Sneak Attack

 I've done another thing, and thus must write another post. These are the rules, as it turns out.

This time, the thing in question is 02 Hundred Hours, the WW2 night raids game from Grey for Now Games. I've had this sitting around for 18 months and really wanted to play it, making the time it's taken me to get it ready for the table frankly astonishing.

The models that come in the box are Wargame Atlantic's European Theatre SAS and German Sentries, and the sprues allow for some very nice poses. So nice in fact that when I came to take some pictures of them and the terrain I've painted, I got carried away and posed up a little story, and I'm going to subject you to that now, I'm afraid.

On arrival at a German base, a staff car is checked by sentries...



...who are unaware that an SAS squad is watching them.



When the dust settles, the lone German survivor at the gate is taken prisoner.

Once inside the base, the Brits sneak past the headquarters...

...staying undetected as they pass the guards.



With the objective in sight, a lone trooper sneaks forward...

...and sets charges to destroy the enemy radar.

Their mission accomplished and the silence well and truly broken, the SAS make their escape under the cover of suppressing fire from the Bren gun.

SAS pose with their prisoner

Felgendarmes are surprisingly casual on finding several corpses

The sentries line up for a team photo

I'm particularly happy to have finally assembled and painted the radar station, which I think is from Sarissa Precision. I'm hazy on the details, mostly because I bought it from the Warlord Games Day in about 2012 and it's been lying around in flat-pack form ever since.

The rest of the terrain is mostly TT Combat stuff - simple models but extremely cheap and straightforward to put together. There are a few resin bits, including the bodies, from Grey for Now - these are nice but alarmingly expensive, especially as they appear to be (admittedly very high resolution) 3D prints.

Absolutely key information to finish this post - these are the contrast paints I used for these:

Germans

Uniform - Creed Camo

Gun stocks - Wyldwood

Skin - Guilliman Flesh

Boots - Black Templar

Puttees, helmet cover - Skeleton Horde

Pouches - Militarum Green

Gun barrels, Feldgendarme trousers - Basilicanum Grey

Dunkelgelb equipment - Agoras Dunes

SAS

Skin - Guilliman Flesh

Gun barrels - Basilicanum Grey

Smocks - Militarum Green and Creed Camo

Boots and knife hilts - Black Templar

Uniform - Snakebite Leather

Webbing - Agoras Dunes

Puttees - Skeleton Horde

Wool hats - Creed Camo

Terraining Day

The new "post when I've got something to actually show" regime continues, so here I am again, this time with a smattering of terrain bits and pieces for Necromunda and/or 40k.

You'll now be subjected to a brief description of each of these. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. 

The thrill ride begins with these post-apocalypse barricades from Crooked Dice. These are really simple bits that were thus really easy to paint, and will also work for a few other projects I have in mind, so it's a bit weird that they'd sat unpainted for a few years up to this point.

We then continue with these MDF scaffolding bits from TT Combat. I think that despite my newfound love of 3D printing, MDF is still a good way to go for simple bits like this that don't need a lot of detail. In Necromunda terms they're good as a way to add some height, and crucially have ladders so they'll give a way to move fighters up and down the levels.

Bit more random here. The barrier on the left is from the toy lorry I used to make the Stiglet truck back in 2021, and it had been sitting around as "dead easy to paint and use" ever since. 

On the right is the clock thing I showed in the previous post, but I don't think I showed the back of it then, and hey, it fits in here.

But more interesting is the statue in the middle. That's from one of my first efforts at 3D printing, and it had, like so many things, sat around unpainted for ages. That was partly because I didn't know how to tackle it, but then I stumbled on the Citadel Technical paint Nihilakh Oxide, which allowed me to get this verdigris effect that I really like. So more of that likely to show up at some point.

These are the worst "sat in the garage unpainted" offenders, as they're barricades from Gorkamorka, which I've owned since its release in 1997. Bit of drybrushed on rust works ok (and I promise, looks better in real life than in this photo). Another one I might look for a specialist paint for though - rusting metal is always likely to crop up.

Now we hit the real seam of tedium, as I go through several photos of parts from the GW Underhive Market set. Look, these boxes have contents...

