Sunday, August 26, 2012

Strange Aeons: 1st Scene of Horror


Confusingly, up next is my first Scene of Horror, posted after the previous two went up. I must have thought I had posted this but I see I did not, so here it goes... I really like that the Strange Aeons game allows scenes to be whatever you want, to model them as such and portray a story.



So, like the second and third scene of horror posted previously, I covered a CD with textured wallpaper and primed it with heavy duty primer. I then used black primed Mini Mythos markers for the statues, which I arranged with enough room to allow for standard bases to move through the scene.

I painted the statues like bronze and added emerald green 4mm gems for eyes.



From there, it was straight basing of paints and flocks along with homemade bushes. I also made a batch of the same markers on bases, to fill the scene or use elsewhere on the board as pentagrams or whatever. here you see them with the large FFG Cthulhu plastic marker I painted for the Ritual Site, for scale.



And now for some fluff-justification explaining this damned Scene of Horror...

November 3, 1927
Threshold Mid Atlantic Address TOP SECRET

To All Mid Atlantic Field Agents,

Please see the attached photo. Our agents detected stories of a latent power in the dense woods of a protected Indian reservation on the peak of Clausland Mountain, in the rustic but beautiful village of Nyack, New York, opposite Sleepy Hollow, across the Hudson river. They discovered yet another site of ancient statues which our office has labeled "conjunctions". Agent Connery and his team risked an attack with thermite explosives on one of the statues in an attempt to silence what they called "turbulant and thundering songs" in their heads when they seemed to fall under a spell of the statues on that hilltop.
The diminutive statues of the elder god are estimated by our archaeology department to be as old as 6,000 B.C., judging from the matching composition of meteoric metals originating from similar statues acquired from the Nepal region. It seems like these Tappan statues have been at this location for almost as long as that, despite the fact that no similar meteorite has ever been found felled in this part of the world that could yield that same bronze-like material for their fabrication; only of the Luxor meteorite have we found  the same metallurgy, the same which kept turning up in our international reports over the last several years. 
The cultural products of symmetry, naturalization and symbology trace to possible sample origins of the elder god statues from Prepottery Neolithic culture though the American and European statues imbue more modern Greco-Roman human morphological influences. There seems to suddenly be many sites like this around the Eastern seaboard, dare I say an outbreak, if only because we are now looking for them or perhaps, since they want to be found, as Agent Petri has mused.
At first glance, the positions of each statue at each site seemed random and disordered. After my team's thorough surveys were completed did we compare the well-rendered schematics of the major regional scenes. They showed that the bearing of each statue corresponds to the same stellar constellations presenting in their ascension and declination every solstice… at precisely the exact same aspect/time for every site no matter the location. In effect, the statures are each “observing” either the same major star systems as the other statue sites at the same time or each other, in complex, rhythmic order that defies the arts and sciences we have at our disposal even today. In the most extreme case a toppled-down statue site was postulated as not being a cast-down site but instead it was looking face-down and inward through our planet to the same galactic transits as the other sites observed on the other side of the world. Imagine our concern with those implications.
 Never have we witnessed en masse coordination like this, even more so than the preformative studies of solstice “tracing” by the Egyptians with their statuary along the Giza plateau. That global sites are overgrown, remote and perfectly synchronized with sites across our country and those reported in the Pacific basin and Asia minor… I shudder to think of the intention behind the loathsome, squat and alien watchers and what means they serve now.
Having interviewed the current leader of that Tappan Indian nation we were left with more questions than answers. The tribes have many stories of the sites though no admitted explanation of their existence. When asked why the sites have been curated for so long by them and hidden from us at the same time, the elders simply denied the fact of the history with their involvement at all, too quickly for my tastes. I sense collusion.
Ladies and gentlemen, we must discern and detect before we prosecute but do not hesitate to react. Ready your teams and prepare for the field, you are to deploy as soon as your receive further instructions.

God Bless us All.

Professor Forsythe 
Professor Forsythe II


Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Strange Aeons: Ghouls WIP

Work+School+Family > Miniatures. But I have managed to build some GW ghouls for Strange Aeons, courtesy of JWoolf at Headwound Miniatures.

Still need to clean mold lines, sand filler/greenstuff, etc. I'm heading out on vacation next week, perhaps I can get something done then.

Command plus spear plus meat cleaver plus infected claws/jaws

4 "normal" ghouls
Ghoul with meat cleaver conversion
Ghoul with spear
Ghoul with spear
Ghoul King

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Strange Aeons: Shocking Tales #3 Cover

Photo resides at Strange Aeons website, all rights reserved
According to Uncle Mike (of Strange Aeons) on the excellent Lead Adventure Forum, we have a new Shocking Tales in the works... friggen' sweet! Look at that cover art... ridiculously awesome.

To that end, the Strange Aeons website posted the new cover art from the new ST#3 by the fantastic Matteo Bocci as desktop wallpaper download, go get it! Included in that area are previous covers as well... super duper! Exclamation marks!

Agent Petri thinks this whole deal sucks and blows at the same time... God damned Dunwich.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Strange Aeons: The Stars are Right

Agent Connery cannot believe his tragically poor choice of parking spots.
 I won an auction for a Horrorclix Cthulhu for like US$40. Not bad. It's dinged but I intended on modding and repainting it anyway. Why? I want to somehow use him in Strange Aeons. Call him a half-awake Godling or what have you. maybe a special multiplayer game? I have pages of notes on the possibilities (taps temple with finger).

If you know this figure, you know 2 things:
  1. It's heavy. Like, kill burglers with it heavy or chock parked semi's heavy.
  2. Cthulhu's back leg is half submerged in the "ocean" on its base. Rip off!
So, that is the project. Get him off his base, add a full-sized back leg and then rebased. Not totally sure how I'm doing it yet since I'm hesitant on cutting his full sized leg, it adds probably all of the stability to the figure. I'm thinking I'll cast that full leg and use it with new sculpted details (like flipped dewclaw and thigh musculature) to complete it. As mentioned, weight is a big concern so I may try and cast the whole leg still attached to the figure. I even considered buying another figure and cutting the good leg off for the other. My kids like food so that's probably not going to happen. If anybody spots a broken Cthulhu for around US$15 bucks, let me know.  Stay tuned and share any ideas below.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Strange Aeons: Flying Nightmare and New Civilian


Here's my version of a Flying Nightmare, until I get a better model. It's an old GW giant vampire bat. Think Nightshift, I suppose. I gave him static grass "fur" before I primed/painted him and added a breaching zombie to the base.






Also, here's my latest Civilian, Walter "Monk" McGinn, in a spot of bother.


Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Strange Aeons: Game 2, "Treasure Hunt"


In my last game of Strange Aeons, we rolled Treasure Hunt. That evening was my team's second game and at 16 points, it seemed like I would be able to cruise with a good chance of winning. All I found was death and sorrow (which includes the Burger King stop on the way home).

I don't have many pics because the game was over pretty much when it started. I played T, Pete and Trish's teenage son, whose pseudo-indifferent ass-beating style both enrages me and leaves me in awe. The sides:

Threshold Team :
  1. Agent Connery:Bowie knife, twin .45's, Heroic, Stat Decrease & Two Fisted (Ranged).
  2. Agent Petri: 45, bowie knife and Tommy Gun, Heroic.
  3. William Forsythe: .22 and bowie knife
Lurkers:
  1. Cult Leader with .22
  2. Cultist with .22
  3. Cultist with shottie
  4. Night Gaunt
The Board: The old Hetfield place sits alone and dark as the Threshold agents Connery, Petri and civilian William Forsythe approaches from the South. Here, the board is separated into zones, any of which may contain treasure, assuming the Threshold are left alone to search for it.
Awesome terrain and Lurkers minis by Pete Ceretti

Threshold straddles the sections of the board, readying to search for the artifact mentioned in William's father's journal...

The Night Gaunt closes way faster than anticipated. I seriously misjudged the distance it could cross and left Petri just inside the daemon's Charge range, which it promptly did. It crossed the board and got into melee with Agent Petri before anybody had a chance to shoot at it. A critical blunder was forgetting that when Petri won a combat he could have backed off and allowed everyone to shoot the damned thing. Instead, he stayed toe-to-paw with the beast and paid for it in blood. The Night Gaunt took Petri's tommygun from him, broke it half and then handed it back to him, thanks to Destroy Weapon. Great.



Agent Connery watches as Petri's face is shredded and Forsythe is torn to bloody bacon ribbons.
Upon seeing Petri leaving the game with a minor injury, Connery failed his Resolve check and charged the Night Gaunt with Frenzy. It took double attacks (plus his popped Heroic) for Connery to run trains of 6's +CC bonus but it didn't matter, he was outclassed in melee (thanks to the Gaunt's Parry) and could only come close to besting the creature. The Night Gaunt eventually took Connery out.
So William Forsythe III met his doom at the paws of a frantic Night Gaunt, trying to intercept a coup de grace when Agent Petri was laid low by the grey daemon. They never once tried to find the artifact, they were too busy fighting the Night Gaunt that crossed the board at tickle-speed. While Agent Petri recovered from his wounds at a Massachusetts hospital (at taxpayer expense) the Forsythe family had a second burial in as many weeks, the previous being Williams father, also an archaeological professor, murdered by their maniac butler and secret congregant of the Church of Dagon, Wannamaker. A strange symmetry was at play in the Wannamaker family too, as his brother, a Threshold conscript, died to a Formless Thing on the old Hetfield place. The slain officer's wife has joined Pete's Threshold team, eager for revenge for her husband and absolution for her brother-in-law's insane evil.

Somewhere in his office deep in the Northeast safehouse, Agent Connery stared at his twin .45's and obsessed over the dread he was feeling about ever firing them again and how different things would be if only he squeezed those triggers at ol' Hetfield's place...

So, 1 win one loss, Petri has a full recovery (but with facial scars) and Connery has Ballistophobia. Just another day at the office....

Facial scars for Petri!
New Tommygun for Petri!