Battletech Shenanigans

 Hi!

I've only got tomorrow off before a return to work, relaxed and raring to go for the festive busy period but I've been having a bit of a last minute wargaming session.

I managed to play out some Rogue Trader, Five Parsecs from Home and have found myself pondering a return to Battletech! 

I originally picked up a copy of Battletech 3rd edition back in the mid 90's but didn't really gel with it but in 2013/14, I went through a bit of an obsession for the old-school shenanigans and painted up all sorts of the clicky mechs that came out with Mechwarrior Dark Age but the project stalled out...

Skip forward to 2020 and lockdowns, I watched a lot of Death From Above Wargaming's Youtube channel where I became much enamoured with the idea of giant stompy robots beating the tar out of each other in the early 31st Century and spent a fair bit of time working on drawing cartoony mechs and even played a small campaign featuring the underdog mercenary company, Wilson's Hussars and Reds Marauders, a pirate outfit out on the rim.

Papertech!

I even started a blog, Tales from the Inner Sphere which I've not updated since 2021 and I must admit that I'd totally forgotten about it! As with so many other projects, its been forgotten about for five long years but I'm seriously contemplating getting back into the swing of things for 2027.

Wilson's Hussars SD style!

What I like about Battletech is that it is a low entry level game as you can play a decent game with literally two figures and that's rather appealing for me with a rather tight hobby budget. 

The quiet settlement of Rynn's Steading

Similarly, I've got my Papertech stuff which made for a super cheap option at the time and combined with some cardboard buildings I printed out and constructed, it was a surprisingly successful project that kept me entertained throughout lockdowns.

Mab Cat being helpful mid game...

Looking at the state of Battletech, it appears that things are not too rosy at present with a weird Gothic re-imagining and a certain amount of fan dissatisfaction but with 40+ years of source material, novels and lots of other gubbins, not to mention a very active modelling community, I'm thinking it's time to rummage out the Neuro-Helmet and fire up the fusion reactor to my trusty mechs and delve back onto the game!

I'm not sure what I'll do with the project, but I must admit I'm pretty keen to have a bash, even if it's only to play a couple of games...

In other news, I've been trying to get another game of my Brutalquest project done (using Rogue Trader for a larger skirmish!) and have managed to play the game out but the pictures didn't turn out which is a bit rubbish but I'll post a report of it tomorrow with retaken photos.

Instead of slavishly trying to stick to one project and to avoid the dreaded hobby burnout, I'm going to go with the enthusiasm for some mech shenanigans so will see about printing out a pair of lances and try and play a game tomorrow!

Until then, All the best!

Stone Acre Carts

 Hi!

I've been footling around with making some more stuff for my ongoing campaign and have finished a trio of carts which will come in handy for objectives, to get in the way and generally make things interesting!

Carts with tiny ponies

I had a bit of a flap about what to do about ponies but ended up using some blocks of Sculpey for the head and main body while the limbs, mane, ears and tail are just EVA foam. Reins and whatnot are just painted on. 

Another view

I must admit that I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out and am now contemplating adding a small cavalry unit to my forces either mounted on comically small ponies or on some larger chargers...

Stone Acre Militia desperately try to hold off a horde of Revenants

Now I've got enough stuff painted up, I'll be playing out the next game in my campaign and controversially, I'm thinking of using Rogue Trader for it as I've got slightly larger forces than Brutal Quest is aimed towards so we shall see how things go. Will the militia and Dunston's party shepherd the wagon train to safety or will the horde of Revenants eat them? 

I admit that I've already done a playtest on a scenario which turned out to be a bit on the easy side for the good guys so have tweaked it a bit and will retry it for the battle report which should be coming in the next few days.

I've also been pootling around with a few other projects that I'm hoping to be able to post an update on soon but until I've got stuff finished, I'll not tease too much! 

Until then, All the best!

Stone Acre Militia

 Have no fear! The militia's here! 

Hi! I've got some much needed holidays from work and have been working on making some militia for an upcoming Brutalquest campaign game.

Stone Acre Militia

Armed with hefty clubs and shaky morale, they're probably not going to be too much use but I had loads of fun making the little fellows with their oversized helmets and ridiculous weapons. I'm now thinking of making another five which would give me a full unit for Dragon Rampant.

Archers

I figured that they'd probably need some ranged capabilities too so made a pair of bowmen. They have slightly smaller helmets than the clubmen so they can actually see and fire their bows with a bit more effectiveness.