... but you can also put the lids on them! Astonishing.

These boxes, on the other hand, don't really have a bottom so you can only put them like this (or stack them if you're feeling especially adventurous).

The market stalls! I had fun messing around with these, although it's a bit of a shame that you don't really have options in how you put them together...

... so these are the same thing again in different colours, basically.

Finally, this is a 3D print I found on Cults. I'm reasonably pleased with how it's come out in the end, but getting this to print properly was a bit of a nightmare - the walkway at the top is a mesh, which prints nicely in resin but then went all wavy as it cured, so I've gone for printing in PLA but having quite a scrappy result instead. I've gone fairly heavy with the rust which I think makes everything ok - and it's not exactly a centrepiece so I don't think it really matters anyway. But still, bit of a faff, partly I suspect because I should have thought more about how to set it up for printing.

Still, there you go, a decent chunk of scenery just in time for us to largely abandon the Necromunda campaign. Success!

The Gang's All Here

In the summer of 2012, I wrote this post, apologising for an extended period (over 2 months in fact) with no updates to this blog. It was a silly little piece of creative writing which I quite enjoyed putting together, and I was of course immediately accused of having plagiarised it. Such is life.

Can't think what put that into my head. Please don't check the date of the post before this one.

Anyhoo. I've decided to take this whole affair in a slightly new direction. Rather than rushing to the laptop every time the paint dries on whatever I've been doing most recently (often I didn't even wait that long, you can probably spot a fair bit of wet PVA on old photos of bases if you're the sort of person inclined to look), I'm going to hang on until I have something a little more substantial. 

The uncharitable might point out that in this instance, that appears to have taken me two and a half years. Ignore these naysayers.

So, in recent times, I've been involved in a fair amount of looking backwards - mostly this has been through older versions of Warhammer and 40k, but now it's time to move into the nightmare undercity. It's time to Necro like it's 1995! Or something.

To allow this nostalgia-fest, I've got the Biostrip out, and repainted my original Orlock gang. 

Also a weird clock thing

To the left...

To the right...

Now back left...

This is a contrast paint job, and to tie the gang together I've used some repeating colours:

Skin - Guilliman Flesh

Boots and jackets - Black Templar

Bandanas and Sashes - Gryph-Hound Orange

Weapon casings - Space Wolves Grey

I also decided to do some light converting. For some reason, even though there were four sculpts for juves, and juves used to come in packs of four, 90's Games Workshop decided that what we really needed was two each of two of these sculpts. (It's possible I've misremembered, and none of the foregoing sentence is true. In that case, meh.)

And back right

Since that's quite irritating, especially in a skirmish game where it's important to know exactly who is who, I never used the "spares" back in the day. But I've decided to rectify that, and having rummaged through the equally old spare weapons I had lying around, I now have a juve with a bolt pistol and another with a hand flamer. Both weapons are far too expensive to give to a juve, so that will almost certainly turn out to be an enormous tactical error.

So there you have it. More of this sort of thing to come, either "eventually" or "when I remember again". Keep holding your breath!

Stig Makes Friends

EXTERIOR. DAY. The ARMOURED LAMBORGHINI is speeding through the wasteland.

JAMES (V.O.): As you've seen, our modified vehicles give us an edge in surviving the day-to-day adventures of finding food and fuel in the brave new world. However, we're still a little short handed, and that can leave us a bit... vulnerable. 

Several RAMSHACKLE RAIDER VEHICLES power toward the AMOURED LAMBORGHINI, firing their weapons at it.

JAMES (V.O.): So it seemed sensible for us to beef up our numbers a bit. 

The STIG WAGON drives into frame, full of STIGLETS. They team up with STIG and the ARMOURED LAMBORGHINI to destroy the RAMSHACKLE RAIDER VEHICLES. STIG and his crew keep rolling through the wasteland.

CUT TO: The STIG faction, the AMOURED LAMBORGHINI, and the STIG WAGON. JEZZA walks into frame.

JEZZA (TO CAMERA): Friendly looking bunch, aren't they? 

Alright, I've been away for months, et cetera. I got a bit carried away with finishing one of my planned 7TV Apocalypse casts, and that took a while, so this post ended up waiting until it was done. Anyway.

