Brew City Freebooter

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  • Day 62: Chicomeh

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    It’s Amazon painting time, and while I have a large amount of thoughts on the cultural influences of the Amazons, the problematic use of indigenous identities in wargaming, and the influence of the male gaze on designing miniatures, I figure it’s better to actually paint some minis first. Despite my complicated feelings on the design space, they’re a part of the game, and I’m going to get them painted and ready.

    Chicomeh

    This image is a bit over-exposed, but you can see the highlights and shading across her. As you might be able to guess, Amazons are helping me to work on skin tones and aiming for smoother transitions, and as one of the first test miniatures for this crew, I’m hoping to improve on my process while working on this crew.

    So, skin tones! I started with a mix of Reaper’s Dark Skin Shadows with Tindalos Red, to build in the warm, dark undertone to her skin. I then highlighted up through the triad – big shoutout to Reaper’s paint triads here – to define the various shape and muscles. This looked a little dark for the skin tone I was trying to aim for, so I ended up mixing in a desaturated tan-orange to bring the highlights up even further. This was then followed by a series of glazes to try and smooth my transitions: the pictures show that I need to work more on softening these transitions, but that’s why reviewing your painted models with a critical eye is important.

    Next up was her weapons. The paints used were Coal Black, Anthracite Grey, Wolf Gray, and a warm white paint, all done with a lot of intermediate glazing in hopes of getting a smoother blend. I think I moved a little too far in the direction of blue tones on her gladius blades, but that’s a relatively simple fix with some more neutral glazes. These were nice to practice on – there’s clear shapes with some strong lines and edges that take to highlighting quite well. A lot of back and forth work was needed to help fix the highlights, but it was relaxing to play around with, and the final result reads as metallic from the tabletop distance and lighting, which is really all I could ask for.

    The gold was done using my warmer antique gold recipe: a warm brown, desaturated orange-brown, warm yellow, pale yellow, and some final spot highlights with white, all mediated with a series of glazes. The headdress was probably the best part of this process – I managed to improve the contrast even further by giving it some darklining to help it stand out more from her hair.

    Speaking of her hair, let’s talk about how I painted it. Rather than going for black hair (as I had originally planned), I decided to try and go for some lighter brown hair. This got base coated in the same warm brown I used as the base for the gold, but rather than starting on the highlights, I began working on the shadows a bit. The initial shadow color was VGC’s Charred Brown, but as this wasn’t quite dark enough, I ended up mixing in some P3 Thamar Black to darken it down further. After that, it was time for highlights, so I started in with VMC Flat Earth on the ‘halo’ section of her hair. I then mixed in an equal amount of Sunny Skin Tone, aiming for a wide highlight on the same hair halo, and then kept highlighting up to pure SST followed by some warm off-white. Glazes were used to re-establish the shadows and get the color saturation back in place.

    There wasn’t a lot of cloth on her, as one might expect for a character from a faction that uses the term ‘clothskins’ for the other groups, but I opted for a mix of my usual canvas/cloth colors (tan, Iraqi Sand, and Pale Sand) and reds, which were also used on the feathers to add a touch of color to her. Pretty simple overall, at least in terms of color decisions.

    While she still needs some additional work, I think she’s got a solid start and looks good enough for tabletop standards. While I think that’s enough of a cop-out that I’d like to return later, continual progress and keeping myself working steadily is important to me, so rather than getting caught on perfectionism, I’m just going to keep moving forward.

    What Does A Chicomeh Do?

    Chicomeh are the Amazon’s basic Deckhands – they don’t cost much to hire, but they’re mostly there to fill out your crew and help bring in some Specialists. With slower movement than a lot of other Amazons, they do have the advantage of the Ranger trait, allowing them to ignore the effect of Difficult Terrain on land, which does a decent job of implying their agility without taking them too far from the general Deckhand formula.

    Their stat line doesn’t have too much in the way of surprises, but one interesting aspect is that they are carrying two gladius (gladii?) – unlike a lot of Deckhands, they don’t lose much combat effectiveness if they take a critical hit to one of the arms. ST 7 isn’t exactly huge, but it’s still quite good for such a cheap Deckhand – it’s also where their name comes from, as it is the Nahuatl word for the number seven, with the suffix indicating a plural, assuming I’m understanding the grammar correctly. So, they have two weapons with ST 7, and their name means “Sevens” – a bit on-the-nose.

    They’re also a Deckhand that can benefit from the Honour Guard trait if led by Yolcameh: they gain Fearless at a cost of 5 doubloons per Chicomeh. It’s a pretty good trait for them to have – their morale isn’t particularly great, even for a Deckhand, so it’s really useful if she’s your Leader.

    Hobby Progress

    Sculpting bases for rats, putting models together, and painting Amazons – that’s the current hobby process! I’m also looking forward to seeing how Locura ends up doing in a local painting competition.

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  • Day 61: Getting Rats After October

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    As I’ve stressed over and over again, the best way to make a demo really eye-catching and interesting is to have everything done to a really high level. This normally means that you’ll want to paint all of your models and have some cool scenic terrain, but one thing that people tend to overlook is having all of your game components look at refined and cool as possible. If you’re going to be running a scenario, making sure all the stuff for that scenario looks like it fits together with the rest of the models.

    Because not everyone has the time to sculpt their own models, endlessly search for out-of-print official minis, or even has access to a 3d printer, here’s a pretty simple method to make rat tokens for “The Hunt for Rats in October”.

    Getting Some Rats

    When you’re looking for easy and cheap miniatures, the best place to start is Reaper Miniature’s Bones line – this has improved quite a bit over the years as they’ve revised the materials and production process, so if you’ve had a bad experience with the old rubbery bones material, it can be worth checking it out again. Thankfully, Reaper makes exactly the sort of rats we’d like to have for this – I ended up picking up a couple packs of their Giant Tomb Rats and Dire Rats for the required 21 rats for the scenario. These scale quite well with Freebooter Miniatures models – pretty sensible, considering Werner Klocke has sculpted quite a few models for Reaper over the year.