Bunny and Firkin

Unlike my usual Tiny Troops, these guys heads are made from two plastic Craft Pearls that I'd picked up from the Range for £1.50ish a tub. They come in several different sizes and turned out to be perfect for daft kettle helms for my infantry.

The Full Militia

I've also been hard at work making a veritable swarm of derpy zombie types to menace my militia. The Revenants will eventually number about 20 but for the moment I've got a full dozen finished and need to paint up a necromancer to lead them (or at least send them forth to chomp on the innocent inhabitants of Stone Acre!). 

Next up will be some carts but I need to figure out how to make some tiny horses to pull them...

Until then, All the best!

Brutalquest Campaign Turn 2: Arrival at Stone Acre

 Hi!

So I've managed to put together some bits and bobs for turn two of my Brutalquest campaign so without further ado, on with the adventure!

Following the run in with the Revenants in the Debatable Lands, Sir Dunston's party have finally arrived in Stone Acre, the only settlement of any real size between the border and the Priory at Ottery St Catchpole.

Stone Acre Map

The fortified village is up in arms as multiple sightings of shambling monsters have been reported by outlying farmsteads and several more isolated smallholdings have been utterly destroyed.

The party is greeted by Bunny Goodbody (any jokes will result in being smacked around the head by her) the local representative of the Farpoint Adventurers Guild. She inhabits a rather ramshackle tower on the north west of the settlement where she tends her vegetable gardens when not hunting monsters.

Bunny Goodbody

She entreats the party to aid with hunting down the monsters as the local militia are preparing to go out to try and put an end to the threat permanently. Bunny will be accompanying them with her trusty war mallet, Carrot Smasher and says she'd appreciate some experienced fighters and a magic user to back her up as the militia are a bit hopeless.

Mindful of his promise to Lady Sylvia to aid her quell unrest in Longmyre, Sir Dunstan agrees, much to the cackling agreement of Rumblebum and long suffering sigh of Bodkin.

Albert Firkin, Stone Acre Militiaman

The party is then introduced to the militia, led by Albert Firkin, a farmer who has taken up arms in defence of the village. He points out that due to an obscure bylaw, no Stone Acre Militia member may carry a blade so the militia have to make do with heavy maces provided by the Mycologists Guild which look oddly like mushrooms themselves. 

Stone Acre Militia Men

The militia is keen to do their duty but afraid of the nameless monsters they may face out in the rolling hills and rocky outcrops of Stone Acre and are more than happy to have Dunstons' party along to help and even offers a reward of one gold for each monster slain and free bed and board while in Stone Acre.

With plans made, the trio retreat to the only tavern in the village for a good meal and well deserved nights rest before venturing forth to do battle with the revenant menace and help protect civilians who will need to be gathered from their homes and brought to the safety of the walls of Stone Acre.

I've got figures finished for civilians as well as Brother Maynard who will be making an appearance further down the line as well as Bunny Goodbody herself and have also just about finished half a dozen militia men to accompany the party on a larger skirmish in the coming week

Civilian Shenanigans

Bunny Goodbody and Brother Maynard

I still need to make some more revenants and some carts but I'm getting closer to being able to play the next game in the campaign which will see the militia and adventurers trying to defend a wagon train from monsters!

We shall see how they fare as no doubt it will be like herding cats! Until then, All the best!

Brutalquest Campaign Turn 1: An Unexpected Encounter

 Introduction

Sir Dunston's party has departed the small border settlement of Rook Moot and is headed north along the old road towards Stone Acre on the first leg of their journey to Longmyre. Following an uneventful day's travel and just as the light begins to fade, Sir Dunstan is planning on calling a halt for the night when suddenly a foul stench fills the air. From the shadows ahead, shambling forms emerge from the gloom and the party is faced by its first challenge, a pack of Revenants shuffle towards them!

The Battlefield

The battlefield is 2'x1' but for larger scales. please do use 3'x2' or larger and represents rough grasslands with piles of boulders, the odd ruin and some trees. The pathway leads across the board from left to right and to win the game, the adventurers have a couple of options, they can try and avoid the Revenants or be a bit more heroic and charge in. The heroes deployment zone is the blue rectangle on the left while the Revenants deploy on the right hand side.

The Forces

Sir Dunston and co

Sir Dunston is a knight armed with a longsword and wearing chainmail armour. 

Bodkin is a retainer armed with a shortsword and wears leather armour

Rumblebum the wizard is armed with a staff and has heavy robes which is better than nothing. He can cast lightning bolt.

Vile Revenants

The revenants are mindless creatures which will move towards anything they can sense and will attack anything they encounter along the way. Until they sense a foe, they move randomly using a direction dice and D6 for how far they move. 

