I had a lapse of a few months between sales and the emails were answered with bids from old customers.

I was looking at the last picture, the one of the wraith, and thinking how much a little ink would help the boots, vest and gloves. Lately I've been painting areas that I want to be leather with a dark fleshtone (like Hill Giant Brown) and then using brown ink on top. I've really come to like the look. The highlights have a nice leather look, and the creases are well shadowed. After that, hit the tracings on the vest with a lighter color, like white leather. It will look like they are blacklined when they are not. OK, about primer. My personal fave is Duplicolor Sandable Black Primer. You can get it at Walmart. Even in Florida's high humidity, I haven't had problems with bubbling, ect. I recently found out that Duplicolor has a white primer. I bought some at Advance Auto parts. I've primed some figs and like how they look, but I haven't painted them yet. The white does look like it works as well as the black. I don't use soap and water to clean my minis any more. I'm not very patient, and water takes too long to dry from the surface of the mini. If I prime too soon after washing, the paint bubbles, which I hate. Instead I clean my minis with rubbing alchohol. It does a nice job of removing anything from the surface of the mini, and dries almost immediately. a big soft brush (like a cosmetic blush brush) will take dust off the surface of the mini if it's beeen sitting around a while after priming. Did you ever keep nuts and bolts in the storage where you now keep minis? If so, there might be a residue of machine oil in the bin that's coating your minis, and would interfere with paint adhesion.

Then why dont some people from the boards (and maybe others) email Ebay's customer service or something and tell them how they could make thier service better for you. It might actually get considered and the format changed if enough people suggest/compain (I would try suggesting first) about it. Already done that. And we've consistently asked for a Reaper section in the miniatures categories, but that hasn't happened, either. Hey, Flynn, I've asked for the same thing. I was really PO'd when they sent a message saying that they had updated several listing areas, and still hadn't added a Reaper section. As a seller, it would be great if they had a function that let you put people into a "prefered buyer list" and automatically send a message to them when you posted a new sale.

First, maybe you need to stop, rinse and reload your brush. The paint may be changing in consitancy from the completion of one eye to moving to the next; hence one eye is perfect and the other a mess. As far as eyeball technique, Anne showed me this at Origins - it does help. First, make sure you have thinned paint and a very sharp natural hair brush. If you are using WNS 7, that's a big help. You just need to get used to them, and how it works to load something that will hold a lot of paint. You also want to be sure of the amount of "load" you have on your brush. I usually roll my brush on a piece of paper towel; other painters will test on their thumb. (You should see Victroria Lamb when she's painting - her left thumb starts looking like a psycedelic zebra.) You can make a couple of "test stripes" on your thumb or paper to make sure the load is just right. Tilt the figure just a little bit away from yourself. When touching down the brush, do so at an angle so it catches a little on the lip of the eyelid. If the brushload, paint consitancy and angle are all correct, it will deposit a tiny drop of paint on the figure's eyeball. I also tend to brace my hands. Often I will brace my painting hand by resting my pinky either on the fig or my holding hand. That's the technique - the rest is all practice. A lot of the problems people have with painting eyes have to do with 1)wrong brush, 2) paint that's too thick, 3) lack of practice with the proper technique. The fabled "one hair brush" is actually the wrong thing to use; with something that tiny, by the time you take your brush from the paint to the fig, it's dried in place and useless. I also usually have brown extending around the eye. If the pupil isn't perfect, it's no big deal; a little high or low is covered by the eyeliner. I'll then paint out the extra line width to leave just a little lash line around the eye. I was using a brown/black mix I got from Jarrett Lee for my pupil and liner color, but Jen Haley suggested Vallejo Model Color Black Brown for this; it is almost exactly the same color as Jarrett's Brown, and I don't have to mix it myself.

Have any of you ever tried to strip a flocked mini for a re-paint? Seems to me that PVA would be much easier to disolve.

*ahem* back on topic. I just pulled out my troops for my next few events. We are using one leader model, three ranged(archer/crossbowmen) and three fighters(axe/sword/stick) grunts. I've got Reven, 2 Crusaders, 2 Necropolis, Dwarves, Nefsokar, and Overlord (mostly proxies in Overlords) factions ready to go. I have enough for 8 players even though I do prefer to keep it at 4-6. We'll be running a Lost Sword game. (like the mummy king/pyramid artifact recovery from the summer cons) Cheryl: This is the Sword of Kings scenario, changed for Nefsokar, correct? AO has a 750pt Fighting Company, all others have 500pts, first one to take the sword from the AO's troup and get it off the board is the winner.

Actually, those are a lot nicer than what I put together. Got them for the whole list of factions, per chance?

I might have to do something similiar to get some Crusder archers. I've been using Anhurian Bowmen, painted to match my Crusaders. They'll do until the "real thing" comes out.

Thanks, Cheryl, that's exactly the info I was looking for. Your make up is slightly different from what I was running with the Reven vs. Dragon scenario, where it was one leadership, six grunts and two archers. Any reason for the change? Could you give a few more details about the scenario? I only saw that setup for a few minutes, and I remember there also being spellcasters in the group. Any additional details would be appreciated. I've got a dragon to use for a Reven vs. Dragon bout, but I will probably have other factions in addition to the Reven. I could probably do 3 - 4 Reven squads; not enough if I have a big group of players. A pyramid would be easy to construct and look cool as all get-out, so the scenario you are talking about would be a good addition. I just finished (with help from my friend Blake) a starter group of the Nefsokar, so I have the models for that. By the way, what do you use for Nefsokar archers? I was thinking using Warlord Skeletal Archers as stand-ins, but I'm open to suggestion.