    So, now that we have some rats, let’s take a look at what we’re working with!

    It’s . . . a rat on some bricks. Pretty simple. The original model was sculpted by Sandra Garrity, and I think it’s a great model. If you’re really a stickler for having all of the rats look the same, I find myself preferring these Dire Rats over the Tomb Rats, who are a bit more savage looking, but honestly, both work quite well.

    There are a couple of options to make these rats fit in as tokens, but the first thing we’ll need to do is put them on bases. If you’re obsessed with making sure everything looks nice and uniform, Freebooter Miniatures does sell a pack of plastic bases which – not coincidentally – happens to contain 21 blank bases. So, to get them to work well, I trimmed and sanded the bottoms down a little bit to make sure they fit flat before gluing them to bases.

    At this point, we’ve got a fully-usable token, but it’s not looking particularly good to start. Here’s where the really basic sculpting is going to come into play, and it’s the trick that helps them to fit in with all of the other models.

    Sculpting Bases

    Once we’ve got our rats glued to bases and have given the glue time to cure, it’s time to begin sculpting the texture to properly make them fit in with the standard FF bases. As with all sculpting, I like using greenstuff mixed with apoxie sculpt for this sort of bulk work – given that GS is no longer manufactured (and it’ll be a while before Sylmasta actually manages to release their version), it’s best to bulk out these putties with a filler, and the apoxie sculpt is the right mix of bulking and behavior to really work nicely.

    After mixing my putties, I put it in place on the base. Technically, I’ve put in a bit less putty than I actually need to use, but this is also the first rat that I’m working on for this and any process needs experimentation before you can really get what you need.

    After I’ve added the putty into the base gaps, I then worked on smoothing it down to get everything integrated together. Getting the top smooth and flat is the biggest way to save yourself headaches later on in the process – unwanted texture is hard to get out once you’ve started on details.

    The actual process of sculpting the base is pretty simple: using a well-lubricated sculpting tool, I started by marking out the divisions between the individual bricks. Then, once I’ve given that a bit of time to firm up, I worked on refining the profiles and distinction between the bricks using a curved chisel color shaper, which helps to keep a straight line between them and curve things subtly to help mark them as distinct.

    Finally, once I’ve got the shapes to where I want, it’s time to texture them. I opted to use a round chisel color-shaper and variable amounts of pressure to start replicating the texture on the main bricks. This is a big push-and-pull process: I’ll smooth things out, try out different ideas, and otherwise built up the textures rather than trying to go full-power at the start.

    Assuming you’re following along, here’s what it looks like once you’ve finished the texturing.

    It’s a pretty quick process, and you can see how much better it looks already! Sure, these rats are on brick rather than the classic wooden planks that we have on most of the models, but the cobbles look is found on most Brotherhood models, so these fit together quite well.

    So now, it’s just a few more that I need to work on . . .

    Hobby Progress

    Cataloging and assembling my most recent shipment of miniatures – I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten some new and out-of-production minis from Spiel Essen, including one of my favorite sculpts that I’ve always wanted but could never actually find. I’ve also started sculpting stones for the rats – there are a lot of them, so it’s going to take a while to get everyone ready, but I think I can have all of those bases sculpted and ready to go by the end of the week if I work over my lunch breaks.

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  • Day 60: The Pirate Crew Is Ready for Action

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    Hooray, another crew is finished for Freebooter’s Fate! This officially puts me at 6 completely painted crews, although I will no doubt be doing a few final checks on the bases to ensure everyone looks their best (and also has their names listed). Thank goodness for Golden SoFlat Matte Black, the best base rimming paint out there.

    The Crew and Equipment

    As Pirates have an incredible variety of options to bring to a game, this was pretty tricky to decide, but here’s where the crew landed in the end.

    • Leader: Captain Regicide Alvarez
    • Deckhand: Cuchillo
    • Deckhand: Sailor
    • Specialist: Piedro the Publican
    • Specialist: Drunken Ivar

    Playing the Pirates

    These pirates are designed to be a hard-hitting close-combat crew that depends a bit more on outlasting the enemy than on ranged attacks or anything like that. With only two models bringing missile weapon, they’re looking to get up close and personal, but once they get in, it’s lights out to anyone foolish enough to challenge them.

    The Cuchillo and Sailor are there to ensure that your more dangerous models can actually make it into melee range. The Cuchillo is very much a distraction piece – just getting close enough to toss a knife or two in hopes of forcing opponents to take cover against them and perhaps set up a charge by some of the heavier hitters is key. The Sailor, on the other hand, is meant to climb over terrain, either grabbing objectives or moving in at an unexpected angle to force the opponent to react to them.

    Piedro and Drunken Ivar are likely going to be advancing fairly close together – while Ivar’s a bit slower, that just means he’ll be aiming for a charge once Piedro has started swinging his anchor around. They are both serious damage pieces – assuming, of course, that Ivar’s current injuries leave him with a decent morale value to work with. Piedro is definitely meant to hit the big targets, and if you can get opponents into a cluster, his Whirlwind Attack can be devastating – ST9 and Armour-Piercing is a terrifying combination, especially if they’re being denied the cover bonus thanks to Chain Weapon.

    Regicide is there to fill in the gaps wherever you need her. Orders (to everyone except Drunken Ivar, of course) will help move pieces up further where needed or get in an extra attack, shots with her pistol if there’s someone peeking out of cover, and – once she’s taken a bit of damage – her terrifying damage capabilities thanks to Hot-blooded. Overall, the only thing this crew is lacking is a way to heal or manipulate the damage they’ve taken during the game, but that’s already a pretty rare ability, so keep an eye out for event cards as they’re drawn!

