Thoughts on Aeroth Terrain

Hi!

I've been looking back over my old Leviathan blog and am rather taken with some of the concepts I was developing before giving up.

One of the immediately noticeable differences between Aeroth and say, the Warhammer world is that I have tried to steer clear of the typical fantasy fare where most games are set in a faux medieval western European world. I really want to introduce a more visually appealing type of game to be playing, populated by a mixture of deserts, mesas, rock outcrops and all manner of desert flora.

Along side this I have vaguely remembered notions of some more exotic terrain, be it obsidian pillars, strange vegetation or whatever suitably warped and unusual stuff I can think of and looking at some of my old photos, theres plenty to be getting on with!

Mesas, Crystal Deposits and Implausible, Floating Trees!  

Sadly, I think I had to chuck out most of my terrain when I moved house from Worcester to Portsmouth so I will have to start from scratch but at least have lots of pictures, notes and scribbles to be going on with.

Polished Obsidian Rock Piles

I must admit I have ranted in the past about my obsession with creating some more original and interesting scenery elements that better reflect a world devastated by an apocalyptic release of wild magic but must admit that having my own man cave makes the possibility of actually producing some of it a bit more likely!

I think I need to have a peruse of the likes of Terragenesis for some inspiration and then have a bash at making something for my Dwarves and Orcs to fight over!

In other news, I have decided to cheat slightly with my project! Instead of sculpting and casting everything myself, I have ordered some of the Demonworld gubbins from Ral Partha Europe to allow me to actually get some stuff painted up for each race and allow campaign season to actually start in a more timely fashion. I still plan on sculpting up all manner of bits and bobs to represent specific characters and lots of monsters too!

I've ordered the following stuff to get me going:

 Northern Barbarians

 Goblin Hunters

 Dwarven Veterans

Orc Marauders

I realise the concept isn't quite as I'd envisioned but with the application of a little putty, they should all look the part! The Dwarves will be getting tusked helmets for example and the Goblins will be getting lots of feather head dresses while the Orcs will be getting the traditional fur hats added.

Hopefully by using this approach, I will be able to field some small raiding parties by the end of January or early February with games to follow. I will also post a mini review of the forces when they arrive. You may notice that the Elves are currently missing but I need to flesh out their background before buying any!

In 6mm news, I have almost finished a second Horned Folks base and will be rummaging out my lino boards to take some decent pictures of the force as it slowly expands!

All the best!

Horned Folk Test Pieces

Hi!

Well I finally finished painting up some test pieces for my Horned Folk army in 6mm scale!

First up theres my Horned Folk character stand, in this case a couple of old Epic Minotaurs, one of which has had his axe replaced with a banner:

 Horned Folk Character Stand

The idea is to make the characters immediately recognisable from a distance and as they are going to average from 6-10mm tall, this requires a nice big standard.

Next up some Beastkin, the Horned Folks regular soldier caste, again proxied by some old Epic Beastmen:

Beastkin Stand

As the Horned Folk are from the ancient past of Aeroth, I wanted to give them a sense of age so the figures wield bronze weapons and their banners are old and crusty looking too and I must admit I quite like the effect.

Looking through my bits boxes, I have enough to field eight stands of Beastkin and six of Horned Folk which will give me a decent core force. The next step will be to sculpt up some warbeasts for them to ride round on and add a pleasing focal point to the army!

Finally, I finished painting an Orc last week when I first started this blog and the result was what decided me on the 15mm/6mm approach:

Orc Berzerker

Looking at the photo, he's not too bad but I spent absolutely AGES on him and the result still isn't up to the standard I'd like. Maybe it was the use of a white undercoat rather than my usual black but I just can't see the point of putting so much effort into painting one figure when I could be working through three or four 15mm or a couple of bases of 6mm instead with far more pleasing results!

Hopefully my next post will feature a few more completed bases of Horned Folk and maybe even a warbeast or two!

All the best!

Painting Progress

Hi!

Well I am busy doing a six day stretch with work with the added fun of an overnight shift during it too but I have been rummaging through my 6mm stuff for something to get on with painting until I get a day off so I can get on with sculpting stuff!

