Gaming with the Kids 1: Goblin Quest

My oldest son is turning five this summer and lately we've been talking a lot about gaming with "daddy's toys". He's been wanting to play on a "real table" with terrain and everything, so this past Saturday we went down to the club for our first proper miniatures game together.

I had found some very simple rules, that still looked like a lot of fun, devised by a dad in a similar situation as myself. They're called Goblin Quest, and it seems they've since developed into something a bit more involved. However, the basic rules were more than enough for my needs at this point.

The game is played on grids, such as you get on dungeon floor plans, but as he wanted to play with regular terrain I substituted the random, grid-based movement with measuring sticks for movement and shooting. I also decided to move the setting from a dungeon to a mystical forest.

I had some Foundry knights in my lead pile, originally released by Citadel in the 80s, that I painted up to use as the heroes. I don't want to sound like a nostalgic old grognard, but these are really nice Perry sculpts that have stood the test of time admirably.

For the enemies, I wanted some classic but not too scary monsters and goblins fit the bill perfectly. Luckily, I had some extra goblin minis from the Dungeon Saga kickstarter that were pressed into service. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to paint these up but they worked fine unpainted (gasp!). I knocked their strength down from 1D6 to 1D4 to speed things up a bit.

I started the game by telling him he was a knight in service of the king, and now the king had asked him to go to the mystical forest and collect some magical crystals. However, he'd better beware as the crystals were guarded by some evil goblins. He then got to chose which of the knight models to use in the game and he chose the red one.

The table set up.

As this was his introduction to gaming, I thought it was important that the objectives were very clear and all treasures and enemies visible from the start. The table was set up with paths/corridors leading to clearings/rooms where the crystals were placed (I used some red playing gems to represent these) together with the goblins. In the final room I placed the "boss" – the goblin chief in the form of the first mini my son has painted all by himself, a Reaper Bones bugbear. He was incredibly proud of this contribution to the game, and it made this feel more like a joint project between us.

Another foe defeated.

The brave knight faces off against the brutal goblin chief.

The game was a big hit, and he proceeded through the forest, the knight knocking down goblins and collecting crystals, all the while cheering when he won and taking his (few) setbacks in stride. In the end, the knight faced off against the huge goblin chief, which he managed to defeat and thus collecting the final crystal for the king. Victory for the hero!

The game was pretty much perfectly timed in terms of length: collecting four crystals took about 15–20 minutes, which was about as much time as he could concentrate for.

With the goblins all defeated, the knight
can collect the final crystal. Victory for our hero!

We've already talked about playing again. While I'm keeping the general setup, this time I'm thinking about using some other monsters like skeletons, just to make it a bit more interesting. I'm also looking to substitute the Mantic goblins with some Citadel ones, as I'm not a fan of the formers aesthetics.

Thanks for reading!

Rohan Warband

Well, now that fellow club member Sören has posted his truly wonderful version of Galadriel, the cat's out of the bag so to speak, and we can reveal our "secret project". Not that I know why it was ever a secret, but anyway ...

It's only fitting that Sören would kick things off, as he was the instigator after having watched one too many parts of The Hobbit! Me and Michael were quickly drafted into the project as it turned out we all had a fair amount of painted and unpainted Lord of the Rings miniatures in our respective lead piles.

As for my part, I have a lot of things on my plate right now and therefore choose the easy path and rebased some Rohan miniatures I painted 4 or 5 years ago, originally intended for Basic Impetus Fantasy (another abandoned project). However, after looking over the minis I found the paint jobs to be worse than I remembered. If I recall correctly they were actually speed painted using Army Painter dip. In an attempt to at least bring them up to a standard I wasn't too ashamed of to put down on the gaming table, I did some touch-ups and added a couple of highlights here and there in addition to the rebasing. The horses got some special attention, and one or two were even totally repainted.

When it came to rules, we decided to go for the upcoming fantasy version of Lion Rampant as we're very familiar with the rules engine by now and it gives a fast and fun game. Going by what Dan posted on his blog about troop types and costs, I came up with the following:
1xHeavy Riders @ 4 pts
2xHeavy Foot @ 2x4 pts

That's a mere 12 points but should be enough to get me started. I have several more models in my lead pile, mainly heroes/characters, both foot and mounted. I'm thinking about painting up a mounted Éowyn, as she is my absolute favourite character in the books and films, but thematically perhaps Éomer would be a better fit. We shall see! In any way, the character would be fielded as an Elite Rider single model unit @ 6 points.

The models took a little longer to finish than expected, and are certainly not my best paint jobs (hence not too many pictures this time), but they're certainly good enough for a game or two!

And don't worry, that's enough fantasy for a while. Next up are some proper historical stuff.

Frostgrave Warband

Regular readers may know that although I'm first and foremost a historical gamer I occasionally like to dabble in more "exotic" periods/genres. Last year I did a smallish fantasy project over the summer, and well – this year I did too! Inspired by my mate Dalauppror's superb kit bashed warband for Frostgrave, I had a rummage through my bit box and built a warband of my own.

An old GW plastic wizard was used as the central character. At this time, I didn't have the rules yet, but after flicking through Dalauppror's book I knew there was a wizard type called soothsayer and the crystal ball in the wizard kit would be a perfect match for this school of magic. After trying a couple of different heads, I used one with a fur hat as it looked good and would fit the winter theme of Frostgrave.

For the soldiers, I went with some old Bretonnian men-at-arms as the basis. I liked their heavily armoured look, which I think also fits nicely with the winter theme. The heads, arms and weapons are from a couple of different GW kits, including the original Bretonnians, Empire militia and State Troops. It was fun trying out different poses – tiny adjustments can really make a big difference for the look and character of the model.

