Malifaux: Jazzed up Pandora Crew

I've got a tournament coming up which uses the "Lost Love" format:  Starter box, totem, one blister and one model to summon at 25SS.  I thought about going with Hamelin since I can summon rats.  However, I don't like Hamelin as much at smaller point sizes and the round time limits are 80 minutes which I don't think I can play him in that time.

As such I've decided (at the time of writing) to go with the Pandora box set, Primordial Magic, Coppelius and Alps as my summon.  My Alps still need painting so they're next and the Primordial Magic hasn't arrived yet.  I painted Pandora and Coppelius about a year ago, so I thought I'd get them out and spruce them up a bit:

I've just been over them and added some extra highlight layers, re-done the OSL on Pandora's Box and made Coppelius' eye a bit more gory.  I'm reasonably happy with them for now.

Game-wise, I've played a couple of games with the crew and it is pretty filthy.  Coppelius paralyzing stuff combined with Pandora triggering Mental Anguish is just nasty.

Malifaux: 70SS hiring pool

A couple of weeks ago I attended a tournament at York Garrison.  The hiring rules for the tournament were fixed faction using a 70SS hiring pool (they were 35SS games) as per the 2013 Gaining Grounds document.  I hadn't played in one of these type of events before as all the previous tournaments I'd played in were fixed faction so drawing up the pool was interesting.  I went with Outcasts as they're mostly my tournament faction of choice for 2013.  Outcasts suffer a little in this format, as there is almost no overlap between the crews.  For example, I went with Viktoria and Hamelin.  Viktoria can only hire Mercenaries, whereas Hamelin specifically can't hire Mercenaries at all.

If you've not read the selection rules from Gaining Grounds for hiring pools they're basically these:

• Masters don't cost anything to hire into the pool, but they must be listed
• You can spend 2SS from the pool for the option to manifest avatars for any master in the pool
• Models can only be included in the pool if they could be legally hired by at least one of the masters also in the pool
• Models hired into the pool cost their printed SS cost regardless of what they would cost when actually hired into a crew.

For the York tournament, the strategies were (all shared):  Land Grab, Line in the Sand and Beatdown.  The task was to come up with a pool which could cover all those eventualities.

I knew I wanted to take Hamelin to his first tournament so he was in.  However, Hamelin sucks at Beatdown so I need a second master; the Viks came into the pool just for Beatdown.  That was self contained, strategy specific, crew and looked like this:

Viktoria

Student of Conflict

Freikorps Librarian

Sue

Jack Daw

This was a slight gamble, as Jack Daw can really suck in some match ups (Collette's Mannequin Replacement and Levi's Entropic Transformation both ruin him), but I went with it.  That was the first 27SS.

Next was Hamelin's crew for Land Grab and Line in the Sand.  My plan for Land Grab is lots of models, move to the middle and have Hamelin stand there making the crew significant, and move between quarters as required.  So, into the pool went a basic Hamelin crew:

Hamelin the Plagued

Nix, the Bull Terrirer

Rat-Catcher

Obedient Wretch

The Stolen x1

Malifaux Rats x5

That's another 27SS into the pool and gives pretty much everything you need for Hamelin.  I didn't add any more rats or Stolen to the pool as summoned models don't have to be included in the pool, so this was just what I wanted to start the game with.  It gives me 10 significant models for Land Grab, provided they all stay together.

I then need to add what I would need for Line in the Sand.  Essentially for this I go for dominating one half of the board, which Hamelin is quite good at, so the list above gave me most of my options already.  I added into the pool 2 Night Terrors to give me some speed for grabbing dynamite.  I had 11 points left at this point so I stuck a second Rat-Catcher and Baby Kade, neither of which I ended up using in the end.

The final pool was 70SS on the nose.

I had mixed success at the tournament.  I'd played 9 games with Hamelin up to that point, but only 1 on the tabletop.  Managing alot of rats can be time consuming in a tournament setting so we went short on time in Land Grab and I lost it 4-1.  Another turn might have helped me here, perhaps not to win, but maybe pick up another VP or 2.