In combat they use their claws and teeth and if they get a double roll on the D100, they sink their teeth in and do double damage!

The Game

I decided to give the decaying Revenants more of a chance of sensing foes if they moved quickly or made noises so Dunstan and co could try and sneak past but if they ran, fought or did pretty much anything else, there was a fair chance they'd be spotted and set upon!

I used Brutalquest with a D100 dicing rather than D10 as I rather like the more granular effect it has and it suits a small skirmish. 

Similarly I only gave the Revenants 10 points of damage each as I tend to use NPCs and mob type monsters as speedbumps or inconveniences and try to give the heroes something to worry about with either sheer numbers or by adding a more powerful mini boss to up the danger level.

As this was the first game in the campaign, I thought I'd go easy on my heroes. How little I knew...

The game started with my adventurers cautiously moving forward towards the narrow point of the table, keen to avoid attracting all the revenants into a choke point where they'll be stuck. Fortunately the shuffling deadmen don't immediately spot the party and two even bump into each other and begin savaging one another.

Spotting one off by itself and despite the urgings of his companions, Wizard Rumblebum jabbers a spell and with a crackle of energy, a searing lightning bolt flashes from his staff impacting the near by Revenant and reducing it to smoking ash. 

Unfortunately this alerts all the other undead and they begin shuffling towards the party. Sir Dunstan, uttering many swears under his breath bundles the cackling wizard off towards a narrow gap that Bodkin has spotted and is heading towards.

Unfortunately the Revenants begin approaching from both directions and Sir Dunstan and Bodkin draw their swords, determined to carve their way through the mob in front of them before the second group which is approaching from the rear.

In the swirling melee that follows, Sir Dunstan bellows his battlecry and decapitates his foe with a single stroke but bodkin fumbles and the Revenant begins to chomp on him. Supremely confident due to his previous spell, Rumblebum decides to cast another lightning bolt but flubs it and the bolt of electricity strikes poor bodkin instead!

Things are looking grim but a smouldering and chomped on Bodkin fights on, managing to dispatch his foe but before they can recover, the second group piles in. Bodkin goes down under a pile of clammy undead flesh and Dunstan piles in to rescue his minion. 

Perhaps trying to redeem himself, Rumblebum casts another lightning bolt and manages to actually hit his target, blasting his target from its feet and allowing Dunstan to hack down the last foe and drag the still smouldering and well chomped form of Bodkin from the corpses.

Post Game

In Brutalquest, you earn Brutality Points which you can use ingame to buff your attacks and so on or save them to improve your stats after. I had thought that I'd be able to upgrade my characters after a simple game but I ended up using all my points to kill off the Revenants before I got overhwelmed!

I rolled on the injury chart for Bodkin and he did survive but is unsurprisingly traumatised by his experience and has a minus 10% to his stats for the next 3 games.

Following the game, I rolled to see if I had any further encounters using the table I found on Five Leagues from the Borderlands and met an itinerant priest called Brother Maynard. The kindly fellow gifted the still traumatised Bodkin a healing potion so it was a bit of a win! 

Brother Maynard heads towards Rook Moot to warn the villagers that the undead are abroad while Sir Dunstan's party continues north towards Stone Acre.

Campaign Book

It's taken quite a bit to get this battle report put together but it's been rather fun and hopefully I'll get chance to post a second turn of the campaign soon but in the meantime, All the best!

Brutalquest Campaign Introduction

 Hi!

I've been trying to get this post done for a while but I had a massive event to organise at work and haven't had chance until now so without further ado, here's the beginning of my Brutalquest Campaign!

Introduction

Lady Cynthia of Longmyre has been having to deal with inheriting her father's domains following his rather mysterious death. Now bands of bandits have begun marauding throughout Longmyre so she has sent the call out for brave adventurers to help discover where these desperate villains are operating from.

As such, Sir Dunstan of Rook Moot has answered the call and along with his lowly footman, Bodkin and the cantankerous wizard, Rumblebum have departed from the small settlement they call home and are heading north along the old trade road towards Longmyre...

Longmyre

Longmyre

The county of Longmyre is a rather out of the way place bounded to the north and east by a mountainous region and the Copper Tail River to the south. The western border is heavily forested with the mysterious Greenwood and the Moss.

The capitol is Longmyre a bustling market town in the north that sits on the Longmere, a long, deep and cold lake that gives the town and county it's name.

The county is currently at its lowest ebb as the neighbouring barony of Voskovia has taken the Red Tower that guards the East March of Longmyre and it is only a matter of time before Baron Vosk orders his forces to cross the Copper Tail river and invade. 

