We Did The Monster Mash! It Was a Graveyard Smash!

It was a dark and stormy night at Chez Vesuvius.  Well actually it was an overcast and slightly soggy morning, but somehow that doesn't sound right for a Halloween Big Game.

Our regular monthly RPG group had agreed to forgo our usual Mutants And Masterminds game in favour of doing something more seasonal on the big wargame table.  As I mentioned in the last post here, the game was going to be Hillbillies vs Dracula, and that prompted a whole week of frantic last minute crafting to get some of the necessary terrain pieces ready. 

Having bought an absolute ton of second hand Plasticville buildings from the US last year (and a handful of new kits) for the Paradiso project, I had many that work equally well for a mainland US setting as for the Carribean holiday resort/warzone.  But a few are just too 1950s Americana to work anywhere else and get put aside for games like this.  That was the box I delved into the find the Plasticville church that formed the centrepiece of the table.

Surrounding the church was an extensive graveyard mainly made up of a mix of Ainsty Castings and Renedra gravestones.  Again I'd acquired a surprisingly large collection over the past few years, of which I'd only painted and assembled a small handful.  Since the graveyard was going to be a much more important location for this game, it seemed a good opportunity to get the rest put together.

I dug out the farm buildings, the diner and the old gas station from the previous Hillbilly game.  The farm had a few chickens painted and based, plus of course the Demon Goat (that had actually killed one of the players' leader in the last game), but I wanted to add to the livestock on the farm.  I'd been buying these Teamsterz farm trucks (around £4 each) for Paradiso to serve as transport for the Rebel forces (and a couple of which were turned into heavy Technicals/Gun Trucks) but each truck had come with a cow, a ram and a pig.  The cows are a bit small for 28mm, and I wasn't sure a flock of rams looked right, but the pigs were just about right, and got added to the speedpainting table, along with a couple of Heroclix figures that would serve as objective markers during the game.

The Plasticville trailer park kit was already on the workbench for use in Paradiso, but despite only being partly primed, we temporarily threw it together for the game.  Even in this simple state they looked pretty effective and I think all they need to finish them off will be a little weathering to bring them into line with the motorhome.

The main part of town was going to be a mix of Plasticville, K-Line and the TTCombat apartment building.  This latter I repainted from its original planned grey (in line with my Sarissa GASLIGHT buildings) to a much more American looking red.  The result was pretty effective, I think.

I also wanted to use the Mad Mecha Guy's monorail cargo depot crane, along with some of the many, many cargo containers we've assembled recently.  And right in the centre of the above pic, you can see one of the custom "temporary office" containers that Joseph produced for Jonesy and me.  Simple boxes with just enough detail, but very effective.  If he ever decides to sell these to the public I highly recommend them as useful utility clutter for urban/industrial terrain.

Looking for still more excuses to dig into the lead/plastic/MDF/Resin mountain, I decided that the town park ought to have a bandstand, and the Sarissa Precision Gaslamp Alley bandstand would do just fine for that.  It's a really nice kit, and while a little fiddley to assemble with lots of tiny curlicue pieces that need poking out, it's not too hard to assemble.  This is one of those kits that benefits from forward planning and spray painting the separate parts before assembly.

The Blotz gas station, a much more modern looking building than the Plasticville offerings, still had a bit of work needed to finish painting the pillars and pumps, but since this detail was hidden in shadow under the impressive canopy I figured I could get away with leaving it.  One thing which did become apparent was the need for a number of "baseplates" to represent areas of concrete for urban areas.  Luckily I had a few pieces of 3mm MDF that had originally been cut and primed grey for use as bases for other Plasticville buildings, which worked well as the garage forecourt.

There were a few other new bits of clutter terrain, bus stops and vending machines from TTCombat which also got assembled and painted in the week running up to the game.  This game also saw the debut of the separate pavement/sidewalk pieces from TTCombat and Sarissa Precision, which I felt worked really well.