Game 2 went better with Line in the Sand, and I went onto win that one 5-3.  The Night Terrors made the difference as they went down the opposite side of the board to Hamelin, flipped a marker and then sat in my opponents deployment zone getting my Breakthrough and denying him Hold Out.

Game 3 was Beatdown with the Viks, against Marcus.  I made a big mistake which cost me the game in the end.  The Viks had killed a Ronin and Willie, but Gun Vik had been wounded by Willie in return.  What I should have done at this point was move back to the support group of the Student and the Librarian but I didn't.  I pushed on towards the Gunsmith (which Jack Daw was capable of killing and did so) and didn't realize I was now in Marcus' line of sight.  He then killed both Viks over two activations.  The game finished 6-4 with Jack Daw scoring 3 points for Stake a Claim and being alive at the end.

I finished 15th of 22 overall, and I'd won a game so it wasn't too bad.  My VP diff was only -2 which was also OK.  I'm definitely going to push on with getting more games in with Hamelin now after the tournament. I feel like I'm getting the hang of Nix, the rats and the Rat-Catcher, but it's Hamelin himself who still feels like I'm not using him to the best of his abilities.  I need more games in with him so I can work out which of his capabilities he needs to apply at which points in time.

Malifaux: (Almost) Finished Hamelin Crew

Hamelin the Plagued and his crew are pretty much done now.  I've still got a couple of Stolen and 3 rats left to do when I get chance.  I entered them in the best painted competition at the last tournament a week ago in York and they were pretty well received (didn't win, but came pretty close to the top):

Hamelin himself, on his fancy base.  This is my most successful attempt at OSL as well:

Nix, complete with drool (see one of my earlier posts on how I did this):

The Obedient Wretch and Rat-Catchers.  I wasn't fond of the sculpts for the Rat-Catchers when I bought them, but they've sort of grown on me as I've painted them up:

6 Malifaux Rats.  The rats are colour coded and have corresponding colour blobs on their stat cards so I can track which is which.  Honestly, it's not that easy to keep track of them, especially when alot are dying and coming back.  There will be three more in brown of these.

The picture I took of the little girl Stolen came out blurry, but you can see her in the group picture anyway.  I'm pretty happy with her, she adds alot of character and colour to the crew.

Overall, I'm very happy with how these came out.  I think they're better overall than any other crew I've painted.  These are also the first crew I've painted from start to finish using my new Games and Gears Pro-Studio brushes which I got on Kickstarter, and also much of the paint is now Vallejo as I begin to transition further and further away from the GW paint line.

Game-wise,. I've got in around a dozen games with this crew now against lots of different crews and masters  including some power house masters like The Dreamer and Colette.  I'm still trying to get the hang of it and the complex interactions between the models so I'll post up some thoughts on how the crew plays.

On a related note, I've spent a bit of time on updating and expanding Hamelin's Pull My Finger wiki page so any comments or feedback on that would be handy.

Malifaux: Finished Hamelin the Plagued

Hamelin the Plagued surveying his horde of plagued minions:

The base is from Model Display Products.  I've used their sewer bases on all my Hamelin models, but this one is part of their Diorama Display Bases.  The base gives Hamelin extra height, like he's looking down on his horde of rats and Stolen as they surge past him.

Malifaux: Stolen Sacrifice Sheet

As threatened in my last post, here's a quick reference as to what happens when a The Stolen is removed from the game:

The only thing I'm not 100% on the whether the rat arrives before or after the 6" pulse.

Malifaux: Rat Removal Result Reference

I've played 8 games with Hamelin now, and it can be hard to remember all the different interactions between Hamelin/Rat Catchers/Nix/Rats/Stolen, especially when one of the them is killed.  To help me remember what happens when a Malifaux rat is killed, I put together a quick flow chart:

I think this pretty much covers it.  Hopefully someone else might find it handy.

