Yearly Archives: 2014

Impact Miniatures Fantasy Football Kickstarter – Blood Bowl friendly!

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Clearly, these figures can be used for a range of Fantasy Football games, including Blood Bowl as the big one. While they obviously can’t mention Blood Bowl, I certainly can, and I do so in exactly the same way that I might talk about using My Judge Dredd figures as Adeptus Arbites, or my many Warhammer Fantasy Battles Ogres, High and Dark Elves to play Kings of War.

So anyway, the campaign is over on Kickstarter right now, and it’s just on the edge of funding. It was funded, but a couple of people who appear to be Kickstarter trolls pulled some huge pledges right after it was funded. Casting is being done by Ed Forte of Trollforged, which I have to admit does make me a little nervous, since the abortion that Tre Manor’s Red Box Games Kickstarter turned into, not to mention his own Alien Assimilation Host which I’m expecting I might have my figures from early next year at this rate.

So with this in mind, why am I interested enough in this KS to pimp it on my blog?

 

Well, Impact are one of the groups that are still keeping the Blood Bowl flag flying after years of neglect and worse by Games Workshop (though credit to them for keeping the LRB up for quite a long time until the recent revamp of their website). The teams are a real mix. From figures that I wouldn’t ever put down on a table I own, to some decent ones to a couple that look quite nice indeed. Not sure why “looks like the 90’s” is such a popular insult – Jes Goodwin’s 1988 Blood bowl figures look better than almost any of the ones that came later or since!

So back to why I give a shit about these. Well, the main reason is this:

Impact Miniatures Chaotic Alliance Team

This team is based on Phil Lewis’ Chaos All-Stars team that was featured in White Dwarf

Phil Lewis’ Chaos All-Stars

Now, before you ask – the figures offered by Impact are not recasts of the Citadel models. They are newer sculpts based on those original Phil Lewis conversions. Now before anyone starts getting up in arms about “ripping off GW”, I’ll just quickly say HR Giger (RIP), Michael Moorcock, Broo. Now, because people are whiny bitches, we can’t always have nice things, and so some of the above resculpts were sold as limited editions in metal some time ago, and now a couple of the above-mentioned KS trolls have cited them being recast in a different material as the reason for their thousands of dollars worth of dropped pledges. The result is that Impact are resculpting the figures in question, and some other cool stuff won’t be sculpted at all (since sculpting isn’t free).

 

So anyway, if you have a passing interest in Blood Bowl or Fantasy Football, I’d suggest you check this one out. There’s quite a few figures in there that could have …other uses besides.

 

Sci-Fi Pipes and Generator

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Another smallish update today. Basically, I haven’t been painting much at all over the last few weeks, and so I’m sharing some more “back-catalogue” scenery pieces. As usual for this stuff, these are at least 10 years old, yadda yadda. They were painted during the heyday of Necromunda, and have been used in many an underhive battle and on 40k tabletops since then. I’m also sure they’d fit in just fine for Warpath, DeadZone, and pretty much any other sci-fi tabletop or RPG games.

Armorcast (I think) pipes. OLD!

 

A view from higher up of the Armorcast pipes.

Rear view of the Armorcast pipes.

This piece, despite looking like the sort of thing that you could easily assemble from a few bits from your local hardware store is actually a purchased resin piece. Probably cost between AU$10-15 back in the day. It’s a slightly rough cast, and I think it’s an old piece from Armorcast – or possibly Forge World – not the current GW-subsidiary, but the US-based company that produced 40k-scaled Epic stuff back in the 1990’s. It’s a slightly rough paintjob on a rough cast of a rough terrain piece, but it’s good enough for most tables. I went with blue-grey because Necromunda, and as you can see, I wasn’t quite sure on what happens to the orientation of hazard stripes on certain things. Not sure what the iron sights on the pipes are in aid of, either.

Once I get past the batches of fantasy figures and terrain I’m working on right now, I may well wander down to the local hardware store and pick up some plumbing fittings to create some new and better-quality variations on this theme. Maybe some more exhaust ports like the above?  The traditional outflow pipe into a small pond of toxic sludge? There’s an endless supply of clichés to mine, after all…

 

Kit-bashed Generator

Kit-bashed Generator – Rear View

This generator is made of an old broken toy part that many of you have probably already recognised – yes, the Hoth Generator from Empire Strikes Back. It’s from an old, old Micro-playset that was a bit broken and busted up from many play hours as a kid (and was second-hand and incomplete when I got it) The main body is made of two audiocassette cases glued together, the box on the side is a random part from a model kit, and the control panel on the front is a thumb switch from a kids’ flashlight. Some flyscreen mesh and a rectangle of card over the top to finish up. Mounted the whole thing on some MDF, then add paint and a couple of decals to finish.