Musings of a Wandering Game Mage
Just finished up Vision yesterday as part of my “oh, hell, Atomic Mass Games is about to drop a million cool minis and I only have half of my MCP painted” reaction.
This version of Vision is from the incredible Vision comics that Tom King put out a while back. It’s a pretty grim, yet fantastic bit of writing!
I love that Vision is phasing through this smashed up bit of wall, too. Very nice touch!
I just realized today that I haven’t actually posted pics of most of the Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures that I have painted up, so I’m going to have to make a change to that!
Valkyrie, though, is a newer mini that I finished up this week. The box art shows her in her classic comics version, all Nordic and blonde. Nope. I’m a big fan of Tessa Thompson’s portrayal in the Marvel movies, so I opted for a darker skin tone and black hair.
I kept everything else pretty straightforward from Valkyrie’s classic comic look, with the purples and vibrant blues.
The first building is finally finished, and I could’nt be happier with how it turned out!
After the flock and shrubbery was secure, I added a couple of plastic railroad trees that I was able to twist in extremely twisty ways by soaking them in boiling water.
The rest of the piece was just a matter of concealing joins and gaps with shrubs.
After all of the flock was set, I poured clear resin into the moat for a water effect.
It’s a really fun piece, and will make for a thematic center-point for my games!
My friend (and Geekshow MVP) Rebecca Frost was talking about Gloomhaven one day, and I kind of lost my mind. I had to paint them. Why? Well, I had never seen them before. Here was a game set in the fantasy genre that I had never seen, let alone painted.
Luckily, Rebecca didn’t call the police, and I was able to get started on the first batch of six figs. I don’t know what they are, who they are, or why they are, but they are a lot of fun to paint!
First up, a badass lady with a couple of axes. She reminds me of a classic orc, but I think her skin is made of stone or bark!
Next up is a bard, but I think she might also be a plant person:
I know a Rogue when I see one!
I think the next two are druid/ranger types. I might also be waaaay off here, but they both fit a nature theme:
The last one in the first batch looks like a Paladin. We’ll have to see!
I have another five of Rebecca’s figs, and I need to get them done soon, too. There are a TON of Gloomhaven minis, so this project should keep me busy a while.
It’s interesting painting board-game miniatures. They still have a lot of detail, but the need to keep the poses static to keep production costs down makes a mini that’s a lot easier to paint. For the simple joy of putting paint to plastic, this has been a pretty fun project!
On April 10th, my hobby world changed in an interesting way when my new Elegoo Mars 3D resin printer showed up at my house. I had been debating the purchase for over six months, but I had a pretty good bonus, the bills were paid, and I decided to jump in.
The first week was pretty rough, with a lot of failed prints and hard lessons learned. I finally got my settings dialed in, found a good little heater to keep the resin liquid in our chilly April weather, and managed close to 3 dozen fantastic prints. So many cool minis joined my collection, and I joined 3 cool printing communities to celebrate and share pics of our amazing prints.
Then, the unthinkable happened. About a week ago, I noticed a weird hole appearing in some of my mins, like someone had drilled a hole through them. It was baffling. I hopped on one of the 3D communities, and some really cool people broke the news to me gently.
My LCD screen was burning out.
I had only had the printer for 3 weeks, and while it had already paid for itself easily, I wasn’t ready to pay to get it serviced. I contacted Elegoo directly, a really patient customer service rep walked me through a diagnosis, and yep. The LCD was fried.
I was told a replacement part would come, and that it would take two weeks to get to me. I resigned myself to painting some of the finished models, and settled in for my two week wait.
That two weeks was three business days. My replacement screen arrived Monday afternoon, and after work I settled down to watch a YouTube video from Elegoo on how to change the LCD screen.
The video showed a fairly complicated procedure, but I figured if I took notes, I could get through it. Then the video switched to motherboard model B, and it was just a couple of swapped out relays. Then motherboard model C came up, and it was literally one quick swapped out relay, pop out the old screen, and replace it with the new one. Connect the relay, and test your settings.
I have a motherboard model C.
The whole procedure to replace my LCD screen took less than 10 minutes. That’s pretty staggeringly cool in my book!
I ran the diagnostic, and everything came up aces. Tomorrow, I am printing up my Ranger and a whole slew of zombies! My enthusiasm for the Elegoo Mars really went up a couple notches today.
I can’t wait to get more prints ready to paint, and get my Rangers of Shadow Deep on!
Rangers of Shadow Deep is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new game. The table top skirmish game was released about a year ago by Joseph McCullough, and shares a ton of the DNA of one of his other games, Frostgrave. As a matter of fact, if you have played Frostgrave (you should), you’ll be able to pick up on Rangers of Shadow Deep in a jiff.
Shadow Deep has a few really cool aspects that set it apart from Frostgrave, though. Rangers is a co-op game, so you don’t face your fellow players in combat. You work together to solve riddles, battle monsters, and find clues about the encroaching darkness that has been wiping kingdoms off the map.
And you can play it solo. It’s pretty amazing. The game has a simple AI baked into it, but it still proves to be plenty challenging.
