Here’s another milestone for me – last month, I officially took part in a curated art gallery at my local community center! This was a gallery for folks who are affiliated with the center; I teach miniatures painting classes there, so I was eligible to participate.
I entered a diorama showcasing a band of dwarven warriors mounting a hasty defense on the perimeter of a small settlement. An undead vanguard was emerging from a nearby forest, so the stage was set for an epic battle! A couple of my beautiful resin village buildings from Tabletop World made an appearance. I wrote a few paragraphs of free-form narrative lore to help put viewers “in situ” in the diorama.
It was a plumb location, right in the main lobby near the public entrance! All models and terrain was built and painted by me. Astute readers will notice some familiar faces in the setup!
The most challenging part of this installation was finding a suitable pedestal with a protective plexiglass cover on top! I called around to a number of local art nonprofits, community theater, library, etc. before finally striking gold at my local historical society! They had a large, well built plinth in storage, and they were happy to lend it to me for the duration of this exhibit.
Anyway, I’m properly chuffed at the somewhat silly idea of finally taking my place among the pantheon of “real artists.” Of course, I know that there are no gatekeepers on what constitutes art, and that anyone with a lick of creativity can claim that mantle. Still, it’s fun and rewarding to display my stuff in public (for 2 months, wow!) and help people expand their notions of what exactly “art” is.
It’s been a while since we checked in on our Nightwatch campaign. I’ve actually had these photos on my phone for a couple months, just haven’t gotten around to doing the writeup.
Anyway, we gathered a few months back to play the fifth (5th) session of our Nightwatch campaign. A proper, by-the-book Nightwatch campaign is a carefully scripted affair, with seven sessions that slowly increase the intensity and danger, culminating with an epic “boss battle” in the final session.
So by that metric, you can see we’re quite advanced by this point in our campaign. Our characters are proficient and deadly, and they’re outfitted with all manner of deadly weapons, artifacts, and gear.
We’ve played a variety of objective-based scenarios up to this point in our campaign. For our fifth session, we decided to try a seemingly simple game mode – survive for seven turns. That’s it! Nothing more complicated than that.
It seemed easy, but the players barely escaped from this game with their hides intact. The danger started early and often, as terrifying beastmen began emerging from the depths of the Embermoon Forest on turn 1.
From there, the danger just increased expontentially. The slower characters, like Jim’s knight Sir Joshua, got bogged down in grinding melee combat just a few inches beyond the heroes’ deployment zone.
This meant that the more mobile characters, like Vincent’s alchemist, had to stay somewhat nearby to protect their slower comrades, and couldn’t race ahead to engage the beastmen reinforcements that were arriving every. single. turn.
This game featured repeated appearances of Terrors – those horrid, panic-inducing monstrosities that represented the near-pinnacle of the Nightwatch bestiary.
Terrors were nearly as powerful as the players’ characters, capable of dealing out fearsome amous of damage, and they arrived with frightening regularity as the game wore on.
It was, as evidenced by these photos, an absolute bloodbath in the Embermoon Forest. The beautiful autumnal foliage was splashed with ichor and gore, the branches blackened by explosive grenades and errant mage bolts. The entire valley was hazy with smoke as the battle wore on. Who would emerge victorious?
Heroes fell in the chaos, then gained their feet, only to fall again. A well-placed magical wall of vapor managed to block a rampaging mob of beastmen reinforcements, gaining precious time for the heroes to organize their defense and gain the upper hand over the savage interlopers.
The beastmen attacked with exceptional savagery, and their onslaught prevented the heroes from moving … anywhere, really. Let’s take a moment and be thankful that this wasn’t a scenario where the heroes had to race around the battlefield and visit different locations. If that had been the case, they would have been doomed!
The heroes spent the final turns in a desperate huddle, hacking at the hordes and using every tactic in their playbook to stay alive until the conclusion of the seventh turn.
These two photos offer a glimpse at the utterly relentless attack that they withstood in the final turns of the game.
And then, as quickly as they had come, the beastmen withdrew into the night, sounding horns and loosing arrows to cover their escape. Who can say what signal caused them to retreat? Perhaps they were called back to their villainous master to serve some darker purpose? Whatever the reason, they fell back in haste, leaving their dead and wounded to moulder in the wilderness of the Embermoon Forest.
And thus concluded our most frenetic, brutal game of Nightwatch yet! We have one more “regular” session ahead of us, followed by an encounter with the savage chieftain of the beastmen … stay tuned for more!
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!