    Hobby Progress

    I finished up the Pirates, so that’s 6 crews ready to hit the table! I’m hoping to finish up the last four before we hit Day 100 of the blog, as I’ve just noticed that today is Day 60 and – with 6 crews – that’s a crew every 10 days. Thankfully, the next crews only have 4-5 models each, so they’ll soon be ready to hit the painting table. I’ve started working on the Amazons as my next project, so I should hopefully have them ready before too long.

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  • Day 59: Looking For Sailors

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    Halloween, so tonight’s post is going to be a quick one. It’s been a grand ol’ time working on this blog for so long, and I feel like I’ve hit the point in my hobby journey that actually working on and completing projects is a natural extension of my general routine.

    I also just got some mail from my brother – as he is in Germany, he was able to make it to Essen Spiel last weekend and quite graciously picked up my Freebooter’s Fate order from there, mailing it home to me. I’m honestly surprised it got here as quickly as it did, but that means I’m now in possession of all the templates that I’ll ever need, a bunch of models to fill in gaps in my collection, and some of the cool new releases from Essen. While reviewing stuff like that is a bit beyond the remit of the blog, I think that you should hear from me that the new version of Blackbeard is a Leader for Pirates, which is absolutely incredible.

    Enough yammering, however, here’s some information on today’s miniature.

    The Humble Sailor

    Once again, I’m not sure why my lighting is looking so stark all of a sudden, but even so, I’ve gotten a Sailor done for my Pirate crew.

    As with all pirates, the Sailor gets to have some really motley equipment. I decided to really go into the sense of freedom by adding a lot of bright colors on her – the orange pants, for example, started off with a relatively dark reddish-brown and then were highlighted with Serpentbite Leather, followed by further highlights and glazes of Scrofulous Brown and Orange Browns to make them really stand out.

    For the striped stockings (which are just now making me think of Pippi Longstocking, that classic Astrid Lindgren character), I started a bit unusually for me – I mixed a dark green with a warm gray for my shadows and base tones. Then, I highlighted it up to an off-white using various warm grays and whites, keeping the greens in the shadows to give it just a hint of color and interest. Then, once I’d painted the stockings fully, I started freehanding the stripes, beginning with VMC Black-Red and ending up with the final highlight in Khador Red. This really helps them look distinct on the model, and when the highlights aren’t washed out by my horrible camera and lighting skills, it gives a really great effect.

    Her skin was the next thing that I feel deserves a bit of talkin’ about. I started with a dark, somewhat desaturated reddish-brown for the shadows, and then started to build it up using VMC Basic Skintone, which accidentally mixed with a bit of Pale Yellow on my wet palette. This ended up working pretty nicely, so I kept highlighting up to Sunny Skin Tone before finally adding intermediating glazes to reduce the starkness of the highlights. It gives her an almost sunburnt appearance, which I feel fits for a pirate.

    Right now, there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to touch up on her, and all of the individual pirate bases need to be painted before I can start talking about taking pictures of the crew as a whole, but at this point, that’s the last Pirate for my initial demo crew, so I can hopefully write up a post about them tomorrow.

    What do you do with a sober sailor, then?

    Sailors are one of the cheapest Deckhands available to Pirate crews, and it shows. They’ve got a pretty similar statline to the Cuchillo, but rather than being able to throw knives, they gain the Rigger trait, letting them move vertically much more easily. I personally really like that part of them – it’s cool to be able to get around the terrain easily, so I’m hoping to have a few rigged ships that are climbable for them to play around with.

    Overall, they’re a Deckhand that can accomplish objectives, and that’s pretty great.

    Hobby Progress

    Locura was dropped off for my painting contest today! I’m looking forward to seeing how I do with him once the judging happens. I’ve also started planning what I’d like to do for the next crew painting plans – jumping between Debonn, ELTC, and Amazons seems like it’s the plan, as well as getting my secondary Pirate and Imperial Armada crews painted, as they’re one of the easiest to explain to people.

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  • Day 58: Sculpting a Yola

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    Today’s blog isn’t exactly the most exciting one, but I’ve been enjoying working in Nomad Sculpt a lot more these days, so maybe talking through my workflow a bit will help me to actually solidify the lessons I’ve learned. I haven’t bothered to take any WIP shots because it’s easy to get into the workflow while sculpting (plus if it’s clear that I’m not much for WIP shots on my painting stuff, too) and I’m not enough of an expert to feel like anything I’d say would be worthwhile.

    Nomad Sculpt: A Brief Primer

    Nomad Sculpt is one of the cheapest sculpting programs outside of Blender, and somehow, it has become my favorite despite still hanging on to an old permanent license for zBrush and previously using that for my digital sculpting. It’s basically “zBrush, but optimized for iPad” and incredibly inexpensive for what it does – 15 bucks for it and no subscription or anything like that. While it doesn’t quite have all of the features, the most recent update has given us a brush that’s incredibly close to hPolish, one of my favorite brushes. It’s a little tricky to do hard surface work using a stylus, especially given that I’m a diehard fan of sculpting using mouse and keyboard, but it works well.

    If you’re curious about digital sculpting, then give Nomad a try. I’ve done a few miniatures with it already, and the only major issue I have with it is the difficulty in properly scaling things.

    While I can adjust the final scale when slicing and printing, one trick to ensure that things look right is using a “scaling piece” – in this case, a square base that I’ve mentally set at 25mm, just like the bases used in Freebooter’s Fate. As I just need to make sure the size relationship is correct to the bases when scaling the boat (as well as to a sort of “dummy miniature” to establish height of gunwales, but that’s a little more technical than I’d care to get into right now), that’s pretty much the only tool I need to get things looking correct.

