I absolutely adore Tabletop World’s crisp resin buildings. They’re well worth the price, even with shipping from Europe to the USA. I painted up a couple smaller cottages a couple years ago, but in late 2022 I embarked on my largest project yet – the epic Mansion building!
I’ll cut to the chase and show you the final completed model in all it’s four-story glory.
TTW terrain pieces are fully detailed inside and out, and the casting is absolutely superb – I’m talking machine-shop precise. The 7 or 8 pieces that make up this kit fit together with incredible precision, and no flash anywhere to speak of.
I started with a simple gray basecoat, which was to form the foundation for the stonework that defines the base of the building (and peeks through the wattle & daub of the upper levels). I picked out a few stones in off-gray colors to create some variety, then drybrushed the entire piece in progressively lighter shades of gray. This created a decent undercoat for the rest of the colors.
The timbers became dark brown after two coats of raw umber. I really like raw umber for terrain, as it gives a brown hue with a touch of green that is transparent, allowing the gray drybrushed highlights to show through.
The windows on my other TTW buildings always draw the eye when they’re on the table, so I wanted to recreate that effect here. I’m going for a warm effect that suggests rooms lit by candles, braziers, sconces, and fireplaces. If you could peek in these windows, you’d see bawdy feasts and ribaldry on display. It’s a fun effect, looks good from a distance, and it’s quite unlike how most people paint windows.
Here’s that completed pic again. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the upper turret is painted copper, not orange. The roof of the turret is festooned with rivets, which to me suggests metal of some sort. Copper it is! Maybe in a few years I’ll go back and add in some patina and verdigris.
Now you might be wondering: blue wood shingles for the roof? Sure, why not? It’s a fantasy setting, so anything goes. The blue pleased me when I was looking at different colors, so I went with it.
So that brings my total collection of TTW buildings to three (3)! But I’m not done yet – my buddy Lawrence, who is even more of a fiend for these pieces than I am, has been busy scooping up lots of TTW terrain off ebay and miniswap, and he’s offered me a duplicate blacksmith’s cottage to paint up. So look for that later this year, once I’ve rebuilt my stamina for these gigantic terrain projects!
We got together earlier this for another game of Nightwatch, specifically to introduce a couple new players to the game. And while this game wasn’t specifically set in our ongoing Nightwatch campaign, it was fun in retrospect to imagine the events of this game happening concurrently to the primary campaign. This is the “B-Team,” and what they may be lacking in combat prowess they more than make up for with the size of their h e a r t s !
Anyway, this was a fun one-off game where we didn’t worry too much about the outcome … we just focused on rolling dice and having fun!
Somewhat by accident, we set up a rather extensive urban battlefield for this game. It turns out that everyone had thought *they* were responsible for bringing terrain, so we ended up with way more terrain than we needed. Hence this cluttered, yet strangely beautiful setup.
The scenario called for the players to defend the small well in the grassy courtyard in the center of the table. The red portals represent possible spawn points for the waves of bad guys that will emerge at random to menace us.
We had a wide variety of heroes in our game … a bladesman, a wizard, an alchemist, and a ranged combat specialist. Overall, a nicely balanced group, ready for anything that could possibly get thrown at them.
The action started on the first turn, when hordes of vermin poured forth from sewers and drains beneath the village. Nightwatch describes its bestiary in general terms, and leaves it up to the players to decide how to represent them with miniatures. In this game, we decided to draw on our collection of ratmen models, starting with Vince’s rat swarms to represent the vermin, followed by my vintage metal Skaven for the hordes.
The terrain tile above had a nifty subterranean staircase, so naturally we placed a spawn portal down there. And we cackled with glee whenever the vile ratmen would come boiling out of the stairwell!
Vincent’s nifty town bulletin board ended up seeing heavy action as the battle raged around it. I need to make one of these, too!
In the photo below, Mumblemore dances atop the veggie cart while in the background you can see a smattering of gore tokens representing the bad guys who have been taken down over the course of this game.
We’ve found that casualty markers or gore tokens are pretty important for this game, because you need to mark the location of slain corpses so that individual hunters can move into contact with them to undertake various and sundry tasks: robbing their pockets, slicing off an ear, maybe pulling out a gold tooth. It’s all covered under the Burdens section when creating a hunter.
The battle got pretty heated by the end of the game, with ratmen surging up from the subterranean depths and the heroes flinging spells and grenades all around the battlefield. The first couple of sessions of a typical Nightwatch campaign aren’t particularly deadly, which makes them perfect for a learning game like we set up here. You can dig in, explore the rules, slay some bad guys, and then survive to make it back to town and go through the post-game campaign steps.
That’s exactly what we did after this game, actually! Even though we weren’t playing a typical 7-session campaign, we nonetheless went through the post-game campaign steps to determine how much loot we found, which artifacts we ended up with, etc. It was great fun and made us even more excited to return to our ongoing Nightwatch campaign.
