The Laden Traveller

I have had this chap sitting in my to-do pile for a good while now - he was part of my first order from Hasslefree Miniatures, all the way back in October 2013.

He has been given a range of different right arms, from his original pistol to cricket bats, before I finally settled upon configuring him as a character of indeterminate battle-readiness. His new arm comes from the Studio Miniatures zombie sprue - one of the few unarmed right hands I could find.

I'm still not particularly happy with the glasses, though I feel these fleshtone lenses work better than the white ones I've given some of the earlier miniatures.

More rebasings

Sleeping, database management, travelling on public transport - all these things are made more unpleasant with this heat (honest, Great Western Railways, where are your trains with functioning air conditioning?). To this list I add painting. No matter how wet my palette, the paint dries on the brush and the miniature before I can spread it across. I have spent half my painting time scraping off lumpy layers of paint with my fingernail over and over again.

Progress is therefore even slower than usual on the painting front.

So, back to rebasing the back catalogue of zombie hunters with a view to utilising them in some modern pulp games:

Office Workers

There has been an extended break in blog posts, linked primarily to D&D-related distractions which have taken up two of my weekday evenings - leaving me with Fridays and weekends for other hobbies, and we have managed to fill our weekends up with a lot of real life stuff of late.

However, with one D&D campaign recently coming to an end, I have an extra slot after work free to return to tabletop affairs!

I have started rebasing (again) my collection, opting for very economical plastic binding sheets. The tests I ran them through indicated their flexibility might result in fewer occasions to glue a figure back to its stand. It has also held better to miniatures with a smaller foot surface area.

Thus, I am now working through my old zombie apocalypse minis, touching up the various knocks and scrapes they have accumulated over time as well. There are a couple of paint jobs which have not stood the test of time particularly well, but they will do for now. They were originally made at a time when I was far more interested in trying alternative combinations of plastic survivor parts, avoiding the plethora of gun options in favour of more British-like homemade weapons.

The Administrator

The Sports Psychologist

The Executive

Some more heavily green folk

I really like these two miniatures. They're wonderful sculpts, plenty of character but - like the wizard and dwarf earlier - not overwhelmingly detailed.

First up is an APEX investigator from Fenris Games, sourced through Bad Squiddo Games, who I'll be using as Dr. Elaine Darrow in an upcoming Pulp Alley campaign (yup, another gamer enthused by David Phipps' demo videos). Her garb strikes me as suitably Indiana Jones-y enough to group her in with the rest of the academic action heroes when not acting as a Pulp Alley plot point.

Next up from Hasslefree Miniatures is a perhaps less academically minded but not less academically ambitious individual. I gave him a university / college jacket to offset his other 'practical' clothing. Switch his crowbar-clutching right hand for one from Studio Miniatures' Rick Grymes, and he's done.

The Beginnings of a Pulp Adventure

I have been keen to try Pulp Alley – a wonderfully flexible and unique ruleset – for a long time. I have bought and read all the rulebooks, but up until now have not had the miniatures to have a proper game (even with the rules’ very low minimum requirement).

Until I can steer the wonderful Mrs Doodler towards tabletop gaming as a hobby, I will be playing on my lonesome. Thankfully, Pulp Alley can accommodate this with its special Solo Deck, so all I need to do is build a reasonable collection of miniatures for adventuring.

While I have no traditional 1930s pulp figures, I do have a good number of modern armed and unarmed civilians from a purchasing frenzy for a yet-to-be-completed(-or-even-seriously-tackled) zombie apocalypse collection, so I do have the resources to put together some modern pulp miniatures – more in the vibe of Indiana Jones and James Bond.

Here are the first offerings: