Shiver Me Timbers!

Hi!

Well I'm just back from a very busy day of work and am slowly working my way through a Catachan patrol!

Alas no pictures tonight but hopefully I will be able to snap a couple of shots tomorrow of them but this post is more about a terrible, awful mistake I made. That mistake was to start reading a book my brother gave me.

Now I've always been a fan of nautical nonsense and pirates in particular but this book has got me hooked (forgive the pun) on the golden age of piracy and lusting after creating a crew of buccaneers to go a pillaging, at least in miniature format.

I know I had sworn off starting any new projects and indeed buying more stuff that I can ever hope to paint but theres something about the idea of a pirate project that is proving very hard, if not impossible to resist.

Inspired by this I have been re-exploring the rather wonderful Secret of Monkey Island series of games and re-watching one or two of my favorite films too and must admit I do love the imagery used and its a perfect opportunity to combine legendary characters with a bit of fantasy too!

The image of sun-baked towns on exotic islands, packed with all manner of weird and wonderful characters, not to mention a good dose of humour is not to be sniffed at!

Looking at the options, theres plenty of really lovely skirmish rules out there which would quite probably be absolutely brilliant fun games but I am trying to keep myself on a bit of a budget here so I am going to try and resist splurging out on either Cutlass or Freebooter's Fate, which seem to be the most popular out there at present and stick to something a bit more Oldschool.


Yes, I am going to use Rogue Trader as the basis for a pirate game. It's will probably involve quite a bit of tweaking and reworking but I figure by dropping in some elements of Necromunda and Mordheim along with some of my own tweaks, I should have a workable system.

Moving onto miniatures, one is spoiled for choice but thats for another day! I am going to spend a little while sorting out my setting first (something I secretly enjoy far too much!) but I will be using influences from all over history, movies, novels and computer games to create something which will give me plentiful opportunity to indulge my piratical urges. I may even be tempted to sculpt some of my own miniatures for it in a more cartoony style than current ranges.

Another fun element to the period is the opportunity to really go to town with some creative scenery, as can be seen with these two Freebooters Fate boards which look really lovely  while staying quite playable:

This is not going to keep me from getting on with my current Sci-fi projects though. Theres lots of elements I can cross over and it will give me something to keep me entertained when I begin to get sick of painting all that camouflage for my Catachans!

 All the best!