Malifaux: Jack Daw and Sue

These two guys form the basis of my new Viks Beatdown crew:  Sue and Jack Daw:

For Jack Daw, I've gone for an bit of an experimental monochrome paint scheme which has come out reasonably well.  I was kind of imaging him like a horrible black and white spirit from a Japanese horror movie like Ringu.

My current Viks Beatdown crew looks something like this:

The Viktorias
Student of Conflict
Freikorps Librarian
Sue
Jack Daw
8SS

The Viks and Jack Daw do the heavy lifting in this list.  Jack Daw is going to draw alot of attention, so he needs cards to keep him alive and that's where Sue comes in.  Sue has a (1) action called Hurt where he can take up to 3 Wds to draw the same number of cards.  Combined with Arcane Reservoir, you've got up to 10 cards in your hand giving you more chance of masks for Whirlwind and Heart Stopper, and chaff cards to discard to keep Jack Daw alive.

Malifaux: Nicodem crew

I've been feeling the draw of the grave recently, i.e. I've been thinking about playing Nicodem again for a bit. I've added a few models to the crew since I last played it, which is getting on for a year ago, and the Avatar is still sat on my "to be painted" shelf forlornly.

Anyway, I found this photo from last time I played Nicodem, it's kind of a crew summary picture which was taken for a club league last year:

Malifaux: First Blood

I wanted to add an addendum to my Viktoria tactics article and talk a little about the Viks specific scheme First Blood.  Here's what it says:

Special:
This scheme must be announced.

Victory:
If the first two models killed during the encounter were models in enemy Crews, you score 2 VP.

The first thing to notice about this scheme is nowhere does it mention that you have to kill those first two models.  The second thing to notice is that it says killed, as opposed to sacrificed.  Third thing is that those 2VP are locked in and can't be taken away from you.  I always prefer schemes like that (such as Kill Protege) rather than one's that arrive at the end of the game (such as Stake a Claim).

This is a scheme I will always save to use against certain masters.  Here's some examples where you can use this scheme to pick up some easy and early VP:

-Ressurectionist masters.  Alot of times your Rezzer opponent is going to sit back and cut up dogs, desperate mercs etc in that first turn to get body parts, corpse counters etc.  Either they're going to carry on doing that and gift you the VP, or they're not going to do it in which case, they're now playing your game and not theirs.
-A popular trick with Kirai is the dog/desperate mercenary cut up in order to get Gaki/Onryo/Seishin between Kirai and Datsue-Ba.  That's two VP's for you, or they wasted the points buying those two models.
-Hamelin.  Those rats die easily, go for the rats for the two easy kills.
-Leviticus.  The classic Levi list is to take the Canine Remains, kill it first turn and turn it into a second Hollow Waif.  That's one half of your scheme done.  The second kill comes in when Levi inevitably kills himself, ideally at the end of the first turn.

Whoever you take this scheme against, always make sure you're looking for those easy kills early doors, but remember not to risk your key pieces like Swordmistress Viktoria to get them.  Von Schill is good for this as he can move about the board very quickly and pick off vulnerable models easily with his clockwork seeker.

As an example of this, have a listen to the Bayou Broadcast episode 20.  Craig talks about his last game at Vapnartak tournament where he used Von Schill to move around and pick off those easy kills from Joel's Dreamer crew (Daydreams in that case).  Craig was using Ten Thunders for that game, but it's a good example of using the speed and ranged punch of Von Schill to get early kills.  That can easily be extended into your Viks crew.

Hobby: Making tiled floor bases

Following on from my last post on Sim29, I thought I'd do a simple tutorial on making tiled floor bases which is what I've done on my McMourning crew.

I've refined the lab base technique I originally trialled with the original McMourning who now really looks like he needs rebasing in comparison to Sim29 and Miss Pack (which I've now done, see below).  The technique is very simple to do and looks pretty good I think.  Here's how I did it.