The idea is to turn my Grand Top Gear Tour cast from the 7TV Apocalypse day into four complete casts, one for each of the main characters. I decided to give each of them a unit and a co-star, and I have a long-term plan of creating some specific scenarios for them.

I already had the Stig himself (who I'm counting as a Terminal Crazy) and last time I finished his Lambo (which fairly obviously counts as a Racer).

I had the idea that Stig would amass followers that are in awe of his inhuman driving skills and general fearsomeness, so they'd try to be more like him. From there I came up with the Stiglets:

The idea here is that they've shaved their heads and painted themselves and their clothes to look like Stig in his racing gear. I think I've had varying degrees of success with the models, but at least I know what's going on. These all count as Joyriders in 7TV terms.

Branching out from these a little, I added in Stig Backley (a Petrolhead, so he throws a javelin...) and the Mechanic (who counts as a Mechanic).

Stig's Lambo has a rear-facing machine gun, which has to be fired by a passenger. So, I wanted a gunner, and since there's not a lot of space in the back of the Lambo, it seemed sensible for it to be a child. Therefore, we get Lucy.

Lucy, counts as a Gunner, and since she's a child, she's accompanied by a "responsible" adult in the form of her mum, (a Bad Lieutenant). 

Lucy's mum isn't as thoroughly bought in to the cult of Stig as her daughter, so hasn't gone for the black and white outfit - to show willing she has a Stig helmet patch on her sleeve.

To go along with all of these, I wanted some transport, so it was time to get back to sticking stuff to toy cars again. Or in this case, a highway maintenance truck.

It's plastered with Crooked Dice armour plating and weapons, and I took some of the more obvious toy-looking bits off.

The big Stig flag on the back covers up another obvious toy section that I couldn't remove easily.

As it's a pretty hefty model I count this as a Big Rig, and I've tried to allow as many models as possible to actually fit on it. 

I now just need to repeat all this another three times to make the other casts! So that might take a little while...

Oh, also, I've carried on with Bolt Action painting alongside this too, so here are another 8 Japanese and 8 German infantry.

Having done all of that, it's time to update the numbers again...

Painted: 70

Acquired: 41

Lead Pile Reduction: 29

Our Not-So-Tame Racing Driver

EXTERIOR. DAY. A montage of dead traffic lights, rusting road signs, and broken tarmac from the wasteland.

JEZZA (V.O.): You've seen our cars, and will have noted the excellent modifications I've made and the pointless tinkering from those two simpletons. But of course, our convoy has a fourth wheelman. Some say he caused the apocalypse with tremendous amounts of understeer, and that if he was bitten by a zombie, the zombie would turn into him. All we know is, he's called the Stig.

CUT TO: THE STIG looks directly into camera, arms folded. He does not move.

JEZZA walks into shot next to THE STIG. 

JEZZA (TO CAMERA): After we retrieved Stiggy here from the wreckage of the BBC, he told us that he also wanted to modify a vehicle to take out into the wastes and seek his fortune.

CUT TO: JAMES is walking, the camera pans with him. 

JAMES (TO CAMERA): That's right. Initially, one of the producers told him to take one of the many abandoned vehicles that are readily to hand these days, and work with that. 

CUT TO: HAMSTER, walking in the opposite direction, the camera panning with him.

HAMSTER (TO CAMERA): After the ensuing... debate, the surviving producers thought a bit more, and found this Lamborghini Gallardo.

CUT TO: The ARMOURED LAMBORGHINI. JEZZA is already examining it. JAMES and HAMSTER walk into shot.

JAMES: Did he really attack a producer?

HAMSTER: Very much so.

(JEZZA nods approvingly)

JEZZA: So, this is, somehow, a Lamborghini Gallardo. As you can see, the Stig has added some extra plating around the windows and doors, including something fairly hefty to cover the windscreen.

HAMSTER: He's only left a little window to see out of, look. He did tell us that he only needs to see things that won't get out of the way, though.

JAMES: He's added this oil dropper thing to the back, which can cause havoc for anything else on the road. But more worrying than that is the machine gun mounted to fire out of the back window.