The result has left me with an intriguing possibility in the form of 40 of the old Epic Beastmen and about thirty plastic Minotaurs! Although I'd hoped to get some Orcs or Dwarves painted up first, I thought to myself I would try and get what I have painted while deciding on whether I wanted to order anything else so its looking like my first 6mm army for Aeroth will actually be the Horned Folk.

I currently have a test base almost complete and by end of play tonight hope to have it ready for a quick photo in the next day or too (daylight permitting!) and must admit that the old GW epic plastics are once again proving to be superb quality.

In the world of Aeroth, the Horned Folk are one of the near mythical Elder Races that the Elves supposedly drove into extinction during the Age of Legends some ten thousand years ago. However the Horned Folk survived after a fashion by retreating to their great Barrows, deep in the forested north east of the continent and have slumbered away the following centuries.

 Snowclad Forest

With the coming of the Death, the Horned Folk have been re-awakened and have begun to reconquer their ancestral lands from the tribes of Human Barbarians who now occupy it. This expansion has brought them into contact with both the Orcish Horde to the East and South and the Dwarves to the West and the brutish and savage nature of the Horned Folks has resulted in several border skirmishes already and full blown warfare has only been averted by the harshness of the winter.

In appearance, the Horned Folk look much like an amalgam of humanoid and great bulls. Standing up to a dozen feet high, the Horned Folk have great bull like heads, sprouting powerful horns, often adorned with intricately worked golden and bronze jewellery. 

Their bodies are covered in a coarse fur and their barrel chests and powerful limbs stand mute testimony to their physical strength. Centuries of sleeping in the cold embrace of the earth has altered many of them as tree roots have entwined themselves around their bodies and even consumed some of their elders entirely. 

Horned Folk Territory

In battle they wield heavy bladed bronze exes, maces and swords from another age and with their savage strength, they are fully capable of cleaving even a fully armoured Dwarf in two or crushing an Orcish skull with a single blow. 

Worshippers of a nameless Prince of the Fallen, the Horned Folk have no concept of peace and live for war, their great warriors wish only to slay for their god and bring slaves back to toil in their fields or fight in their armies. This attitude has not not made them popular with the Barbarians, many small tribes of whom have been slaughtered or driven into slavery but the Horned Folk are an elemental race, returned from the mists of time to reclaim an ancient empire.

Alongside their Minotaur nobles, resplendent in their bronze armour, march ranks of lesser Horned kin, smaller, man sized beastmen who serve their masters as a race of warriors. Well trained and disciplined, the Horned Kin form the bulk of raiding parties and also drive the lowly slaves into battle before them.

The centuries of sleep and invasion of trees into some of the most ancient barrows have deprived many of the elder Horned Folk of their bodies but their spirits now inhabit the soil, rocks and trees of the land and they can be raised to fight as great and terrible elemental creatures, often dwarfing even the mightiest Minotaur noble. These beings are revered as avatars of the Horned Folks god and are often adorned with small idols and their great misshapen bodies are bedecked with golden torcs, bronze breastplates inlaid with precious stones and even trophies of defeated foes.

Hopefully as I get on with the painting I will get chance to flesh out their background a bit and hope to bring a bit an overview of some of their conflicts with the other races!

All the best!

What About Farpoint?

Greetings!

Well my Aeroth project seems to be off to a good start and its fantastic to re-explore the gubbins I scribbled down a few years back when I originally attempted gaming Leviathan.

What of Farpoint though? Looking back at my original post for this blog, I get the decided impression that I didn't know what I wanted to do with it back then either and its floated aimlessly on for almost two years in a similar manner!

Looking at my rather inept attempts at painting and collecting over the intervening time, I must admit the stand out figures have been the varied assortment of Epic stuff I painted all the way back in 2012!

I dont know why, but they strike a bit of a chord with me, harking back to the halcyon days of high school and Epic where vast armies of tiny, unpainted plastic men and tanks fought desperate battles for cardboard towerblocks.

The amount of detail and speed of painting combine to provide a very satisfying finish without having to spend hours slaving over each model and as I have literally hundreds of the little fellows, I think I am going to spend a little time in 2014 painting up some more.