1-  Fill in the slot in the base with GS, Milliput or whatever.  You're going to be applying pressure to this later, so you don't want to be pushing your green stuff through the slot.  Let this dry before moving on to the next stage:

2 - Cover the base in green stuff.  I think I used Milliput on my original McMourning, but that doesn't work nearly as well as GS.

3- Smooth out the green stuff with your preferred sculpting tool to roughly spread it over the base:

4- Use something smooth and cylindrical (thank you, titter ye not) to roll the GS flat, even and smooth on the base.  I use the plastic tube that my green stuff comes in.  It'll end up nice and smooth like this:

5- Smooth out any bit where there are fingerprints showing or it's a bit uneven.  If necessary, roll it out again.  I don't get too hung up over slight imperfections here, as I figure that McMourning's lab floor is pretty far from perfect.

6- Score lines over the GS in your preferred tile pattern.  I use a fairly blunt hobby knife to do it with.  I usually start with a cross in the middle like this:

This cross then guides the rest of the lines.  Try and push down with this rather than dragging as you don't want to be moving the GS about on the base.  You could use a ruler or something to get straight lines, but I just do it by eye.  You should end up with something like this:

You might end up with the odd wonky line or slight bend (I've got a couple here), so just run up and down any lines again taking care to press rather than drag where possible.

7- Leave to dry then mount the model on it.  Ideally you'll want to pin it to the base.

Here's a finished example, minus the miniature:

As I'd made this, I decided I might as well rebase McMourning with it, so here he is:

There's a Flesh Construct still to come to finish off this McMourning specific part of the crew.

Malifaux: Little and Large

More models done, this time for my McMourning crew:  Zombie Chihuahua and Simulacrum-29.

If you haven't seen Sim29 in the flesh, then this thing is huge.  That's a 50mm base he's stood on to give you an idea of the scale.

Painting wise Sim29 was actually pretty quick to get done.  The whole thing was painted in several thin layers of VMC Flat Flesh before a several washes of various hues, some purple, some flesh etc and then drybrushed highlights.  Once I'd drybrushed the highlights I went back over several areas of the model with a thin paint layer of the same colour in order to smooth out the highlight.

I'm in the process of writing up a quick tutorial on how I did the bases, so stay tuned for that.

Painting: Blood Strings Effects

Following on from my last post on using Tamiya Clear Red to make blood effects, you can use the same stuff (and a couple of other things) to make blood strings.  This is the kind of effect we want, shown here on Kirai's shears:

This is really easy to achieve, and here's what you need for it:

-Some cocktail sticks, bits of sprue or something you don't mind getting ruined.
-Some Tamiya Clear Red
-Paint or ink to darken the Clear Red, for example brown or black
-Some UHU All purpose clear glue.  This stuff:

This cost me about a pound for a massive tube.  It's very, very stringy which you will notice as soon as you squeeze any of it out.  Of course, stringy is exactly what we want for this effect.  UHU glue holds a special place for me since back in the very late 80's it was the same glue I used to stick together my first ever plastic miniature kit:  Skeleton Army.  As I re-call it pretty much sucked for that, but it's good for blood strings!


Step 1:
Squeeze some glue out on to a suitable surface and quickly mix into it whatever paint or inks you want to use to tint the glue:

This was a mix of Clear Red and Vallejo Charred Brown.  Having tried it with both brown and black, I think I prefer the black/clear red mix.


Step 2:
Grab a cocktail stick, scoop up some glue and apply it to the model where you want it.  You'll need to work very quickly here as the glue starts to set fast, literally you have less than a minute to do this.  Make sure you draw the glue between which ever surfaces you need to have the blood strings between.  You should end up with something like this:

Step 3:
Leave it to set and you're done.


These strings are very thin, so it goes without saying you're going to need to be careful if you're going to be handling this model alot.  You may also want to do this after you've varnished the model, since I can't tell you what effect varnish will have on it (probably none but test it first).

Of course, you don't have to use Clear Red for this, you can use any colour you want to get different effects like slime, drool etc.  Here's some examples of where I've used the technique:

This is a zombie from Studio Miniatures, which I use as a Mindless Zombie in Malifaux.  Make's his insides look like they're about to drop out.

