Badgering a Normie

So the game didn’t happen. There was a good reason and there have been good reasons in the *checks calendar* two months since that it hasn’t happened. It was my friends birthday back in late June and so I grabbed a copy of the rulebook and one of the starter warbands from Oathsworn’s website to properly get her started on her mini journey once she has had her demo day and will clearly be hooked. If we manage that before the new edition comes out next year, I’ll call it a win.

This is going to be a bit of a project pivot then. Reading the rulebook and looking over my painted models has put me in the mood to paint more B&B minis and with the winter season coming, I’ll maybe dabble in the solo mode over the next few months.

While looking through the models on the site (there over 200 of them in the range now!) I realised that most of what I own are the warrior types. I have very few of the townsfolk. Have the willpower of a toddler, I immediately added a bunch of them to my order. As usual, the order came in super quickly and everything was well packed.

The B&B minis are always excellent casts and they even do a little of the clean up for you. It means that other than giving them a good bath and a couple of scrapes over minor mould lines, they are good to go very easily.

Everyone gets a black then white zenithal prime. Around this time my lovely new paints from the Spring Clean Challenge prize arrived and these seemed like the perfect models to try them out of (though they also work really well with Contrast/Speed Paints). Two evenings and this is where I’m up to; it’s been really nice working on models to completion with very little uniformity – the Grand Army Project is fun but this is a lovely break from it. The basing stopped at a layer of AK Interactive Dark Earth texture paste because I’m going to rebase all my old models once I’m through this batch.

It was around this point that I found another box of B&B minis in the stash and realised that all but two of the models in my recent order were part of a Kickstarter a couple of years ago that I backed. Oops.

I’ve been a bit quiet on here the last couple of weeks so let’s catch up on my hobby shall we?

A few weeks ago I strained a ligament in my knee so we pushed the game… unfortunately we’ve still not managed to find a day that suits both of us yet. Living in Edinburgh during the Festival is a tricky time for generic friendly hang outs but I’ve been using the time to add to my terrain.

In the stash I had some tree kits from Woodland Scenics and a lot of Mantic Terrain Crate plastic bits that have never been out of their plastic bag prisons. I grabbed some fences, hedges, boxes and barrels for now.

• A quick job while I was watching Jurassic Park was to mount the fencing on tongue depressors and adding some AK Interactive texture paste.
• I had one day free at the weekend to paint them between household chores. First was a spray prime with TTCombat Laser Burn Brown. Then out came the cheap acrylic paints from Hobbycraft that are kept for painting terrain. A mixture of browns, greens and other earthy hues were used – you know the kind of things, don’t make me list them. Most of the work was just dry brushing.
• The hedges got a layer of flock to give them a bit more texture
• I knew that one of the things I was going to do was tie everything in with flock. I hate the mat that I’m using so nothing was going to be matched to that – at some point I’ll replace it completely. After soaking with IPA and watered down, everything was set and good for play.
• Trees are boring but a necessity on a table. 
  • Following the instructions in the kits (one of which was metal – news to me!), I bent the armatures to shape and gave them all a spray prime with black as I was running low on the brown. 
  • Dusting with the remains of the brown can, the armatures were ready for a bit of dry brushing. I’m not aiming for the most realistic trees you’ve ever seen, just what your eyes expect to see. 
  • Once I got some more browns on there, I went over all the limbs with my very old (yeah, should have thought about that before starting this project) Hobb-E-tac. Not going to lie, I was dubious that it would work but eventually it “dried”.
  • The metal kit came with some of the Woodland Scenics pull apart fibre which I’ve not used before. 
  • The plastic trees had their usual big bag of clump flock to get dipped in.
• I also printed out the standing stones and treasure piles that they have in their 3d Vault this month.
  • These got a black prime then the stones were drybrushed up with three shades of grey. Put on another pond base, texture paint and then a layer of a new Javis scatter mix I’ve picked up and really like the look of
  • The treasure piles aren’t really for B&B so much as just to be generic objective tokens. They just got base coats and a wash

At this point I was doing pretty well and seem to have hit upon a tactic that is working. I don’t normally enjoy painted terrain elements but if I just keep it simple and work on one at a time, they get done pretty fast.

Claymore was this weekend and I got two more little terrain bits and managed to bash through them in a couple of hours each Saturday and Sunday. They are 3d printed but the quality is excellent and I’m really happy with how they turned out.

I’m thinking about changing all the ground cover to the new Javis stuff (Battlezone Field Scatter apparently) but I want to get on with finishing up other things first.

I’m a big fan of Warbases stuff; most of my armies are on their bases, the terrain kits are great quality and value for money and I own a lot of the miniatures that they carry. They are usually my biggest spending visit at the annual wargaming show I go to.