Sadly Epic has already become the preserve of the hardcore collector and bargains are nigh on impossible to come by these days but I reckon I have enough to play around with and I have a hankering to play out some larger scale battles.

I doubt there will be many huge games played but I do want to complete a couple of battle companies to shoot each other up and I am very keen to represent some more of the classic Marine Chapters such as the Blood Angels, Dark Angels and Spacewolves as time allows. Handily I have about fifty rhinos and goodness knows how many tactical marines sat in a box in the flat somewhere so I don't foresee having to spend much to complete the project!

Rules wise, I am not too sure at present. The old 2nd edition of Space Marine is seen as many as a classic but I have always been fond of the much maligned Epic 40000 as its streamlined rules were so simple and playable! 

  

Having perused my unpainted boxes of bits, I find that I actually have enough gubbins to get several forces put together for each of the main races, including Squats and Chaos which is nice.

The one thing that the project is missing is the large titans and metal vehicles that GW released over the years but for the most part I'm not too unhappy about giving them a miss as the prices on Ebay for even the most common are frankly preposterous!

Handily, the 6mm scifi market is awash with far more recent, and most of the time more reasonably priced stuff that will make do as proxies so I don't find myself bemoaning the fact I can't get a decent Eldar Bright Stallion or Towering Destroyer!

It may be a bit of a slow process as I suspect my gaming time is going to be at a premium and Aeroth will be taking up the lions share of it but I do think it would be rather fun to continue painting something a bit different to keep me entertained and stop me burning out!

Another quick peruse through the last couple of years of posts also reveals that another, potentially equally entertaining mini project has been overlooked in the form of my Orks!

While the possibility of painting up a huge collection of the greenskinned menaces is frankly not on the cards, I do wonder if I can find the time to paint up enough to represent a couple of warbands to play some Gorkamorka type game but with proper clans of Goffs, Badmoons, Snakebites, Deathskullz, Evil Sunz, Renegades and Gretchen too!

Needless to say much of what I hope to do will fall by the wayside as the perils of Real Life intrude but I do hope to give it a go!

All the best!

Wargaming Aeroth

Hi!

Well its January 2014 at last and Aeroth is slowly coming to life and I am literally snowed under with ideas, concepts, locations and creatures I want to include but I have found a slight stumbling block to my ambitions.

The main problem being that theres just not any miniatures out there that really match the concept I have in my head. While 28mm scale has literally tens of thousands of miniatures to choose from, none of them quite match up to the tech savvy Dwarves or brutish Mongul inspired Orcs. 15mm scale is even worse as the selection is sadly limited, a situation that's quite surprising considering just how popular 15mm scifi has been over the last couple of years.

The only real solution I can think of is to sculpt my own! Several years ago I sculpted up the Boar Company in 15mm and had great fun doing so:

 Grimli, Flint and the Boar Company

 Battle Rager and Crossbow Wielding Scout

I must admit that looking back, they are a tad rough and ready sculpt wise, but I really enjoyed getting them finished and painted. This is how I visualise my Dwarves when I write about them and similarly I don't see Orcs as green skinned gorillas, instead they are more like these fellows:

Orcish Horde!

The problem has been the time it takes to sculpt each individual figure and paint them has made collecting up a decent sized army impossible but if I were to sculpt and get the little chaps cast, I could field many more and even the odd warbeast!

This may result in my initial progress being rather slow on my blog but having given it some serious thought, I just can't seem to shake the idea! While the sculpting and casting is underway, I hope to continue fleshing out the background and its assorted inhabitants. 

To recoup the cost of getting some figures cast, I hope to offer some excess up for sale if folks are interested but this isn't going to be a business venture by any means. I am also going to be having a clearout of all my remaining 28mm scale stuff as looking at it, nothing I have really suits Aeroth...

I must admit I am also stepping away from the Leviathan setting and developing my own post apocalyptic fantasy world as Aeroth bears little resemblance to the old Grendel game and the Leviathan rules are being discarded too in favour of No Quarter, a freely available ruleset that is really excellently written and exhaustively playtested!

Hopefully folks won't mind my casual discarding of game, setting and even scale as I continue to rework Aeroth into a proper fantasy setting. If anyone has any suggestions, I am more than happy to consider them and incorporate them too and if anyone fancies using the setting in their own games, all the better! 