A ghostly Malifaux Drowned.  This one is slimy rather than bloody, as she's just crawled out of the water.  In this one I mixed the UHU with green ink to tint it green.

I've also tried the effect to simulate saliva on my Rogue Necromancy but it's quite small so I couldn't get a decent photo of it.

Painting: Blood effects

A club mate put me on to this stuff, and it is really nice for making blood effects:

Tamiya Clear Red X27. I got mine in Model Zone which is a UK high street model shop for about £2 or something.

It says on the side it acrylic paint, but it's weird stuff not like GW or Vallejo acrylic. Just use a brush you don't care about on it.  It also reeks so use it in a well ventilated area.

It's quite a bright red, so mixing it with brown or black paint (just normal acrylic paint works) makes it a bit more gory. Once you've mixed it, then stippling it on the area you want gory, poke it with a brush. I like to use an old tooth brush to flick blood over the area as well, but you might need to water it down a bit to do that.  If you take a look at good ol' Avatar Seamus' fists here, this is an example of effect we're looking for:

One thing, the clear red has a gloss effect, so either you want to do this post varnish or go over it after using gloss varnish.

Clear Red is also going to be useful when you're making blood and gore strings which I'll cover in the next post which should be up over the coming weekend.

Malifaux: Kirai crew so far

I've put in some work recently on the Kirai models that I got for Christmas.  I've got a couple of Gaki done which are kind of meh (not a fan of the models, therefore didn't do a very good paint job).  I've also got the chaff part of the crew done, all the Seishin and Lost Love:

As you can see, I've decided to go with bright colours with this crew.  That's something that I don't paint very often at all, so it's more of a  challenge.  The models above are mostly done with Vallejo Model Colour Blue Green which is rapidly becoming a favourite of mine (see my Seamus and aSeamus for example).

Having got those done, I went to do Kirai next and I'm very happy with how she came out:

Again, I've gone with the bright colour scheme for Kirai.  The sash is the blue green again, and the purple is done using VGC Warlord Purple (I forget the exact name) which is the Vallejo equivalent of GW's Liche Purple, another favourite colour of mine.  For the face makeup I've gone for Geisha style makeup which was different and challenging.  This was started from a pale grey base and built up from there to white.

You can't see it that well on the picture above but I've added some blood strings between the shears here.  I've had more of a play with this since I took the photo and I've got it to look a bit better so I'll probably try and get a tutorial done for that at some point.

Since Kirai was done, and I'd had so much enjoyment in painting her, I decided to get Ikiryo done next.  Here they are together:

As you can see Ikiryo is in a similar colour scheme to Kirai.  I did this as Ikiryo is Kirai's vengeance and anger embodied so I wanted it to look like an extension of Kirai herself hence the similar colour scheme.  Rather than go with the exact same tone, I went for a more muted, washed out tone with Ikiryo and carried on the grey theme into her face and skin.  This was achieved by mixing the blue green and purple base coats with a mid grey (VMC London Grey in my case, but Codex Grey would do it as well).  Highlights were done by adding more and more VMC Light Sand (like Bleached Bone) to that basic mix and then layering them on.

Bases for crew are metal inserts from Black Cat bases.  All my Kirai crew and Izamu are on the same bases, and I suspect any future Misaki or Yan Lo crews will go the same way.

*I'm aware I've used old name for GW paints here, I don't know and can't be arsed to find out what stupid name they've got now.  I'm still pissed off they've got rid of the names Skull White and Chaos Black.  Anyway as you may have detected, I'm also moving to Vallejo paints away from GW.

Malifaux: The Freikorps

I'm on a painting roll this week, so the Freikorps box is now all done:

The Strongarm suit has been built and primed so he's next on the list.  I've tried out the Strongarm suit in one game so far, and he was a bit underwhelming.  He's going to need a few more try out's I think.  In the game I played with him (against a Molly crew), his WP4 really hurt him.