    YOLA: You only live aquatically

    The Yola is (in game) a two-person rowing boat. As I have learned far too much about shipbuilding in the process of reading up about these little boats, I will condense what I’ve learned and its application to sculpting maritime objects for gameplay usage here:

    • Boats can have a lot of different types of hulls. If it’s made up of numerous longitudinally-running boards, construction is either edge-to-edge, or carvel, or overlapping, clinker, construction.
    • There are a distressing number of names for parts of boats.
    • Boats are made of a lot of curves that meet up in places.

    I know, highly technical stuff here. Since I like a challenge/it’s the best way I can think of how to do this, I’ll be doing carvel construction for this Yola.

    My starting place for the techniques I used was this video – the most important part (to me) was explaining how to get the planks for the carvel construction using a simple shell of a boat shape. Admittedly, the techniques needed some modification given my own limited skills in the digital realm as well as for my intended 3D printing plans, but if you’re used to sculpting digitally, I expect it will give you a usable workflow.

    So, here’s how I got started:

    • Create a curve that’s locked to the grid line.
    • Use the radius tool to get the shape lookin’ vaguely boat shaped.
    • Rotate your vaguely boat-shaped object 90 degrees.
    • Trim off the top to get the silhouette roughly correct
    • Polygroup based on normals.
    • Separate your polygroups: you’ll need the top edge separate from the bottom shell.
    • On the bottom shell, start splitting off the planks.
    • Mask and extract the planks, filling in the geometry.
    • Realize I’d fucked up the process and everything was incredibly pixellated, choppy, and giving random holes.
    • Go back a bunch of steps, smooth things out more, increase resolution.
    • Repeat several times as I worked on things and improved my own workflow.
    • ??????
    • Start extracting the planks for real this time.
    • Smooth out planks.
    • Texture planks.
    • Prepare to start doing more stuff and then realize you’re probably going to redo a bunch of other things.

    It’s remarkably simple once you get used to going back and also making clones of any step you’d like to repeat/might need to make use of later on.

    So, what’s our Yola looking like right now?

    Note that I’m going to be mirroring the boards once I work out a bit more on the dimensions.

    Now, you may be wondering how this will work on the tabletop, and let me tell you that I will need to flatten things on the bottom so that it will sit nicely. This method is slower, a bit rougher, and certainly more frustrating than simply sculpting a boat by hand, but on the other hand, once I’ve done these, I can print them off for running all of the boat-based scenarios AND can do some fun customization on them without ruining nice, original models.

    Hobby Progress

    Finishing up some final basing elements on Locura, painting pirates, and – as one might guess from above – sculpting boats. I hope to have this project finished by next week, as it’s easy to put in a bit of work over my lunch breaks.

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  • Day 57: Regicide Alvarez

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    Finally returning to my semi-regular posting style, I think it’s about time I made some additional progress on my Pirates. Everyone loves Pirates, after all, and they’re one of the most iconic factions for a game about pirates, after all. They also have such great variety – I’m never bored painting pirates, and I get to use a whole bunch of different colors to create a motley crew.

    This is also a fun process because I’m getting closer and closer to finishing another crew – I’ve got a single Deckhand left for this crew now, and they’ll paint up relatively quickly, assuming I have the gumption to actually sit down and work.

    Regicide Alvarez

    A relatively standard paint job here, but one that really came together as I worked on her over the course of a few days. This is one of the few cases where I took a larger break between painting sessions on an individual model – I’ve found that I’m doing that more and more often for Leaders because I really want to get them looking great. Regicide has a lot of fiddly bits, but it’s all quite distinct and clear. I think she’s one of my favorite sculpts by Werner Klocke right now – there’s a lot going on. Assembly was a little bit fiddly, as I have her arms quite close to her body rather than extended outwards, but it’s totally fine.

    Now, on to painting! First and most importantly would be the leather of her boots, cuffs, and hat. These were built up gradually from a basecoat of Dark Umber, shaded with some reddish hues to help tie her together. I then started to highlight up everything, starting with some Flat Earth, moving up through a Golden Brown, and then hitting the highest areas with a really thin glaze of Golden Brown mixed with Warm Yellow. This creates a nice, rich leather that shows a lot of wear over the years – it’s definitely in need of some additional refinement and cleanup, but it looks quite nice right now.

    Her skin was the next bit I wanted to work on: I started with a mix of Orange Brown and Sanguine Shadow to create a bit of a warm undertone to her skin, and then started highlighting up using Sunny Skin Tone mixed with Brown Rose until I got to pure Sunny Skin Tone. At this point, I had a good mid tone established, so even further highlights were done using Tan Flesh, mixed with a touch of Olive Skin Tone to cool it a bit, as I got her face highlighted. Then, there were a lot of intermediate glazes to hopefully smooth things out a bit – this is key for skin, and doubly so for relatively smoother feminine skin. Regicide got some reds glazed in around the temple as well, to hopefully make her look slightly angrier.

    Next up was her shirt and pants. I decided to use the same cloth recipe I use for my canvas color, so a simple Tan -> Khaki -> Iraqi Sand got me most of the way there. Then, as I keep trying to follow the concept art, I opted to add the freehanded stripes that she has on her bandana and pants, albeit a little less well-executed. Stripes were freehanded using a start of Orange Brown mixed with Sanguine Shadow, then highlighted using Orange Brown followed by Orange – this gives a nice, orange-y contrast that matches the concept art.

    Next up, her jacket! There’s only one choice for this, and that’s red – it matches some of the art, but also seems really appropriate for someone as hot-tempered as Regicide. Locura has really taught me a lot about reds, so I started with a base coat of a reddish brown to establish the color (Burnt Red + Dark Umber), then worked my way up until I was at P3’s Khador Red, giving me an incredibly saturated red.

    Now that the larger areas were done, it was time to tackle the next complicated bit – the NMM gold. As I mentioned above, she has a ton of little details and elements on her clothing that will need some careful NMM painting, so I opted for my warmer, old-gold recipe of Warm Brown -> Orange Brown -> Warm Yellow -> Ice Yellow -> Ivory, with some additional glazes of a reddish-brown into the shadows to help keep it nice and warm. This was a pretty back-and-forth process: she’s got some cool weird shapes that need to read as golden, so I was working on it for quite a while.