All the best and happy new year!

Leviathan Stirs

Greetings!

Well its the dawn of a new year and I've decided to have another bash at the world of Aeroth. Sadly I think this blog has gone as far as it can so I've started a new one called TALES FROM AEROTH

Hopefully 2014 will herald the return of Leviathan within my own small hobby world!

All the best!

New Year, 214AD

High up in the Axeblade Mountains, Grimli, commander of the Boar Company looked out over the pass. The heavy snow had stopped shortly before midnight and the sky had become clear. As he looked on, waves of green and purple lights began to flicker across the velvety night in a ghostly dance. 

The lights lit the entire landscape, showing the black masses of the high mountains and painfully white snow in sharp relief. Legend had it that the northern lights were the Children of the Moon, dancing across the night sky but Grimli had no time for such fables. 

The vivid display was nothing but tides of wild magic rolling across the high atmosphere but almost despite himself, Grimli felt at peace for the first time in years. The blanket of snow deadend all noise and the dancing lights flickered and rolled with such beauty that even the gruffest of Dwarves could not help but feel a little bit of wonder at the celestial display.

Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the fortified bunkhouse that his Boar Company had sought shelter from the storm in. Even now the faint sounds of merriment and the lilt of pipes could be heard faintly as if some shade from before the world had died played, remembering happier times when the world was sane. 

The door to the bunkhouse slammed open and Grimli's second in command strode out and grunted as he saw his leader. Deftly shutting the door with his ironshod boot heel, Flint stomped through the snow towards his leader carrying a couple of frothing tankards of ale. 

"Bewitched by the Childrens Dance I see." noted the gruff Dwarf, handing over one tankard and quaffing mightily from the other before smacking his lips with satisfaction. 

"Aye, it makes me wonder if we will ever see an end to the war and settle down to doing something more useful'" replied Grimli, absently blowing the froth off his own ale before taking a deep swig. 

"Bah! Not much chance of that with the high country infested with Goblin braves after Dwarf scalps or those damned Blackblood scum down in the pass"

Glancing down from their perch, Grimli could faintly make out the glimmering of watch fires down at the mouth of the pass, a sure sign that Krull and his followers were still holding out, despite the cold. Word had come through that it was so bad down there the Orcs had turned upon one another for food and that something terrible now resided in the bloodsoaked camp.

Absently Grimli spat off the edge of the cliff in the general direction of the Orc winter encampment. 

"Come spring when the pass clears, we are going to sweep down and give that cursed Orc a damn good thrashing." Grimli grunted. "With our new Golems and tanks, the elders have hopes we will drive the scum right back down the Old Road and even retake the Kragh."

"Hmm, mayhaps they're right" ruminated Flint, taking another drink. "The new Golems look properly fierce and if they work as well as the Technomancer Guilders promise, we should be in for quite a show!"

"If! If promises were gold, I'd be a wealthy guildmaster, not freezing my backside out on a mountain!" Grumbled Grimli. "No matter what they promise, it's going to come down to Dwarven courage and the strength of our axes that will see off that rabble!" 

"By my Bearded Grandmother, this cold is making me maudlin! Next thing I will be weeping into my beard like a beardling!" With that the Dwarven leader tipped the rest of his ale down his throat and belched with satisfaction. "Tomorrow morning, set the scouts out and lets see if we can find ourselves some Goblins to hunt!"

"Now thats more like it!" Flint agreed, tugging thoughtfully on his beard. "But in the meantime, lets go back indoors and get some more Ale, I'm fresh out" Tipping his empty tankard upside down to prove his point, Grimli's second in command turned back to the blockhouse and sparing one last glance out over the pass, Grimli followed.

"Some day all the mountains will be safe and our kin will live in peace, chief but until then its up to us hard cases to deal with those who think otherwise!"

With that he slammed open the door of the blockhouse and entered, bellowing for Ale. Grimli smiled, perhaps it was the will of the Ancestors that he fight and die defending his mountains but so be it. He would do his Oathsworn duty or die trying.

High above the lights continued their ghostly display, impervious to the thoughts of those far below even as the faint sound of a Dwarven drinking song began to lilt across the winter landscape.