I’m getting ready to play my first game of Rangers, but I figure I might as well go bonkers with the project. I have set a few rules into play for myself, which I will outline here:
1- All the minis I will be playing with will be printed on my Elegoo Mars.
2- The terrain for each scenario will be scratch built, of printed here in the lab.
3- Everything used in game will need to be fully painted.
4- I will present write-ups of each game, as well as behind the scenes looks at the processes that I will be using to bring the game to the table. I’m really freaking bored, and this might be the only thing that keeps me from going kookoobananas.
5: This guy needs to be in the Ranger’s band of heroes:
The first thing I needed to do was settle on a Ranger. In Shadow Deep, your Ranger can be just about anything; Spellcasters, classic barbarian types, sword-and-board twinks, dump-truck babies in bear suits, you name it.
I have always been partial to half-elf Rangers, especially the classic, archetypal bow wielding bad-ass. I would also like to play with a female Ranger character, because I’m tired of beefcake.
I’m also pretty burned out on cheesecake, so finding the right Ranger proved more challenging than I thought!
(I don’t have a problem with cheesecake mins. If you want a little T&A in your games, have at it! There are some great sculpts out there! It’s just not what I want right now!)
But I want a mini that looks fierce, and has the sense to go adventuring with something covering her vital organs.
My usual go-to STL model files have been from Titan Forge Miniatures, Artisan Guild, and Lion Tower Miniatures. They all have some great figs, and I came really close to going with this awesome Ranger from Lion Tower:
But, I kept looking. I also found Lila from The Dragon Trapper’s Lodge, and a few minutes later found another set of files that had Lila with an amazing mount. So, she’s in the queue, as is the earlier Ranger from Dan Kelly at Lion Tower Miniatures.
You can’t have enough Rangers, after all!
Next up: a big batch of zombies for the first scenario!
Last week, a purchase I have been wrestling with making arrived on my doorstep. It’s a purchase I have had mixed feelings about for months, but isolation and work stress (I work in the mental health field) from COVID-19 finally won.
I bought an Elegoo Mars resin printer. That model you see up above was my first print, and the reason why I finally gave in. He was, to be frank, too cool not to have in my collection.
I have been conflicted for a long time on this technology. Initial prints that I had seen from extruded printers didn’t really impress me, and resin, until recently, has been really expensive. Now, you can get a good printer with a liter of resin for under $300.
My other big issue has been what I see as a disruption effect on an industry I care a lot about. Good prints made at home could be the death of small game stores, but after all of the printing trials and fine tuning I had to do to get things going, I don’t think we’re there… yet.
There is a lot you have to learn to make resin printing effective, and mistakes can be costly and messy. I messed up the FEP film almost immediately, and my garage was too cold for things to work right. But I am stubborn as hell, so I dove into research mode, and now I’ve been getting amazing prints without fail for a couple of days.
This handsome gent is Gino, and he was one of the awesome models Artisan Guild had available in March. $18 a month, and March had more than half a dozen badass dwarfs, including one mounted on a Griffon. I didn’t really have a choice.
Once I trimmed the supports off, it was time to get Gino primed, and start laying on the paints:
I really had a ton of fun with this model. He’s brawny, puffing on a pipe, and he’s stepping on some poor monster’s head. It wasn’t until I was almost done painting that I realized Gino had knocked a bunch of this dude’s teeth out before chopping off his head. Such a great model, and I think he cost me about .50 cents worth of resin to print out.
The final product is stunning! I’m still working my way through the rest of the offerings for last month, but Gino is ready to kick some ass!
The Thor mini form Marvel:Crisis Protocol is pretty cool, but after finishing him up, he was lacking… oomph. That had to change.
One quick search through EBay later, and that Jane Foster Thor found its way home to me. Click are terribly painted, but that lightning effect is made of soft, transparent plastic. Time for some chop-shop action!
Getting the lightning onto Thor took some persistent pinning, but the end result is pretty great.:
I’m tempted to strip the paint off of the Jane Foster fig. The sculpts on Clix can be half decent once the foot of paint is cleared off!
I don’t know if The Drowned Earth is a good game or not yet, but I love the setting and absolutely cherish the miniatures. Sure, it’s yet another post-apocalypse setting, but the model count per faction is pretty low, and what models there are look pretty amazing!
Kalhana is a big mutant heavy gunner from the Wayfarers faction, and he’s what sold me on the game. He’s really cool to look at, and a blast to paint!
I’m painting up the rest of the faction now, and they’re all a lot of fun. Terrain for The Drowned Earth should be a great deal of fun, too!
Gotta love Atomic Mass Games right now. Marvel Crisis Protocol hasn’t even been out 6 months yet, and the line up past the initial boxed set is impressive to say the least!
The Asgardians hit stores about a month ago, and as you can see, a certain Odinson isn’t messing around!
I spent a little extra time layering in some richness to the cape, and I’m still thinking of some lightning effects that I can work in. Other than that, Thor is another solid winner from Atomic Mass!
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