    At this point, I noticed that her bodice and the straps on her boots were just kinda there, so I wanted to make them stand out a bit more. I painted all of the straps black before starting to highlight them up to a warmer gray to represent slightly-worn black leather. Admittedly, I still need to prime, paint, and attach her belt pistol, but we’re moving forward and that’s the most important bit.

    The NMM on the sword was done using my recently-discovered favorite recipe. For those who want a refresher and to pad out my wordcount properly document everything as I think through this painting process, it all begins with a basecoat of black. Then, using Payne’s Grey and Anthracite Grey, I start blocking in the shadowed areas before mixing in a bluish-white to the mix as I gradually establish highlights for the metal. This makes a really nice, cold steel appearance.

    I’d also like to take a second to acknowledge the blend on the flat of the blade, about halfway up. It’s probably the best one I’ve ever done, and I’m going to highlight it so I can remind myself to look at it and do that when painting for smoother blends.

    Finally, the feather. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what color would stand out best here, so I randomly chose and landed on red – she’s got a lot of warm colors on her, so it only makes sense, and a red feather will coordinate with the rest of her outfit. Drawing on my work with Locura, I did the usual feather highlighting to keep the vanes really distinct.

    Her base is going to need some additional work on the flag – I’m trying to find the proper color scheme for an Imperial Armada flag that she’s stomping on. I may do a separate post about flags and how to make them.

    Captain Regicide Alvarez, The AngRiest Pirate Leader

    Regicide Alvarez, first introduced in the Deep Jungle expansion of 1E, is a Leader for the Pirates and a pretty straightforward one at that. While she’s got the usual Authority, Order, and Rallying Cry traits that comes standard with a lot of Leaders, she’s unusual in that she has exceedingly high morale: her first couple of boxes in Grievous Injury even have her hitting the morale cap of 9, which is already impressive.

    Regicide’s defining trait is, without a doubt, Hot-Blooded. As soon as she loses at least one LP, she’s overtaken by anger and suddenly what was a fairly standard stat line turns into a terrifying close combat fighter. She gets a +1/+2 ST bonus, +1/+1 T bonus, and the Steadfast trait for as long as she doesn’t fail a morale test. Note that her odds of failing a morale test are some of the lowest in the game: Steadfast allows for a re-test should she fail a morale test. She brings a pistol and a rapier to the fight, with her Hot-Blooded trait serving to change them from relatively average weapons into weapons that rival double-handed or heavy weapons.

    She’s a solid, no-frills Leader for the Pirates, and while she’s a bit outshined in other areas by more specialized Pirate Leaders, she’s a great example of the versatility of Pirates – she can act as an Order-dispensing Leader until she’s wounded, at which point she’ll be able to charge in and deal with whatever enemy has the misfortune to have attacked her.

    Hobby Progress

    Priming is done for all of the initial crews! I’ve got them set aside on my desk and I’m steadily working through the backlog as I aim to have enough models for people to play. I’ve also ordered some rat miniatures for the Hunt for Rats in October, opting for the cheapest option Reaper could provide to start as I’d rather have scenario tokens to play the game.

    I’m also starting in on sculpting some boats. At the moment, that mostly involves making some base meshes that look like the boat sizes, followed by messing about with adding details. This is probably going to take a while, but I at least have a Yola-shaped object started, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all need?

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  • Day 56: Boats!

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    Hell yeah, it’s a mechanics blogpost!

    Let’s talk about the boat mechanics for Freebooter’s Fate: they’re technically part of the advanced rules because boats are complicated (and they were introduced later in the life of 1E) but you can’t have pirates without cool boats. There are some great scenarios that teach players how to use boats, as well.

    Hiring Boats

    Boats are hired just like crew members: you pay the doubloon costs and get the boat. There are a wide variety of boats usable in Freebooter’s Fate, though no real rules for the larger sailing ships – these are strictly rowing powered boats. They are variably in production, so maybe find them when you can. I’m working on sculpting a few proxy boats to release via digital sculpt, but considering it’s a lot of hard surface sculpting, I can’t promise anything anytime soon because I’m a slow sculptor for that. You can also hire boat-specific equipment, including some stuff that’s restricted based off of your main crew’s faction: the Brotherhood won’t buy a cannon, for example.

    Important note for boats, too: you must name any boat that you hire for your crew. An unnamed boat is unlucky, after all.

    Much like models, boats have movement, vitality, and toughness. Unlike most models, however, boats have a seating chart indicating their capacity – in order to activate a boat, it needs a crew, after all. While their vitality is close to what has been seen before, the equivalent to morale is handled through the boat’s water level. This water level fills up from the bottom of the card, just like water seeping in through the bottom of the boat, and at certain breakpoints, it causes movement penalties for the boat. There are some other stats that you’ll find on boats, like their maneuverability and steering, but that’ll come in when we’re talking about actually moving the boats around.

    But How Do I Make It Go?

    Boat movement is – unsurprisingly – a bit difficult at first, but once you realize how it functions, is pretty intuitive. To make a boat do stuff, you need to have models crewing the boat: looking at the seating chart, you’ve got four crewing options:

    • Rowing: This gives the boat movement.
    • Steering: This allows the boat to turn.
    • Rowing/Steering: This seat allows the boat to move or steer.
    • Ordnance: If the boat has ordnance, this is where someone can fire it!

    Each seat in the boat has a facing and a crewing type – in order to contribute any Boat Stuff, you need to have models in the appropriate locations. Every model in the boat is a passenger, but not every model is crewing the boat – models who are crewing the boat can contribute their actions according to which seat they’re in and do not get a separate activation from the boat. Accordingly, a model cannot take their active phase and then contribute to the boat phase, as it takes their full attention to do anything boat-related.