They have river sections in various versions but they do a starter bundle which is one sheet of each type for £12.50. For some reason I have two of these sets in the stash – do you like the way I say “some reason” as though I don’t know it if because I forget what I buy and never bother to check before spending more money? Anyway, I got one of the sets out and decided to get them painted up.

• Now if I was being more thorough I would have bevelled the edges before doing anything but this is my low effort river set… the lazy river you might say.
• A coat of shellac over each section, front and back to seal everything up. If I has been going in with heavy pva on the next stage I would probably have done two coats but I knew that the terrain paste I was using wasn’t as watery
• Build up the banks with AK Interacive terrain paste, I used one of the desert sand ones because I have loads of it but it doesn’t really matter, it’s all getting painted over
• A few sections got an extra treat of some small pebbles glued down to act as fording points. If I had been taking my time a bit more, I’d likely have added in different sizes of stones across all the bases for visual interest. As it is, the stuff I used is the larger bits of the bird sand that I bought years ago for basing and sifted.
• Spray primed TTCombat Laser Burn Brown at the same time as everything in the last post.
• Dry brush with a couple of paler browns for the banks and over the river bed in case I missed in the next step
• Painting the water up, I wanted a clean looking river. Mid blue at the edges, wet blending into a darker blue and then almost black in the very centre of the river to mimic deeper water. A few little sections of green to look a little like river weed under the surface.
• Once everything was dry I gave the river a coat of gloss varnish. Yes, modpodge and empty airbrushes make more realist water texture but this need to be done in an hour. Done is better than perfect.
• The banks got their flock to match the other terrain in the last post, sealed with IPA and watered down PVA and we’re done!

As I say, I have the rules and a bunch of minis painted, more than enough for the two of us. The thing is terrain. I just don’t have a lot of fantasy terrain. Actually, that’s not true. I have quite a lot but it is all on sprue, and it mostly scatter.

In need of buildings, I started to look at both Sarissa (who carry the official line) and TTCombat (who carry cheaper kits). I took a few days to think about it and in that time Business Daddy emailed to say they had a sale on terrain. Diving in through the options I found they had a load of the Battle Systems fantasy buildings for 30% off. So for much the same as I was going to spend on unpainted MDF kits, I could get the pre-coloured card buildings instead. Sign me up!

A few days later it arrived and I figured it was best to start with the smallest kit and work up. The kits don’t come with instructions but rather you have to go to the website and watch some videos. Yes, that is as stupid as it sounds. 

I’m not bothered about being able to take most of them back down to their component pieces for storage but they are designed that you could. It would take a silly amount of time to get a table set up every time but if space is a premium, they look great for buildings you can store flat packed.

In terms of the building experience, other than the videos, it was fine. Pictorial instructions like the online ones you get for TTCombat kits would have been much better. The videos are pretty bad tbh and just get in the way of the process more than they help.

The pieces themselves come out of the cardboard sprues cleanly most of the time though some of the more delicate parts (like the bridge railings) weren’t properly punched and led to some tearing.

The clips are good and you get spares in each pack so if you wanted to play around with different layouts there is some capacity for that. I like the brown more than the grey, they just seem less noticeable to me on the end product. The clips go onto the cardboard well in the vast majority of instances with only one or two being so tight that you had to cut away some card or risk bending/snapping the part.

I didn’t make up any of the crates or barrels as I have plastic ones to use instead but they look like they’d be a bugger to put together.

I haven’t got round to running a pen over the edges yet (mostly because I didn’t have anything to hand) but I will before the next time they hit the table. I also still have another kit to put together but it is much larger and I don’t have time for it before next weekend.

All in all, a few hours of work over a couple of evenings and there’s enough buildings put together for a small B&B table. I think it should look pretty good given the time investment. Obviously there are better looking options out there but without spending a fortune or taking a lot of time to build, texture, paint and weather, these are perfect for my needs. They seem robust enough to take gaming and storage in their built form too which is nice.

Now the buildings are done, it is time to move onto some countryside accoutrements.

I have backed several of the Kickstarters from Oathsworn for their miniatures line Burrows and Badgers. I’ve even painted a fair bit of it. I’ve had the game since it’s first print run back in 2018. When the solo rules launched during lockdown, I immediately downloaded it. As recently as December last year, I bought a bunch more minis from their site and I love them.

So how many times have these glorious models graced the table in this simple but delightful looking game?

*koff* Zero.

The recent Let’s Play here on OTT lit a fire under me to get it to the table. I usually pick games up, even when I’m less than into them, because there are people locally who play and it’ll be easier to get a game in. I rarely bother being the one to push a new one.

A friend is going through a rough time at the moment and is in need of a distraction. She is a massive nerd, just not a wargamer (yet). I reached out to offer to teach her B&B. We’ve put a date in the diary for the 13th of July.

Let’s get this ready for snagging a Normie, shall we?