To make the soldiers look less uniform and more like a hardened band of mercenaries, I mixed shields from the original kit with different metal shields from Curtey's and Gripping Beast. The lion heads are overpainted transfers.

The apprentice gave me some trouble. It wasn't until I started playing around with a Gripping Beast model it all seemed to click. The model is from the Saga baggage set. He got a spare head from the GW wizard kit, a pole arm from the Bretonnian kit (it's a bit over-sized but hey, it's fantasy!) and a fur cloak for a bit of dramatic flair. I liked the look of the cloak so I went back an added one to one of the soldiers. 

Then it was just a matter of painting them up, trying to find a paint scheme that tied them all together as a force. To make them stand out, I added a bright green colour to some parts of the wizard and the apprentice.

As I said, I didn't have the Frostgrave rules when I built the models. After receiving the rules and reading up on warband creation, I discovered my warband is too large, especially kitted out like this. Oh well, it's nice to have some models for when the warband grows – and of course I can use them for other games as well. 

Thanks for reading – have a great weekend everyone!

Tales of Darkwood – Ruins of the Forest

As I mentioned in my previous post on the fantasy project, I have done some terrain pieces. Starting off we have some arcane ruins that harbor strange artifacts from the fallen empire, together with crumbling statues of long forgotten kings and a mysterious stone circle that still seems to emit an eerie power.

The ruins and statues are all from Citadel's Lord of the Rings range, while the stone circle is from Ziterdes. The buildings look like they have been purposely destroyed rather than having crumbled of old age, which makes for an interesting effect I think.

The kits are nicely detailed, but the fitting between the different parts are less than perfect – or maybe it's just my mediocre modeling skills ...

Going with the forest theme of the project, I went for an partially overgrown look with these. It was fun playing around with different tufts, ivy and foliages. You just have to be careful not to overdo it and remember these are not dioramas, but rather war-games terrain – you have to be able to place the miniatures somewhere!

In the future I want to do a couple of more terrain pieces, a bit smaller this time, and maybe some trees as well.

Thanks for reading!

Tales of Darkwood – Ragnar Blodsärk and His Men

And now for something completely different.

As I mentioned in another post I lost a bit of my painting mojo over the summer. I don't know if it was the slow progress of the Italian Wars project or just general painting fatigue. However, after some serious surfing on various blogs and particularly the fantastic Lead Adventure forum, I found my inspiration slowly being reinvigorated: I was going to do a fantasy skirmish project.

You see, I'm a bit of a fantasy buff. Ever since I laid eyes on that fantastic map in The Hobbit, I've been hooked on imaginary worlds and made up languages. It's a genre with lots (and lots!) of crap for sure, but in the hands of say a LeGuin, a Tolkien or a Leiber there's nothing quite like it.

I already have some experience with the excellent Song of Blades and Heroes rules from Ganesha Games, and they fit this project perfectly. A standard war band numbers some 8–12 models, which meant I could paint it up pretty fast and still spend some time on conversions etc without it getting overwhelming.

As for the background and setting, the "fluff" if you like, I was very inspired by the newly released Swedish pen-and-paper RPG Symbaroum, which centers around a vast brooding forest, harboring strange remnants of a former empire. So shamelessly stole this idea and adapted it to a (short) campaign: various groups searching a spooky forest for strange artifacts and clashing with each other and the mysterious guardians of the woods. And so "Tales of Darkwood" was born – the name of the forest obviously being an homage to the old Fighting Fantasy book "Forest of Doom".

After presenting the idea to my mate Dalauppror, he immediately responded: "So when do we play?" He was keen to use one of his war bands from an older project, which would fit perfectly for what I had in mind. He also had some custom built terrain we could use.

My own idea for a war band was a tribe of "barbarians" that's been living on the brink of the forest, but never venturing into it because of old taboos. Now however, with the arrival of explorers and missionaries from a southern kingdom, they are desperate to find ways to battle the newcomers and thus enters the forbidden woods in search of something to help them in their fight.

The models are a mix of Ancient Germans from Foundry (the riders) and Black Tree Design, together with an old Citadel wizard. I did some simple conversions on some of the riders. I sculpted fur cloaks over the regular cloaks on two of them, and the leader got an imposing spiked mace from a GW Chaos Marauder. The wizard/shaman I left as he was, as it's such a fantastic model full of that old school charm I'm so fond of. I really dig these old Citadel miniatures, and after finishing my first proper "Oldhammer" miniature I certainly have an itch to do more of them!

As the leader got a red shirt I decided to name him Ragnar Blodsärk ("Blood shirt"). Simple and straight forward, just like Ragnar himself I imagine.

I choose to use some Pagan Rus shield transfers I had laying around. In part to give the models a bit of a different "non-western dark ages"-look, but also to add some colour to the miniatures.

For the bases I wanted to try some new toys and experiment with a new look. I went for the thick moss of the forest floor, together with thick underbrushes with a slightly alien feel. I think the red leaves work particularly well against all the green on the bases, and the slightly muted colours of the miniatures.

And no, the irony is not lost on me – even when I decide to do a fantasy project all my miniatures look like they belong in the Dark Ages ... Sigh.

I'm now in the process of finishing some terrain pieces for this project, and of course I'm looking at doing another war band or two! These projects have a habit of getting out of control once you start.

Hopefully I'll be able to get a game or two with Ragnar and his men before the new baby arrives.

As always – thanks for reading and I hope you'll all have a great weekend!