    So, now that you’ve crewed the boat, what happens next? Well, it’s time for the Boat Active Phase – the boat is like a character made up of all the crew members, all of whom contribute their simple actions to the Boat Action pool, and when the boat is activated, so are all of the characters. At the beginning of the Boat Active phase, the boat’s controller declares what all of the crew are doing, which is pretty self-explanatory:

    • Rowing gives the boat movement points to spend during the turn.
    • Steering allows the boat to turn. A boat turns up to its Steering so long as it moves at least its Maneuver in cm between each turn (and so long as someone is steering it!)
    • Firing Ordnance should be self-explanatory, but yes, it means firing a weapon the boat is equipped with.
    • Bailing removes a point of water from the boat. You’ll generally want to keep water on the outside of the boat.
    • Landlubber Actions are any normal simple actions that the character can take when not in a boat, such as orders, aiming, or reloading a ranged weapon. Note that only one model can take one of these actions each turn, so use them wisely.

    So, once you’re in a boat, you’re performing Boat Actions, and when you perform a Boat Action, they all happen at once when you activate the Boat.

    Determining base-to-base contact with boats is similar to how you determine it in the main game. There is also a specific Boat Action which consists of leaping from a boat (or land) onto another boat, attacking a person in said boat, and then displacing them from the boat. Yes, you can steal your opponents’ boats – you only control a boat if you control at least 50% of the models in the boat, and boarding makes it a lot easier to remove opponents.

    But What Scenario Works For Boats?

    For an introductory boat scenario, I have to recommend Stranded (TOL#5 12-13, 2 crews, 500+ doubloons) for the absolute basics. You just need a single Pinassa, and everyone will be fighting over the boat! Boats can also be added to a lot of scenarios.

    Other good starter scenarios with boats are going to be Evacuation (BRB 92-93 or TOL#5 22-23), The hunt for the XO (TOL#7 9-10) or, should you prefer a cooperative scenario, Here be tentacles (TOL#8 24-25). They all take a little extra in terms of stuff – you can find what you might need on the Scenario Finder page.

    Hobby Progress

    Strangely, I haven’t painted a boat yet, but I am thinkin’ boats. I’m also working on painting some Pirates as I finish up Locura for a painting competition, but they’re slightly on the back burner right now.

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  • Day 55: Competition Painting Pt. II

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    I’m gonna just dump some photos of my progress because life has been hectic, and I’ll update this post with additional information when I have the time – which is now! Only technically a day late, but whatever, painting for competition is already delightfully time-consuming so a lot of progress elsewhere has stalled. Rather than just posting WIP pictures, I’m glad I was able to prepare the actual model in its (mostly) finished glory.

    Locura

    Look at that delightful Chicken-snake protecting his jenga. No one will take it, ever.

    Jokes aside, let’s talk about the painting process and why trying to paint to a higher standard can be really useful in increasing how fast I can paint and the overall quality of my mini painting. Astute readers may have noticed that my overall skill in painting has improved since the initial posts of this blog; compare my earlier painting posts to the more recent ones, and you’ll see a noticeable improvement in smoothness, color separation, and highlight placement. Much of this is due to repetition and working through the model workflow over and over again. As of last count, I’ve painted about 35 miniatures since starting this blog: this is a relatively decent clip for someone who has gone from barely painting anything at all to working on larger long-term projects.

    The painting process and recipes is pretty loose here, so I’ll bring in some of the techniques that I wasn’t really sure of when I started work on the mini. First off, let’s talk teeth and bones: these started with a layer of the greenish brown that I’d been using elsewhere on the model’s skin. I then mixed in some Brown Rose to create a sort of muddy brown that was lighter than the initial greenish brown, which started bringing it to a nice, desaturated bone color. This mix got some yellow ochre to lighten it further, and then I started mixing in Monument Hobby’s Bone and working up, really trying to keep the faded, colorful undercoat. This helps them really stand out against the rest of the model and keeps them from just being a neutral gray or white color.

    This kind of bone coloration is something I didn’t plan out, but it ended up working so well that I’m keen to explore this technique further. Being willing to experiment is a big part of how I’ve been working on improving, so I’d like to keep trying this. Another reason that I like this technique is that it helps to tie the part into the rest of the model – the quality of the color and light keeps everything looking like it’s in the same scene.

    I also further refined the feathers and furry bits on Locura, as I wanted this to be incredibly vibrant and so I needed to ensure that they really looked their best. Some of this work involved refining the shadows a little more – I aimed for darker reddish-purple with fewer cool tones, and then used that to bridge the gap between my deepest shadows. The highlights needed to go even higher, so to do so, I first started by reducing their total area using a mid-tone red, followed by integrating more of the highlight red. I then mixed in a bit of Sunny Skin Tone with my highlighting red to further brighten things without dulling the red too much, and aimed to define some of the higher strands, increasing the amount of light on the model. This is borrowed from some red NMM experiments that I’ve done, and I think it ended up working out nicely.

    As I needed to ensure that the top highlights were incredibly bright, I then grabbed some thinned white paint and painted the absolute top highlights using very thin, sketchy highlights. Once those were established, I grabbed some fluorescent red paint and added it over the top – because fluo paints are so translucent, the white underlayer helps make them really visible. An additional benefit is that the translucency helps to integrate those top-level highlights with the rest of the paint job.

    You may notice that there are some extra parts on Locura now – these were initially painted in sub-assemblies, then attached them to the model and got the final highlights in place. For the skin, I used the same greenish brown to bright yellow green as the base, but also ended up mixing in some of VMC’s Dead Flesh to give it more of a skin tone, followed by a little bit of ice yellow to get that final brightness on the highest highlights.