Hark, gentle reader! Do you hear that? The grinding of massive gears hints at some foundational updates to Comrade’s Wargames. Specifically, I have created a new section on ye olde blog to collect the various narrative campaigns that I have taken part in recently. These campaign chapters have heretofore been sprinkled throughout my blog as individual posts, spanning months if not years. The new page attempts to list them all in rough chronological order for ease of reading.
The page itself is creatively named “Narrative Campaigns” and it is linked in the menu bar on the front page of this blog.
The page, in turn, displays links to three additional pages showcasing the backstory and a listing of battle reports from three recent narrative campaigns. They are:
In keeping with tradition here at Comrade’s Wargames, these narrative campaigns feature beautifully painted miniatures from me and my buddies, alongside visually stunning terrain and a compelling tabletop narrative. I’ll continue to update these pages as we play additional games for them. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage and dig in!
I’m back with a gameplay report for our December 2022 Apoc-Luck mega battle, featuring some stunning and dramatic photos. Recall from my previous post that we set out to do a large multiplayer game using Age of Fantasy. We rented out a local community center, gathered our armies large and small, and arrayed them for a glorious clash. The final tally put the combined points at roughly 15,000 per side, for a total of 30,000 points of toy soldiers on the table.
This post will share some incredible photos from the games themselves. I regret that I didn’t capture much of the turn-by-turn flow of the battles, as I was trying to both snap photos and pilot my chaos army to victory. In the later turns, I had to unfortunately step away for a phone call, which further inhibited my ability to capture the narrative flow.
The first game (The Twilight Forest) featured infantry-heavy armies maneuvering blocks of troops in a wooded glade. My chaos raiders, Paul’s orcs, and Rian’s chaos warriors faced off against John’s human peasant levies and Parker’s sneaky wood elves.
The second game (Blood in the Streets) was more of a “clash of the titans” affair, with lots of solo models and small units of larger miniatures smashing each other to pieces in the cobbled streets of a medieval village.
Here, in roughly chronological order, are pics from the first couple of turns of the first game (The Twilight Forest).
The Twilight Forest – Early Turns
Paul’s orcs looked fantastic together with Daniel’s loaner army (also orcs, also similarly painted).
My giant chaos army featured two (2) dragons, which swooped over the battlefield wreaking havoc.
My Putrid Blightkings led the way on the right flank, soaking up damage from skirmishers on the opposing side. Their advance paved the way for the bulk of the chaos infantry and support units.
Below you can see John’s human army marching to war under the House Begovic banner, along with a contingent of metal automatons.
Blood in the Streets – Early Turns
The photo below shows a closer look at Blood in the Streets, our second scenario which sprawled across a large battlefield dominated by a medieval village and some ruins on the periphery. The buildings are from Lawrence’s personal collection of Tabletop World pieces, and they are absolutely gorgeous – a real treat to play upon!
Lawrence’s Lizardmen raced onto the board and crashed headlong into the undead army helmed by Alex (Jim’s son, the drama!!) and Lawrence’s chaos daemons (composed almost exclusively of gigantic centerpiece models).
The Twilight Forest – Later Turns
The later turns saw the blocks of troops in the Twilight Forest crash perilously into each other. Skirmishers pelted the combatants with arrows and quarrels; dragons swooped over the battlefield breathing fire; and infantry hefted their spears to receive the charge. Epic and glorious in equal parts!
Paul’s orcs did a great job refusing the flank versus Parker’s wood elves. The elves took some early casualties and gave way, melting back into the forest as the orcs advanced.
Both my heavily armored chaos knights and John’s winged pegasus knights roamed the backfield, seeking a ripe target to receive their devastating charges. These units were strong, but fragile, operating more like a guided missile than a take-and-hold unit.
Blood in the Streets – Later Turns
The “big guys” clashed in a decisive battle in the medieval village. Dragons, zombies, dinosaurs, and more dragons sundered the earth with the force of their blows.
Endgame
Blood in the Streets reached its conclusion first – a decisive victory for the forces of darkness (Alex’s undead army and Lawrence’s chaos daemons).
I was focused primarily on the other battle (The Twilight Forest) which was also drawing to a close. We weren’t able to play quite as many turns as the other battle, due to a phone call that I received during the later turns that unfortunately pulled my attention away. But given the outcome of the game in the medieval village (a decisive win for the bad guys) it seemed clear that the forces of darkness would win the day.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the final photo of the game, shortly before we packed up, was a shot of Malathon Scar-wing, the great dragon of the north, swooping low over the battlefield to roast the terrified defenders.
Our 2022 Apoc-Luck game definitely pushed the boundaries of our gaming capabilities and delivered an epic tabletop spectacle. Playing a fantasy game (as opposed to Warhammer 40k) was a certainly a change, but a welcome one in my opinion. Age of Fantasy gave us a highly playable game with an easy-to-learn ruleset, even at a gigantic 30,000 point threshold.