On the figure front, while I had the Hillbillys covered I was sadly lacking for supernatural opposition, and so my good friend MarvinTheARVN agreed to lend me his Gothic Horror and Zombie figures for the game.  On the Friday he arrived with the figures, and although the zombies were well painted and his Werewolves (which we'd used before) were fine, all his vampires were unpainted and still primed black.  I needed at least one master vampire figure to be the main villain and I needed it ready for the following day.  This led to the fastest speed-painting job I think I've ever pulled off.

A few months ago, Carl from the "Solo Wargaming in the UK" blog sent me a selection of Victorian/Gothic Horror figures that he no longer needed. (and I'm painfully aware that until now I haven't credited or thanked him properly for this kind gift.)  Most of the figures were from the Blue Moon "Chaos in Carpathia" boxed set, which included a master vampire and three "Brides of Dracula" types.  In anticipation of needing them as a possible backup plan for this game, I'd put them in a jar of Dettol to strip the existing partial paintwork at the start of the week.  Minutes after Marvin had left, I was fishing them out to find that the magic liquid hadn't quite had enough time to do the job, and while one of the ladies was down to bare metal and Dracula was about 80% there, the other two were still mostly covered in paint.

Emergency measures were required, so I dug out some acetone-free nail varnish remover that I'd bought previously to remove tampo decals from die-cast cars.  Having previously only used the tiniest amounts on the end of a cotton wool swab, I knew a relatively small dribble over each figure would be enough to strip the remaining paint off the figures.  But my god!  That stuff was pungent!  Ladies, I don't know how you stand to put that stuff on your fingertips, but even the tiny amount I was using stank to high heaven, and I use the term "high" advisedly!

Once down to bare metal, I was able to skip a step from my usual figure preparation process.  The Blue Moon figures all have large round bases with appropriately sculpted detail.  They about match the size of the penny bases I use for GASLIGHT figures, and while I could have mounted them on slottabases to match the Hillbillies and modern figures, I thought I could get away without it.

From there, the figures went back outside for spray priming with Army Painter, black for him, white for the Brides.  Then straight back in to the painting table, where the girls simply got a skin tone (Porcelein Flesh) and a hair colour (red, black or Blonde).  Dracula got a little more attention, grey skin, waistcoat painted white then red (to brighten the colour) and a little drybrushing in progressively lighter shades of grey to bring out the details of his suit and cape/wings.  Then finally a coat of Army Painter Dark Tone Quickshade dip was painted on to work its magic.

Estimated time from coming out of the Dettol jar to closing up the Quickshade tin was about 90 minutes.  While I'm the first to admit that the results are at best a low "tabletop" standard paintjob, I'm more than happy with them given the time taken.

So onto the day of the game, and there was a gap on the table by the railway track that looked like it was just crying out for a railway station.  Although I hadn't planned to use it, and had done exactly zero restoration work on it, I dug out a Plasticville railway station from the "not Paradiso" box again and plonked it down.  The fact that it looked so good on the tabletop makes me question somewhat why I'm spending so much time and effort basing, repainting and restoring the Plasticville buildings and why don't I just throw them on the tabletop and play with them as-is?

So onto the game itself.  The scenario was simple - Dracula had taken over the tiny Appalachian town, killing or turning all its inhabitants.  Members of four nearby mountain-folk families had been caught up in the slaughter, and after a couple of weeks, the four families had come to town in search of their missing kinfolk.  The churchyard formed the centre of the table, surrounded by six seperate zones: The Farm, The Highway Rest Stop, The Trailer Park, The Cargo Depot, The Town Park and the Town.  In each zone was a clue, a figure or terrain piece that the Hillbillies could discover that would weaken Dracula's powers when they finally faced him down in the Churchyard.  Meanwhile Dracula would be sending his legions of zombies, wolves and werewolves out to slow them down.

The rules were Flying Lead from Ganesha Games, with a slight tweak to the turn sequence.  In the original rules, each players attempts to activate all of his or her figures before handing over to the next player.  While fine for simple 2 player games, in the previous Hillbilly game we found that this left people twiddling their thumbs for too long.  This time, each player attempted one figure activation at a time before handing over to the next player.  If they failed two activations then any figures they hadn't activated in that "grand cycle" would forfeit their move until the next cycle.  I also had each Wolf and Werewolf pack activating as a single entity rather than individuals, and instead of being controlled normally, the zombies all acted in a seperate phase at the end of each grand cycle, getting one medium move stick towards the nearest human and if that brought them into contact with, one attack.  It worked very well, the wolves working as packs and the zombies being relatively slow and more of a hazard than a threat (though they did manage to take out a couple of stragglers during the game).

Oh and finally, the players (CrazyEddy, KayDee, MarvinTheARVN and T'uther Chris) were told that they were still feuding with the other families, and any "victory points" would be modified by the number of kinfolk each family had left, so it was in their interest to "thin the rival herds" a little bit.

The game itself was pretty memorable.  Here are some highlights

The "CrazyEddy" family (yellow) had gotten stalled in the Cargo Depot thanks to Crapping Out on several early game turns.  Meanwhile, the Dee Clan (red) had stormed through the Farm and the Trailer park picking up their clues and only having to deal with a handful of zombies.  Seeing a werewolf about to pounce onto the Eddys' truck, the Dees decided to "help" their neighbours by ramming the beast.  Unfortunately the agile lycan dodged out of the way and... well the brakes on those old jalopies ain't all they ought to be.

This lead to a... .ahem... misunderstanding between the two families and harsh words and buckshot were exchanged between the two.  But any misundersanding was soon ironed out when the Dees backed their jalopy away from the Eddys... then shifted back into forward and rammed them a second time, this time clearly aiming for one of the Eddys' kinfolk.

The situation..... escalated.

Meanwhile, the Tuther clan (run by T'uther Chris) went into town and rescued young Lucy Westonra from the town's radio station.  Showing remarkable forsight, for his next activation after finding her, T'uther Chris had Granny clamber to the back of the Jalopy to check their new friend for injuries, only to find those two telltale puncture wounds at the neck and assorted other arterial points.

A scuffle ensued, ending when Lofty shoved the muzzle of his hunting rifle under Lucy's chin and scored a Gory Kill result, blowing her head clean off.  The scene was so entertaining and to reward the player's foresight, I gave him a second, bonus clue.

From that point on , the Tuthers were reluctant to leave their jalopy, using it as a rather effective sniping platform for Lofty and Minnie-Jo. (Minnie-Jo is the little girl with the teddy bear and huge rifle.  Mr Fluffles is her spotter and gives her the equivalent of the Marksman and Hit-Man abilities, making her an absolutely deadly sniper.



The Arvn clan had found a clue at the rest stop but disturbed a large nest of zombies.  With the zeds and a pack of wolves bearing down on them, they were forced to leave Old Abe to his fate.  Moving into the park, Li'l Billy-Bob ran ahead to the bandstand to talk to the strange wheelchair-bound professor who told him scary tales about vampires and werewolves.

With the clue secured, Li'l Billy Bob just had to evade the zombies staggering towards the bandstand and get back to the truck.

"I push his wheelchair down the steps towards the zombies as a distraction."

Sometimes I fear my players.

At the end, The Dee's had been completely wiped out, taking all but three of the Eddys with them.  Two of them were fast enough to leg it down the road in search of transport.  But a huge swarm of zombies had been raised in the churchyard and by mutual agreement of three of the players, all headed towards the loudest noise, namely the exploding and burning trucks.

Poor Bubba.  Poor old drunk Bubba.

Of all the Hillbilly figures, he's the least violent.  Unarmed, except for his jug of moonshine, which he'll happily offer to share with fallen kinfolk to help revive their spirits.  His pitiful drunken state had been known to drive other womenfolk to berate him mercilessly,  (basically his only "attack" forced hostile womenfolk to skip actions berating his drunkenness.)

Poor Bubba didn't make it.