    Yellows were done using yellow ochre as a base, followed by a mix of pretty much every yellow I have up to a bright pale yellow color. There was a lot of intermediate glazing steps to make sure that things were well integrated, followed by glazing in some oranges into the shadows to help deepen the color.

    As this is starting to devolve into a list of colors, I think it’s time to talk a bit about what Locura actually does on the table, because these large models are pretty unique in Freebooter’s Fate.

    SO What Does The Jenga Chicken-Snake Do?

    Locura is the first model we have that is Large – this means that he’s situated on a 50mm base, rather than the usual 25mm base. Large models work a little differently than medium or small models: rather than having two values for each characteristic, they have three and can thus suffer more critical hits to each body location. They also get a base of 3 simple actions per turn, which can also mean a single simple action and a complex action.

    While his large size means he’s a little easier to target, he’s got some excellent movement options: Jungle Warrior means he can ignore negative terrain traits on land, and Shadowrun means that all of that terrain he’s ignoring is suddenly a place he can jump out of unexpectedly. This kind of movement on such a large model is terrifying – while he’s relatively easy to gang up on due to the size, the ability to quickly disengage and attack another target can be terrifying. Add to that his Fearsome trait and suddenly you have a giant monster that appears out of nowhere, terrifies one of your crew, and then proceeds to get an additional action afterwards.

    Attack-wise, Locura can deal some heavy damage, but the most dangerous element of his attacks come from the add-on effects they all have. His ranged attack possesses the Shockwave trait – if he hits, even if he causes no damage, his target is pushed directly away from him. This can potentially knock people off of ledges, into friendly models, or even out of advantageous positions to set up later charges. His tail, on the other hand, has Knock-Over (3), meaning that so long as he causes at least 3 points of damage while attacking with it, the target is knocked prone. A prone target is defenseless, and Locura can immediately follow up his more dangerous bite attack if he’s got the spare action left. Remember: all these attacks can come after a Shadowrun, so very few places are safe.

    He’s an expensive piece to bring, but for the amount you pay, you get a lot of snake-chicken to fight your opponents with.

    Hobby Progress

    Painted Locura, obviously. Like, a lot of painting Locura today, and he’s still not really finished because I have more work to do yet.

    I also started tracking down some terrain boats – rather than using the boat advanced rules to start, I’m planning on converting some Blood and Plunder ships to fit in with my Freebooter’s Fate, maybe as the basis of some terrain.

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  • Day 54: Painting for Competitions

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    I’ve been working a lot on Locura lately – while the flying serpent of pestilence is unlikely to make an appearance in a game any time soon (outside of running The Hunt, but I think I need more Oncas for that . . . ), let’s talk about painting for competition rather than for games.

    Getting Started

    While Locura is far from finished right now, I think talking about the approach I’m using to paint to a higher standard is useful to help me organize my thoughts appropriately and document some of my process, though since this has been taking place over the entire month, I’m not entirely sure how well I’ll catalog it.

    The actual requirement for this painting competition is to paint with at least one very vibrant color, so with Locura, they’re getting a bright, highly-saturated paintjob that focuses on reds and greens to really fulfill that requirement. This has been a long, layered process to say the least – I initially wanted to go for a more sickly color on the skin, but opted to go for greens and yellows to better contrast with the reds.

    Light placement was the first big element I wanted to consider – because this is a model that is meant to be displayed for a while, I really need to look at where the highlights and shadows will fall. This is fairly easy with the main body – the higher up the body, the brighter the highlights. In areas where one part is above another, reduce the highlights and deepen the shadows. Above everything else, aim to keep things clean and continuous on the model, as it has to read as light, rather than sudden color changes.

    For the greenish parts of the skin: I started with a greenish brown once I landed on what it was I wanted the skin to be. Bear in mind, this was repainting after originally painting the entire model purple and red to get the colors together, followed by painting all of the skin in desaturated grays in hopes of coming up with something bruise-like and interesting. This finally led me to the greenish brown, which ended up working best with the red that I decided would be the main feature of the model. Highlights were done by mixing in and glazing increasing amounts of Murm Green for the cooler areas and Bright Yellow Green to the warmer/more exposed areas – this helped me to unify a lot of the colors and provide a skin-like depth. I’m at the next step of things where I’m working on adding some skin tones to further brighten the highlights, but that’s going to take a while and it’s nowhere near done.

    For the feathers and other red bits, I started with a dark reddish-purple, made by mixing Sanguine Shadow with Dark Purple. This is going to form the deepest shadows on the model. After that, it was a gradual process to highlight everything up using various shades of warm reds. When I say “gradual”, I mean it, too – I think I’ve mixed about 8 or 9 intermediate tones as I finally got to my brightest red, and even that’s not quite where I need to end things, as I want these reds to really jump out. As such, I’ll probably be giving it some sparing white highlights in places which will then be very, very lightly airbrushed with a translucent red ink to keep cranking that saturation up further and further.

    For the bone-y bits, I’m dedicated to using paints that are already on my pallet. To keep things unified, I started with a basecoat of the greenish brown, and then started to highlight it up with a mix of that and Brown Rose – this gives a pleasing desaturated yellow that is going to look nice.

    You may notice that I’m talking a lot about process, and that’s because it’s most of what this is – the process of slowly going back and forth between the various areas of the model to make sure everything looks good, all before moving on. The fur and feathers, for example, are going to have several more steps as I don’t think they’re anywhere near what I need them to be, but I have a plan.

    Hobby Progress

    I painted some of Locura, who is currently in sub-assembly form. Behold the terribly over-exposed photograph:

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  • Day 53: Advancing and Attacking – Causing Mayhem While Moving

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    There are several traits in Freebooter’s Fate that give characters access to special actions involving movement and combat. Rather than posting actual hobby progress, I’ve decided to write out some of these and give my thoughts on their general utility in the game.