JEZZA: There's not exactly a lot of space to fire that. Whoever he's got using it must be tiny!

HAMSTER: Don't look at me, I've got my mini to drive!

JAMES: Notice both his weapons work backwards? I think the theory is that anyone driving around the Stig is going to be behind him...

THE STIG walks into frame.

JEZZA (to THE STIG): Ah, Stig, do you want to show us around your car? We were just...

THE STIG gets into the ARMOURED LAMBORGHINI. The engine starts, wheels spin, and the ARMOURED LAMBORGHINI sets off in a racing start.

HAMSTER: Right. Shall we get on then?

Once again, the above presumably makes it obvious that I'm still amusing myself with my Grand Top Gear Tour post-apocalypse nonsense for 7TV. This is another die-cast car that I've glued things to and then painted, which I'm still finding a lot of fun. I've been trying to add enough details onto these to make it look like they've been repeatedly modified over time - but I figured that beyond making sure he isn't killed, the Stig wouldn't want to add too much to his ride as more weight means less speed!

There's still more to come of that stuff, but of course we're nearing the time when I'll be able to resume actually playing games with other people, so I might unfortunately get distracted into something more sensible. We shall see. 

I have also stuck to my own rule of continuing work on my Bolt Action Japanese as I go, so here's another 13 of those...

So, crucially, it's score time:

Painted: 44

Acquired: 31

Lead Pile Reduction: 13

Finally, the numbers have started to move in the right direction! Need to keep that up then...

Hamster's Wheels

EXTERIOR. DAY. HAMSTER is walking through the wasteland.

HAMSTER (TO CAMERA): So, you've seen the orangutan's Jag, and been mightily underwhelmed by Captain Slow's taxi... tank... thing. Now let me show you how to approach the world after the end with a little more finesse.

CUT TO roads clogged with burnt out cars, rubble, and craters.

HAMSTER (VO): You see, with their big, lumbering vehicles, those two are bound to get bogged down and fall easy prey to cannibals or mutant hedgehogs or whatever we're going to have to deal with this week.

No, this situation calls for agility, so my first thought was, of course, a bike.

(A motorcycle picks through the debris. We can't identify the rider.)

HAMSTER (VO): That has some problems though.

(A machine gun opens fire on the motorcycle, hitting it and the rider several times. The bike crashes in a fireball.)

CUT TO the OVERLOADED MINI. HAMSTER walks around it.

HAMSTER (To camera): So here's my solution - a 1991 Mini Cooper, with a few modifications. 

The aim is combine agility with enough protection to see me through life outside the settlements. The Mini is small enough to make its way through the obstacles in the way, and I've been able to attach armour plating in a few key places.

I've also fitted a roof rack, and filled it with fuel, ammo and provisions.

I'll need the ammo for the machine gun mounted on the bonnet - so I can deal with any problems that I can't drive around by shooting them. Shooting them a lot.

JEZZA and JAMES arrive.

HAMSTER: It's good, isn't it?

JEZZA: It's absurd. Can it even move under that weight?

HAMSTER: Of course it can! Remember the one I had in India? This thing's a warhorse.

JAMES: "Mini masher"? Is it a kitchen implement?

JEZZA: Your machine gun is mounted on the bonnet. 

HAMSTER: Yeah. I can shoot it from inside, it goes through the windscreen, look.

JEZZA: So when it breaks down, you can't actually service it?

JAMES: Not without disarming yourself, anyway...

HAMSTER: You two don't understand great design. Let's get on the road!

As you'll have gathered, I'm still mucking about with toy cars, and working on my frankly nonsensical 7TV Apocalypse project. It's amazing the things you find time for when you can't actually play any games.

Hamster's mini is definitely my favourite of these so far, but I've still got more to come. 

In the same vein, I've also painted a cameraman!

I have a profile card for him that Karl from Crooked Dice kindly gave me a while ago. I've got a vague idea of having crew as a separate cast, or as things that move automatically, or... something.

Anyway! I'm also keeping up the plan of working on my Bolt Action Japanese at the same time, so here's the latest on those:

Right then, numbers time. 

Painted: 28

Acquired: 31

Lead pile reduction: -3

I'm almost back at where I was at the start of the year!