The Final Push - Lawnor approaches 100% painted

Models remaining:
Batch: 0, Normal: 16, Luxury: 7, Modular: 0, Bits Box: 6, Terrain sets: 12, To Ship: 80+

Time for my weekly update.

Across the week I applied the washes needed to the ork flesh, once a night.  5 minutes work followed by long drying times so this is the best way.  Once the wash was applied I got to work painting the whites on my Masons and my Elementalist.  The Elementalist is the only mini likely to see the table this year, so he was my focus.  I finished him off on Saturday.  My plan after that was to go play Kingdom Death, but I was just so comfy painting and watching the weekender after getting my chores done so I didn’t get back up out of my chair.

With the elementalist done, I decided to batch paint the flesh on everyone else, including drybrushing the highlights on the already wash-shaded orks.  I’d never painted an armadillo before, so I went looking for pics and I think my guessed colours have come out ok.  Drybrushing texture for the win here.

I finished this all off and did the eyes while watching the XLBS on Sunday and then went to work on battling The Watcher (second time in my first ever campaign, thanks to time travel) in Kingdom Death.

I knew I was going to want a lot of Endeavours so I could farm under the lantern hoard and upgrade my gear immediately so I used the watcher to deliberately kill off a load of my population, turning each of them in to 2 endeavours.  When the game begins, you get 1 per fight for every survivor that returns, so 4.  I’d upgraded everything so on a good year I could bring back 9 from a fight.  I came back from the watcher with 38 endeavours, and I could have farmed more.  Turns out I was able to farm everything I needed after spending only 4 because the dice went in my favour, but I wasn’t to know.

I ran in to a narrative glitch after this fight.  After you beat the watcher all the lights go out for a moment and then the settlement gets a special light that you can’t leave town without anymore as it’s too dark.  However, despite the watcher fight happening in town, my survivors got lost in Clinging Mists before returning to the settlement and had to go out on a new hunt, even though technically they couldn’t as they didn’t have the light.

How do you not find your way back to town when you’re already in town?  How do you hunt when the rules say you can’t, but also say you must?  We don’t ask such questions!  I jobbed an Antelope, went back to town, and did what farming and upgrading I wanted to, and then spent over an hour spending the other endeavours.  I’m still not done.  I ran out of time.  I did spot a way to upgrade my stats though, which I really should have seen a long time ago, so I’ve ben able to bump up my super survivors a tiny bit, in preparation for the Gold Smoke Knight who has ridiculous stats.  I’m pretty sure my guys can now wound him 50% of the time, which is waaay better than I ever could have done on my first pass through the timeline.

I now have 10 Lantern Years / Hunt cycles left until the Gold Smoke Knight turns up.  I think that’s 12 more games, unless anything unexpected happens again.  I’ve got 3 survivors with Strength 10, and one archer who can have a luck stat of 8 (Crit wounding on anything but a natural 1, and half his cards have crit locations on them).  I can summon The Hand one more time and get at least +1 str on everyone, hopefully more evasion too.  I’m hoping to farm more bugs for cooking up stat increases.  I already have all the gear I could want (Except the Perfect Slayer, and I need a 1% chance to happen, followed by a 1% chance in order to get that.  I get around 6 shots per LY.  I’m 50 LY in and the first part has not happened yet.  It’s not expected, but it would be nice)

I’ve a week off coming up soon.  I’ve walls to paint, and minis to make progress on, but I expect to have this campaign finished this month, one way or another.  Then it gets packed up so I can solo play through Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion once.  Then maybe try Stargrave.  By that time I hope to have some KDM expansions ready to play and I can start a new campaign.