On the other side of the churchyard, a conference had taken place between Clan Arvn and Clan Tuther, who agreed to unite their clans to deal with the threat from "that thar fancy-pants furriner"/  With most of the zombies drawn off to the explosions, that left Dracula, his three Brides and a couple of zombie/ghouls left.

Because they agreed to share the clues they'd found, the Tuthers and Arvns had four clues between them.  Each clue negated one of Dracula's abilities, which brought him down from being an unstoppable killing machine to about the level of one of the tougher Hillbilly fighters.

Sniper fire from Minni-Jo accounted for two of the Brides, though not after they'd fanged poor Cousin George.  Granny Tuther tried to chastise one of the brides for being such a shameless hussy, walking around in her slip like that, showing her ankles and she'll catch her death of cold one night and.... sadly the Brides, being a couple of centuries older than Granny herself, were immune to her Berate power.

(As an aside, Berate was an ability I'd given some of the Elder figures, especially the unarmed ones, which allowed them to pin enemy non-elders with a stern tongue-lashing, similar to using magic to pin figures in Song Of Blades And Heroes.  That power had worked wonders against the Werewolves, several of which had fallen foul of elders' stern words and disapproving tone of voice)

When the third Bride fell to fire from the Arvn clan, Dracula made his move, pouncing out and wafting his cape magnificently.  Uncle-Daddy Tuther, patriarch of the clan, charged him with his pitchfork but found himself ganged up on by Drac and a couple of his ghouls.  The fight went back and forth, until Uncle-Daddy finally succumbed to a ghoul bite.

Minnie-Jo listened to Mr Fluffles' voice in her head one last time, took careful aim and put a .50 cal round right between Dracula's eyes, ending the terror for good.

A heck of a good fun game.

MarvintheARVN has already suggested the subject of the next big game, when he noticed my "not quite Nelson's Column" terrain piece, complete with lions.

Hillbillies 3; Hillbillies in Old London Town

Should I be worried that I think I've already got most of the figures and terrain I need to make that happen?

Other Parcels & A Head Count

So other parcels today. In addition to the second tank engine I received a pack of WWI German "characters" from North Star Miniatures. They're nice enough, and look like they'll fit in well with my existing figures (about half of which are actually early WWI, from Foundry I think). Two are clearly old Grognards with spectacular beards wearing service caps, one a bareheaded fresh faced youth (this one had a miscast bayonet, which I can live with) and one fairly ordinary chap in Pickelhaube. Since I'm two figures short of an even six line infantry units, the plan is to use these chaps as sergeants spread across various existing units, which not only accounts for any differences in uniform and sculpting style but actually makes their distinctiveness an advantage. The only down side is that these chaps are all cast in running pose, with the rear leg raised and connected to the base by a temporary support. This leaves me with the choice of either living with an unsightly column connecting the rear leg to the base, or cutting it away and being left with a figure that's more vulnerable to being snapped off at the remaining leg.

The third parcel was the cavalry and artillery from Irregular. I'll get to work assembling them tomorrow. One nice touch I've noticed was that the British Lancers come with a separate rifle scabbard that can be fitted onto the horse. Beyond that they're as I described in an earlier post - not spectacular sculpts but incredibly good value and functional. The WWI German Uhlans will past muster as 188x lancers for the Invasion of England, but I'm not sure what to do about converting the British Lancers to Home Service uniform, as being created for Zulu War use they come with Wolseley pattern pith helmet. Someone once described turning a round-headed pin into a helmet spike by sanding it to a point using a Dremel like a lathe, but I've tried that without much success. I have a couple of sacrificial pith-helmeted figures on which I've fixed a short wire pin into the top of the helmet, with a view to sculpting up the spike around it with Milliput, but I'm not sure my sculpting skills are up to the job. In the end I may cheat and just indicate the home service helmet via painting rather than modelling.

