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:

The Cult of the Beetle

After a bit of a break, here are some orc members of the Cult of the Beetle.

These guys took me a little while to get done, but the most sluggish point was the beginning as I tried to work out the best way to represent the participants in the Pulp Alley campaign. Having decided to try and avoid buying new miniatures for a few months, I set about trawling through my backlog of sprues and partially assembled / unpainted models to put a force together.

Now, I was determined not to get bogged down too long on any one model, so they needed to be easy to convert and easy to paint. I had discovered a skin tone I liked by using Vallejo Sepia Wash over a basecoat of Vallejo Tan Earth, so aimed to do most of the fodder troops using nothing but basecoats and washes.

First up we have Fierce Cultists and Militant Cultists, the most basic of Orkwyrd's minions which ironically required the most work. They're Wargames Factory orc heads on Warlord Games celt bodies, both elements needing chopping and filing down so as to join neatly together. Painting-wise they were all done using three different browns for basecoats, one silver, one bronze, one off-white and one black, which were all finished with either a plain brown wash or a strongtone shader.

The Faceless Ones, the specialised warriors, were by far the easiest. Plain LotR Berserkers with the same paint scheme as the cultist minions.

The Beetle Priest, one of the living cult leaders, was a Gripping Beast Arab archer body and arms with a Warlord Games orc head filed down to suit. A minimal amount of highlighting involved on this one.

And finally the Risen Priest, a LotR Ringwraith with hands painted as bone rather than armour. Very quick and basic highlighting again.

Altogether, these models should be enough for me to play the first chapter of the Tomb of the Beetle (Serpent), though I need to source a decent miniature from my collection to represent Orkwyrd's physical avatar. I shall keep searching.

Warehouse Personnel

Some speedy jobs (as in, they only took days rather than weeks...) to cover some plot points in future Pulp Alley games. The middle gent is a Hasslfree miniature I did a year ago or so when I was putting together a zompocalypse collection, and I felt he was generic enough to transfer across. He just needed a new base.

The chaps flanking him are a mix of Studio Miniatures zombies, Warlord Games survivors and an arm from the Wargames Factory Russian Infantry sprue. The arm in question has had its grenade trimmed down to form a torch-ish shape. Other than green stuffing the arm joints, that was about as much effort as I was willing to commit to this pair. Painting-wise I did no more than a hurried basecoat, wash and highlight with the basecoat colour, with a further highlight on the skin. Certainly not my most creative of miniatures, but hopefully they're vague enough to pass for security guards or police officers (or even just general thugs) according to requirements.

A Veteran and a Traveller

So far so good in terms of painting progress – the initial burst of enthusiasm is still in effect and models are being started and finished. Long may this continue!

This battle-scarred villager is one of the Warlord Games celts with her left arm – originally bearing aloft a severed head – replaced to hold a shield.

I’ve also recoloured a Samwise Gamgee miniature from Games Workshop to create a well-packed halfling adventurer, carrying everything one might need for a long journey on his back.

Populating a Fantasy World

Much like my modern pulp collection, my fantasy miniatures hail from a great range of sources, certainly not all represented below.

These are my efforts so far:

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: