Annnddd... here were are. More ghouls than I could probably ever need for Strange Aeons. These are the Games Workshop ghouls and I have to say, I love them. Great poses, great variability and cool details. I painted them so they'd blend in with the masonry a bit and still retain that pallid, crypt-skulking pallor. They're just really hard to photograph though.
Still and all, they're done now, until I get inspired to do more with them. In game terms, I made one with a spear and another with a meat cleaver, two dangerous weapons for dastardly bastards from hell. The rest, though unarmed, are still formidable and their leader stands above them all, the trophy of a dead Threshold agent adorning his scoliosis.
In progress now is a church for Strange Aeons along with a 2 level cemetery. After that, the town's hospital, which is already taking on the look of a too-big project.
Look what Sandy deposited on my doorstep! I've been wanting this model for aeons but never had a gaming reason to own it until the last Shocking Tales of Madness and Mayhem #3 came out. Not bad when a 14bp model is US$10.00.
The plinth will be based normally, to be used as an objective marker or tombstone. I may make his little dais floating or just base it as-is.
GUSH Alert: just a fast update that I received my copy of Strange Aeons Shocking Tales #3 in the mail... it's AWESOME! A stout magazine and super cool Zener psychic cards are packaged together.
I hope to take this out for a spin this weekend and report back. Pete, consider yourself served. This even gave me an excuse to order more minis (won't say which, no spoilers here.)
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.
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:
It's heavy. Like, kill burglers with it heavy or chock parked semi's heavy.
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.
After paint, but before attaching the door, I detailed the interior of the door with some spooky glowey eyes. This was a trade off, I wanted to add something to the piece that wasn't overt and still allowed models to stand at the doorway. Speaking of which, I'm probably going to make a metal door to replace this wood one at some point but this is fine for now.
I flocked and added crabgrass around the area and some ivy creeping up the back. I had installed some some fence which I had picked up from Scenic Express (a GREAT company) and added some verdigris to that to age it a bit. Originally I installed the full height but my buddy Pete suggested it was too tall so I cut it in half. I'm glad I did. 5 models can stand inside the fence.
Here's the test for the Daemonic Hound for Strange Aeons. I suppose it's evident what I did here, so not much to say. The model is an old GW Chaos Hound.
I finished 8 Cthulhu objective markers, mounted on 2" bases. Let's hope the Threshold never sees what happens when they are all assembled and aligned as above...
Same as big daddy there, gave them my bronze treatment and green jewel eyes.
I dug out an old GW foam-molded terrain piece I inherited from my buddy Wil. I'm not doing a whole how-to now but I wanted to share WIP shots. I basically cleaned it, trimmed a bunch of stuff off of it to make room for 2" bases, spray painted it with water-based spray paint and went about making it look best I could with an extensive repaint. More later about that but on with the pics...
The seething cauldron/portal/whatever
A plastic Cthulhu statue I bronzed and added gem eyes to. Honestly, he kinds looks awake right here...
Here's a tester I completed for a Strange Aeons objective counter. I simply used a bag of Mini Mythos that I cleaned up with an Xacto and mounted it on GW 2" bases. I then primed it black. I underpainted it a hard contrast style with some off-white/light grey paint and then some copper paint on top.
After that it got a layer of Verdigris water based stain to tone down the yellow in the copper paint and add some hard lining. To finish it off the paint I added some Model Color Verdigris glaze which I allowed to pool and then rubbed off while wet with my thumb and some flat brushes.
To top it off and make it more mystical-looking I added some 4mm costume jewels for eyes. Seen here are purple/orange/yellow gems. I also got some pale yellow/green ones to add to some others.
I suppose this sounds like a lot of work but all told I probably spent about 20 minutes on him start to finish, not including dry time.
I wanted to do some conversions for the Strange Aeons Night Gaunts, featured in both H.P. Lovecraft's writings and his childhood nightmares, which were probably like this:
I knew I wanted to use Legion of Everblight Harriers since the body type looks like a pretty good match to the illustration in the Strange Aeons rulebook and I already had two Harriers thanks to my buddy Finn at Spindango Fundulation. My buddy JWoolf over at Headwound Minis gave me some GW Bloodletter heads when I decided they'd work best. Together with some snips, greenstuff and some sculpting you get this:
The sell will come with the painting. I haven't decided to either be faithful to the description of a face that is a featureless void or just simply do a monochromatic paint scheme. A featureless void would need some gap filling to mute the facial detail, which I happen to like.
In terms of the game itself, 2 Nightgaunts are 16 points of mayhem and can each Destroy Weapon, which is good in-game. They have Parry and a good enough CC bonus (+2) that starting agents fighting them solo will have to literally be very lucky to survive. They should count themselves lucky if the worst that happens is that they have to re-arm in the re-equip phase. Oddly, buying an agent a Meat Cleaver for 1BP isn't a bad first purchase choice after other skills as the CC bonus matches the Nightgaunt's and cancels out the monster's Parry with its own. If you have that and agents fight together against it the good guys may pull ahead on dice, on average. A bowie knife armed, A3 starting agent would win 1/3 of the time in a straight fight I think these creatures and zombies will be the first gribbly things an agent sees after Cultists so better be ready.
I have 4 Scenes of Horror for Strange Aeons in the works. First
up is a scratch built obelisk/monument/mausoleum/crypt entrance/gateway to
another dimension, what have you. I realized after I got this together it also
sorta looks like an outhouse. I'm with that.
So the layout is evident by the pics. I cut the lid from the
dental floss container and used it as a stoop, which was Crazy Glued. I removed the metal bit that cuts the floss too as you see in the pic above. I glued the Advanced Heroquest arch to the wall,
allowing for how the door swings out and I had to cut some sprue into bricks
for the bottom of the arch. I then spray textured both the stoop and monument
with texture paint to hide cracks and add some interest to the deal.
I also
masked off the Cthulhu statue and texture sprayed the bottom slab of the
stature for a nice unifying look with the rest of the monument. I did two
coats.
I cut the stoop tile to run across the threshold and fit flush with the vertical face of
the floss container, so there was no gap under the door when it was mounted,
then glued that on. I added a tile pad for underneath the monument and glued it
all down together.
Steel wool it
Slice it
Rub it down/ oh no!!!!!
Note that you should scuff and cut the surface of CD’s beforehand to give coatings some traction,
otherwise it could start shedding your glue and paint jobs. Another thing I was surprised to see was that some of the cheap CD's that would be great for Strange Aeons are terrible. The writing sloughed off a few, probably due to cheap label printing. Do yourself a favor and wash them after the scuff and slice, set the aside to dry and see how they look after drying.
Next I trimmed out the base in textured wallpaper. Sometimes
it looks good to mount stuff on top of the wallpaper but I didn’t this time for
two reasons. First, the monument is literally heavy and could probably rip off
the CD since the textured wallpaper is mostly foam and paper so I wanted a bond
right to the plastic CD. Second, the monument looks heavier and more sunken,
therefore more ancient, when the ground seems above the level of the tile. I
cut a few tile out but will paint the underlying area as tile too, to give the
illusion that some tiles are really sunken.
I cut some cardboard as a header for the tile overhang, glued that on and added a molten blob of hotglue to the inside before attaching the roof tile piece, since it needed back filling to grab and secure the tile as the cardboard was too thin and lacked surface area for superglue.
Closing in on the final part of assembly, I trimmed an open
zombie hand and glued that to the door, so that once painted and assembled, it
will look like something is emerging from inside. I intend on painting glowing
eyes inside the door. I had haughty ideas of lighting this nerd up but I have
finals the next two weeks so nerts to that.
I spray primed the whole project black so if I can just get
some paint time I can finish it up. More pics when it is done.
As I've been working on Strange Aeons models, reading Lovecraft and generally making To Do lists for Strange Aeons terrain, I have also found some pretty damned good soundtracks for inspiration. Where Akira, Glory, Halo and Band of Brothers were my go-to for playing my Imperial Guard, I caught myself casting nets upon Spotify for eldritch soundtracks and what clamored aboard is well suited to the quasi-sane sound-scape of horrific madness.
Here's what I have so far, in no particular order. Feel free to suggest and I'll update the list. The list is Spotify-friendly...