The final parcel was a pack of HO/1:87-1:100 model railway automobile models from Everest Models, a seller on eBay. These guys are perfect scale for 15mm figures, looking much better than die-cast cars. The key thing is that even heroic 18mm figures struggle to see over the roof of a typical Hot Wheels car, some even struggling to see over the bonnet/hood. I suspect the nominal HO scale is a little.... flexible shall we say? But in practice these look exactly right, and ordered direct from china are dirt cheap. The casting quality isn't fantasitc, some cars may need a bit of cleaning up around the windows, but other than that they come pre-coloured and ready to play, and since they're made of hard plastic, are relatively easy to hack about for conversions.

One delivery that didn't come via parcel post was the pack of Wargames Factory zombies someone bought for me at Phalanx. That worthy gentlemen came around and we had a most civilised mid-morning tea discussing the disastrous state of British Politics over the last 30 years. After he'd left I got to have a look at the flesh-eating ghouls he'd brought. One happy surprise was that instead of £15 for 24 zeds, which still represents a good deal, the box contained five sprues for a total of 30 zeds at 50p each. Bargain. While listed as 28mm, they are quite slender sculpts, and seem to fit nicely between the Mega Minis and my old GW zombies in size. Between these three ranges, I now potentially have about 86 zombies. I've also got a pack of 50 coming from Victory Force Games as part of a "50 for $50" deal they do periodically. That, and possibly the rest of the Mega Minis Range is as many zombies as I am *ever* going to need for an "All Things Zombie" game. For now though, the zeds all go into the "Later" box.

Apart from all that, today was mainly spent trying to get the unit of Redoubt British Home Service Infantry on my painting table finished. They're 90% there now, with seven of them needing the gold decorations on the helmet doing. It's only now that I'm so close to being finished that I realise their pants are far too light a shade of blue. Every picture I see of home service uniform shows pants that are allmost black, and while the Quickshade will darken the "Ultramarine Blue" shade I used, it won't darken it that much. So I'm going to have to redo the pants on each figure tomorrow, then redo the red trouser stripe, before these are ready for applying sand to the base and then Quickshading. The other figures on the painting table are a unit of Germans that I'd already painted that I'm upgrading the basing of, and a couple of civlians. The Germans just need flocking, while the civilians are ready to be Quickshaded along with the Brits. After that I've got one more unit of Germans primed and ready to paint, and then it's on to Tranche 2 - two more German squads and a unit of Guardsmen from Ironclad Miniatures, all of which are ready and waiting to be taken outside to be primed. I'm still waiting for my order from Ironclad Miniatures, including another unit of Home Service Brits.

Figures to be painted

1 unit (10 figs) of British Guards

1 unit (10 figs) of British Line Infantry

1 unit (10 figs) of British Lancers

2 British field guns (each with 4 gunners)

4 units of German Line Infantry

2 units of German Jagers

2 German 75mm guns (each with 4 gunners)

2 units of "Masked Minions"

2 units of "Iron Men"

Assorted character figures (about a dozen in number)

Considering the unit of Redoubt British I'm just finishing up now took 8 years to complete (albeit with a seven year interlude) then that's a hell of a lot of figures for me to do in six weeks.

Challenge Accepted.

Time flies by...

Yesterday was something of a parcelpalooza. I received the Design 28 Chinese Gorden figure from Phalanx, along with the extra pack of Iron Men I ordered to make up a second unit. Gordon is a lovely figure, wearing the trademark fez. But this is a steampunk Gordon and he appears to be wearing a rivetted steel plastron across his chest and what looks like a very small steam boiler on his back.

The second parcel was an order of 28mm zombies from Mega Minis in the US. Zombies are a bit of an ongoing but low priority project as part of the 28mm Sci-Fi/Street Violence project, so for now these go straight into the "later" box, along with the Wargames Factory zeds someone bought for me at Phalanx. Zombie gamer blogger extraordinare Vampifan has done a thorough review of the whole Mega Miniatures zombie line on his "World of the Undead" blog, so I won't review them in detail here. I will say that the Mega Minis zombies are noticeably smaller than, say the GW Zombies I have currently, and that they are definitely "old school" style sculpts with a few anatomical glitches, but as Vampifan shows they can paint up very nicely and there are some lovely "character" zombies in the set. I bought sets 1 & 2, I'll probably pick up the remaining sets over time, but I don't think I'd be interested in the non-zombie civilian figures.