Lady Sylvia is desperately trying to raise forces to meet the Baron but the constant harassing of her settlements and travellers by bandits, no doubt supported by Vosk, has seen her forces spread thin.

She is not without support though as the Nuns of the priory of Ottery St Catchpole and the March warden of Farpoint have allied with her and even now, bands of sturdy frontiersmen and women are training in the northern part of the county and the Longmyre Longstriders, her frontier guard are doing their best to hold back Vosk's scouting parties.

To make matters worse, the southern kingdom of Arcady is currently experiencing a civil war so aid from the supposedly allied kingdom is unlikely to materialise.

Character Portraits

Now I've been working on my tiny troops that will allow me to run a mini campaign without spending a fortune but felt that they needed a bit more character so decided to make some character portraits along with gear charts and next thing you know, I've got a bit of a scrapbook for the campaign!

Sir Dunston's Party

Sir Dunston is a freelancer who was once employed by the old Duke but has spent the last few years in near exile in the small border hamlet of Rook Moot but Lady Cynthia remembered his years of faithful service and has requested his aid in dealing with the bandits. 

He is accompanied by his faithful but rather long suffering retainer Bodkin and the hedge wizard Rumblebum. 

Sir Dunston has chainmail armour and a longsword, Bodkin has leathers and a short sword while Rumblebum has a staff and heavy robes and can cast Lightning Bolt. None of them have any skills yet or other equipment but I'm hoping to see them develop over the course of the campaign!

Gamewise, I'm using Brutalquest with a few modifiers to speed things up and my next post will hopefully showcase the first game of said campaign in which Sir Dunston and co encounter some unpleasantly stinky denizens of The Debatable Lands!

In the meantime, All the best!

Hobby Wobble

 Hi!

It's been a busy few days and I find myself having a bit of a hobby wobble. 

This year I've found myself making tons of stuff and generally enjoying the whole process of creating tiny troops, 2mm and 6mm randomness but as we rapidly draw near to the tenth month of 2026, I find myself having a bit of a pause for thought.

I've been sculpting my own figures now for quite a few years but instead of increasing the complexity and skill levels, I seem to be simplifying them for the sake of limited hobby time and to get things done and I have come to the conclusion that maybe I've been making a bit of an error.

Looking back at my older sculpts, they had some real character and personality to them and I was pleased with how they turned out, even if they were a bit rough and ready around the edges. Now I'm making things that are literally basic shapes and I can't help but think that I need to try something a bit more interesting or challenging.

While my sculpting in larger scales lends itself to cartoony and rather stylised figures, I used to have great fun making them and yet here I am churning out tiny and simplistic stuff simply because I just haven't the time to do more and I'm beginning to realise that I need to buck up!

Bloodaxe Boyz - SD style

For the sake of simplicity and speed, I seem to have devolved into very basic figures that do allow me to play games but feel unsatisfying in some way that I can't quite put my finger on. Looking back through the blog, I realise that even my first real attempt at sculpting, a 15mm scale rogue wizard who would later become Marik Goldhelm a notorious denizen of the frontier and sworn nemesis of my Dwarven Boar Company, looks better than the stuff I've been making this year.

Marik Goldhelm

It's a bit perplexing as my Tiny Troops have been pretty popular but I'm beginning to think that I've strayed too far from the sheer enjoyment of making interesting figures into something that's just too simplistic and not really a miniature anymore, more like a token and I'm wondering what I can do to remedy things.

My most recent figures

I realise I'm being a bit daft as it shouldn't really matter but it does and while I'm flailing around trying to settle on something that I can't even define, my projects have suddenly ground to a halt. On the one hand I'm heading to a record for painting figures and I've had a lot of fun doing so, but on the other hand, once they're done, I've not found myself too keen to actually use them in a game and am heading for my worst year's gaming total in some time.

The tiny troops were designed to allow me to quickly make forces to play games and they seem to have done the opposite.

I'm not going to stress myself out over it but I do think that 2027 will need to be a bit of a change with what I'm doing with my hobby and I want to try and focus more on some fun sculpting projects and maybe do something completely different.

I don't know if anyone else has similar moments when you've had a really productive hobby time only to suddenly realise it's not what you'd had in mind but I refuse to have a loss of hobby mojo like I did last year and will keep on with the tiny troop styles for the moment but I think I need to do some sort of palette cleansing exercise to get me back on track...

We shall see what I can come up with but thank you all for reading my ramblings and until then, All the best!

Richard