    Ranged Attacks and Movement

    Assault Shot allows models to combine a Complex Advance with a ranged attack. Note that this can be a retreat as well as an attempt to charge in! The ability to reposition while making a ranged attack is quite powerful, but it does come with a penalty to the attack itself.

    Notable models: Pehua (Amazons), Asaltore (Imperial Armada), Capitana Katharina (Pirates/Imperial Armada), Roberta (Pirate), Senor Conejo (ELTC), Guus van Glapje (ELTC), Foxbite (Tianyu)

    Overall, Assault Shot is one of the easiest of these traits to understand, and while it’s got a penalty associated with it that can’t be overcome with aiming due to being a Complex action, it’s a good way to demonstrate how important movement is in this game.

    Double Charge is kind of a weird one – rather than being extra shots or anything of that nature, it’s a charge that lets the model take a ranged attack with the Imprecise trait when they charge in. This is a great way to soften up a particularly tough opponent.

    Notable models: Cauyacatl (Amazons), Sparatoria (Brotherhood), Pierce (Pirates), Bob (Pirates/Debonn), Lindo Guapo (ELTC), Fog Sharks (Shadows), Grieving Soul (Tianyu), Tong Hu Han (Tianyu)

    Double Charge is fantastic if you can combine it with Event cards or if you have some backup for your charging model. It also plays into the psychological aspect of the combat system – if you aim for an unexpected area with the charge, you can condition your opponent to defend it.

    Sneaky Attacks

    Sneaky attacks get their own section in part because they’re charges that don’t gain the ST bonus of charges, but they do get an A bonus. This is a key thematic aspect of these sorts of charges: rather than being more powerful, they’re more likely to cause a critical or get a hit through due to that extra A card.

    Sneak attack is like a standard charge, save for a few key differences:

    • The enemy does not need to be in LOS
    • The advance can involve any type of movement, including climbing

    This is huge for a variety of reasons, including the ability to sneak around terrain and attack from unexpected angles, as well as allowing your models to advance carefully. If you don’t need clear LOS for a charge, that means you can position yourself to avoid taking any ranged attacks.

    Notable models: Queen of Shadows (Brotherhood), Bonaccia (Brotherhood), Nartz (Goblins), Gob Morley (Cult/Goblins), Mi Yeoh (Tianyu), Maid of Horror (Shadows), Rastrillo Oscuro (Shadows), Black Nick (Pirates), Quamitzli (Amazons)

    Sneak attack is a great trait, and one that really changes how you look at terrain and charge angles.

    Shadowrun is like a Sneak Attack, only it has a lot more shadow magic involved in whatever it’s doing and contains cyberpunk elements lets the model make a pseudo-teleport between terrain pieces. It’s also exclusive to the Brotherhood and the Shadows, as it is explicitly done using some form of shadowy magic from the same dimension that the Shadows are from. Think of it like a Sneak Attack that bypasses a lot of terrain, and also requires your opponent to be in cover, which is probably why the Brotherhood doesn’t get too many good ranged attackers. Another important distinction is that the model performing a Shadowrun can make a ranged attack after the run, which is a great way to keep your opponent disoriented or maybe even force them out of cover.

    Notable models: Master Assassin (Brotherhood), Whisperer (Shadows), Wailing Woman (Shadows), Blighted Blade (Shadows), Locura (ELTC), Raven (Brotherhood)

    Shadowrun is pretty much the defining feature of (most) models that have it – the ability to jump from scenery to scenery means no one is safe if they’re standing in cover.

    Getting into melee, but Exciting!

    Onslaught is a charge but more so – rather than maxing out at double the model’s MOV, it’s up to triple their MOV. What’s even better is that the attacking model gains an extra bonus to their ST so long as they charge more than double their MOV. You’ll need to be careful in order to set up a usable charge lane, but that extended threat range means you can get some serious hits in.

    Notable models: Lieutenant Krud (Pirates), Arturo (Brotherhood), Quetcholli (Amazons), Wild Ox (ELTC/Debonn), Franjo (ELTC), Chevalier Confiture (Debonn), Animalistic Force (Shadows)

    The biggest challenge is making sure that you can actually support a model that has done an Onslaught charge. Without support, you can easily end up in an unfavorable position or an overwhelmed attacker. One other utility of the move is using it to move further while carrying a Scenario item.

    Run-by-Attack, drawn from the Ironball action, allows a model to briefly enter melee to attack before disengaging with no chance of the opponent keeping them in place. Why, you may ask, would this be useful? Well, for one, you can set up a waiting model near that enemy to intercept any attempts to charge the model. You can also use this move to block off support lanes, move out of charge LOS . . . there’s a lot of options.

    Notable models: Dragonseeker (Tianyu), Will-o’-Wisp (Shadows), Captain Ronbert (Shadows), Flora Corridora (Shadows), Loranus (Shadows), La Crobate (Debonn), La Serpiente (ELTC/Brotherhood), Mapachin (Amazons), Momma Raya (Goblins), Velocia (Brotherhood), Corrido (Brotherhood), Fianccato (Brotherhood), Little Pete (Pirates)

    It’s a fantastic trait to use when you’re switching between accomplishing scenario objectives and harassing opponents. Rather than being a decisive strike or anything like that, it’s a good tool to get some hits in or quickly provide some support.

    Juggernaut is probably the least common of these traits, in part because it technically requires the model using it to be larger than any opponents that you might be attacking. It’s also one of the few traits that allows you to attack multiple opponents in the course of a single activation.

    Notable models: Tibbo Carrera (Goblins), Atoyatl (Amazons), Franjo (ELTC)

    If you’re using a Juggernaut piece, the goal is to get as many opponents in a straight line as possible so you can rampage through. Debonn especially needs to be aware of this trait, as Rank-and-File models will not like getting hit by a model using this trait.

    Hobby Progress

    Absolutely none. Taking a break is helpful sometimes, you know?

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