The third parcel was the prize. One thing I definitely wanted for a 19th century steampunk invasion game was a steam train. Back when I was playing 15mm there was an easy solution to this, as the Thomas The Tank Engine die-cast toy line turned out to be perfectly scaled to 15mm. All you needed to do was hacksaw off the stupid smiley faces, smooth the end with Milliput and repaint. Now in 28mm you'd think that this was going to be even less of a problem. 28mm is generally matched with the model railroading O-scale. If we were in the States this would be fine, O-scale is still popular there for "toy" trains, i.e. being run for sheer pleasure. Unfortunately, here in good old Blighty, O-scale is the domain of the hardcore scratchbuilding scale modeller. You know, the types who hand lathe every scale rivet... and the number of rivets on the model had better damned well match the prototype or else! Don't get me wrong, I have massive respect for the skill and dedication it takes for that sort of thing. But it does mean that you can't just head to Toys R Us and pick up an O-scale trainset that you won't mind being knocked about on the wargames table.

The solution? Ah Amazon.co.uk, are there any of life's problems you cannot solve? The solution is this toy locomotive and this tank engine train set from Teamsterz. The third parcel was the tank engine, ordered a few days ago. Now let's be clear. As toys for actual children, these suck dead donkey balls. No self-respecting five year old is going to be interested in pushing a steam train around the floor, and the construction on these is too flimsy to survive much playroom action. Although described as die-cast, they're only partly metal, with plastic bases and fittings. Oh and the batteries are non-replaceable, so after a while, no more flashing lights and chuffa-chuffa sounds. As fine-scale railroad models... well let's just say that the wheels on the engine appear to be for a different guage to the accompanying carriage.

But as wargames models for 28mm figures, they are absolutely spot on. There's enough detail to look convincing as a train at wargames table distances, but not too much and nothing too fragile that is going to break under normal wargames usage. The scale is listed as 1:55, and seem a perfect match for 28mm figures. These are designed to be pushed along the floor, so lack the flanged wheels needed to fit properly onto track. I suspect with O-gauge track, the train's wheels would sit nicely inside the rails the same way that the 15mm Thomas trains did with HO gauge track. But unfortunately you can't just go down to the local ModelZone and pick up a length of O gauge flexitrack, so as a compromise it'll perch roughly on HO track with its wheels outside the rails, which again looks passable at wargame table distances.

The tank engine I received was blue and came with a single passenger carriage in matching livery. The back of the box shows another identical model in red, plus two locomotives in green and blue with coal carts. For around six quide I'm so happy with this I've ordered two more, plus one of the locomotives. This ought to give enough rolling stock for a decent looking train, plus a couple of spare tank engines that can go into the bitz box and might resurface as part of a steamtank further down the line.

Other than that, yesterday was mainly spent assembling some Armorcast steampunk walkers that I picked up when I visited the states in 2003. These no longer seem to be available on the website, which is a shame because they're lovely models, full of quirky character. I've also started the conversion work on two trucks and two tractors from the Atlantis toy line, which will become the prime movers for the field guns. It would have been nice to have traditional horse drawn guns, but even at Irregular's very reasonable price of £10.50for a four-hourse limber, the expenses can't quite stretch to it at the moment. Finally I'd finished the initial basing on the first tranche of figures for painting, plus an already painted unit of Germans that I'm upgrading to the new standard listed in a previous post.

With everything laid out on the painting table, I'm ready to declare a moratorium...

No new purchases until everything on the painting table is ready for the wargames table.

Today's plan - return to the rivers I started working on Monday, and get my 2nd unit of British Regulars (Redoubt figures) painted up and ready for Quickshading.