Seasons greetings, gentle reader! It’s been a pleasure sharing another revolution around the Sun with you here on Comrade’s Wargames. This is the first of two blog posts about my club’s biggest annual event: Apoc-Luck!
If you’ve not heard about it before, Apoc-Luck is an extended game event paired with a pot luck dinner, where everyone brings a dish to share. Basically, you play a big game of something, and share a meal together as well. We’ve played out Apoc-Luck games in 2018, 2019, and 2021, so it’s been a rewarding tradition that has helped usher in the holidays.
This year we rented out the Girl Scout Center that has served us so well over the years. This is a large, clean, well-lit facility that is conveniently located two doors down from my home, which makes it easy to haul terrain and minis over.
In years past, our Apoc-Luck games have been Warhammer 40k, which has been fun and gave us all opportunities to paint and build big ol’ 40k armies.
This year we decided to do something different, so I planned a fantasy-themed big battle set in Üthdyn, our shared narrative campaign setting. We planned to use Age of Fantasy, the excellent and fast-playing ruleset from One Page Rules, to play out our epic game.
I’ll get to the actual gameplay in the next post. For this one, I wanted to share with you some photos of our battlefield setup, and some pics of the glorious armies that took to the field. Read on, gallant reader!
The Battlefield
We ended up setting up more than 20 linear feet of battlefield, split roughly evenly between a forested scrubland and a typical medieval city. The narrative and victory conditions were outlined in this game handout.
Players were assigned to two factions: the Forces of Darkness (representing everything savage and vile in the world of Üthdyn) and the Defenders of Dawn (the eponymous good guys and their bannermen). In addition to overall victory for their faction, the individual players had their own personal objectives to pursue (or ignore) on the battlefield. You can read more about those in the handout above.
With that preamble out of the way, let’s meet the combatants! Where possible I tried to capture each army in a single photo, although that certainly wasn’t possible for every player.
Patrick’s Chaos Army
Hey, it’s me! This is the brütal collection of marauders, thieves, and maggots that I’ve been calling my “little ‘c’ chaos army.” I’ve been working on it for several years. It started as what you might call a classic undivided chaos warband, but over the years I’ve mixed in some red-armored berzerkers (representing Khorne when used in the Warhammer universe; otherwise they are just blood-crazeed axemen) as well as some plague-wracked wretches (representing Nurgle when needed). But I tried to keep it suitably generic, so the units and models could be mixed and matched to play all of the glorious rulesets that we embrace here at Comrade’s Wargames.
John’s House Begovic
John has an unhealthy obsession with miserable, grubby humans in all games, so it made sense that he would bring an army swollen with foot infantry and peasant levies. He’s been working on this army for several years, and it’s a true delight to face on the battlefield.
Paul’s Swamp Orcs
Paul assembled a delightful army of the new Kruleboyz models, bringing not just his army but also some loaner models from fellow club member. Both armies were painted similarly, and they looked absolutely stunning on the battlefield together. Check out those swampy bases on Paul’s orcs!
Jim’s Lizardmen
Jim surprised us by showing up with a brand new Lizardmen army! Jim is known for painting armies with relatively muted color palettes, like Imperial Guard with their olive drab camouflage and armored vehicles. So it was a real treat to see him tackle a new, brightly colored army for a change.
Lawrence’s Daemons
Lawrence has always had a thing for gigantic centerpiece models, and Apoc-Luck always gave him a wonderful excuse to drag out all the gigantic models in his collection that didn’t normally hit the table in our smaller skirmish games. Here he brought his beautifully painted Nurgle Daemon army. And lest we forget — Lawrence also outdid himself by bringing a mac & cheese bar for us to graze on during the game. Thanks, Lawrence!
Mark’s Dragons
We weren’t quite sure what Mark was planning to bring to Apoc-Luck this year. All he would say was that it included dragons. Turns out, he built an entire army of dragons for this game, backed up by some Tzeentch-inspired infantry.
Alex’s Undead
Alex’s pre-game prep work went down to the wire … we’re told he was painting the bases of his models just a few hours before our game was set to commence! Regardless, he managed to get it all on the table by gametime, and it looked great!
Parker’s Wood Elves
This was another surprise — Parker had mentioned months ago that he was painting up “some elves” but we had no idea exactly how many he would turn up with. He ended up bringing a respectable and very beautifully painted force of forest guardians! They acquited themselves admirably on the battlefield, despite being pointy-eared leaf lovers.
Rian’s Orcs
Rian is new to our group and found out about this Apoc-Luck game a few short days before. In spite of the short notice, he mustered a nicely painted warband of hulking orcs and savage spellcasters for the game.
Stay Tuned for Part II…
So that’s a look at the armies that took part in this stunning tabletop spectacle. Check back soon for a photo-drenched post about the actual games, as near as I can remember them. Until then, I leave you with one more teaser photo of the carnage that unfolded…
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