London Playing Board Reffrence

I've been gathering reference photos for the London board.

All of these pictures come from the Granada 1984 TV series Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The most authentically Victorian of any of the Holmes shows. The definitive Sherlock Holmes. You can learn more about the series here

Here is an actual period photo of London. Do you see a comparison?

More from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Transportation.

Countryside Board

The English countryside is a well ordered pastoral landscape. I remember flying to Heathrow airport as a teen and passing over the manicured fields and towns of southwest England. It looked just like a wargames table from the air. No wonder wargaming is so popular in England!  So now on to my country table; its not fully planed out yet. But I do know I want it to look like a picture I have in a book. Its a picture of a ruin on a hill behind a sleepy village. Sorry I don't have the picture digitized. The ruin in the picture looked something like this:
 
The hill with the ruin will be at one end of the table, a four building village will be in the middle and the far end will have fields and hedges. So you can see, it's sort of planned out.

I'm incorporating a piece of Warhammer scenary into this project as the ruin.  Fortuitously for me, my mate had asked me to assemble a GW ruined tower kit some time back. Since we no longer play Warhammer and I'll be scratch building most of the buildings, this seems like a great idea to me to use this as the ruin.

The kit is called the Dreadstone Blight Now I like this kit, its made from thick styrene and is fairly durable. But, its a GW kit so of course it needs hard work to make it fit together. You'd think after all this time GW would have learned how to make a kit that actually fits together properly! But No they didn't. You'll need to do a fair amount of filing to get the first floor sections to fit together and form a circle. I got as close is I could and then filled in the gaps with putty.

 You can see where the pieces don't fit exactly. This was as close as I was able to get it.

I had to cover up the gaps where the pieces didn't join together properly with putty. That was basically all of them. Also all the pieces have these jig saw puzzle piece edges. I had to fix the edges that are not supposed to connect to another piece by adding additional stones. The skulls on this piece are not as obnoxious as most other GW scenery kits. Even so I wanted to remove some of the warhammer iconography, but the owner (my mate) dis-aloud it. A bit of a shame IMO. I could have replaced it with some crosses to give it less of a warhammer feel.

Stay tuned for the next Countryside Board update.

Game Boards

My mate and I are working on two boards to play EOTD on. One will be a London street board and the other a Countryside board. Both boards will follow a basic semi-modular plan, four rows of 16" x 12" sections. That will be 3 16" wide sections and 12" high sections per row, 4 rows will make a 4'x4' playing surface. Each section will be made of 1/4" MDF boards cut to size. We both live in flats so storage is a major issue. The modular part is based on the standardized section size. This will enable us to move the sections around allowing a different set up each game. This will allow a few different combinations, but over time we can make more 16" x 12" sections to increase the number of combinations. We are hoping to make a few sections that will fit in both the countryside and the London streets. I'm not sure that this will be possible in the end, but we've give it a try. 

I got my table idea from staring way too long at the Night of the Alchemist Table.

Next up early work on the Countryside board.

Lumber Piles

 I made some lumber piles from kitchen matches. I used a medium wood stain to color them. They come in handy for any board set up. The perfect thing for Gentlemen to take cover bind during a Gentlemanly gunfight. I hope you like them.

I made a fire wood pile out of twigs too. I cut the lengths in half to better simulate fire wood. I used a piece of scrap sprue to represent and iron fire wood holder.

Comments welcome and critiques are always welcome.

Empire of the Dead Requiem

West Wind Productions has recently put up Empire of the Dead Requiem a kickstarter project. This is the first expansion of Empire of the Dead since its release in March 2012. EOTD has been in desperate need of additional figures for its range and Requiem aims to provide them.

My opponent has been eagerly awaiting reinforcements for his Brotherhood faction. He has armed one of his Brotherhood members with a rifle, a fine weapon, but the Brotherhood starter set doesn't have a rifle armed brother. And he hates converting metal miniatures, he feels its sacrilegious. We've had to proxie the brother. With Requiem he is now saved. Requiem has a fine set of brothers with firearms.

And a fine set of Gentlemen to provide future reinforcements for my un-gentlemen and provide nice weapons upgrades. Like multi-barreled rifles and shotguns.

These are the figures we've personally been waiting for since last summer. But Requiem goes much further than that. Pledges of Requiem level or higher gain a whole host of kickstarter only special characters for each stretch goal met during the kickstarter event.

So if you are an EOTD fan, and you have to be to read this blog, you must check out Requiem.

A Look at the Work Table 2

We will continue with a few more shots of what's on the table. I'm in the process of basing up all the zombies in the West Wind zombie box set plus an other zombie.

My camera is dying a slow death, I hope the pictures are clear. The West Wind zombies are superb and I can't wait to paint them up. The others are all ready primed and awaiting some paint.

Here is a chap from Horrorclix Carnival series. He has a pretty good paint job, but I plan to repaint him anyway. As you can see the Horrorclix are a bit taller then the West Wind figures. But not so tall that I feel I can't use him.

I just can't resist zombies. I'll be adding every vaguely Victorian liking zombie I can lay my hands on to EOTD. One day I'll have a Victorian Zombie horde. But The Hellfire club is allowed 1 zombie mob per game; no more. A zombie mob is made up of 10 zombie figures. The zombie box contains 10 so I'm good to go.

Speaking of Horrorclix I dug up this guy in my bin of random Miniatures.

He'll make a passable Professor Gecko until I get around to buying the offical one. Here is the artwork for the good professor. He is one of the many new characters appearing in the EOTD Kickstarter: Requiem. He will need a re-paint of course.

 
 Last but on least, or maybe he is the least? I've had this figure in my random miniatures bin for some time. I've now decided to paint him, but I'm not sure how I will use him in the games. I use him as a vampire guardian last year in my early games. I might use him as a sort of marker now.

I start actual painting this week. I'll try to post more next week.

A Look At The Work Table

I realized that I haven't posted in some time so I wanted show what's on my work table.

I'm working on my Hellfire Club Un-Gentlemen's Club faction. I'm adding a zombie mob to it.

 

I've made these base inserts from putty for all of my Empire of the Dead figures.                                  

One of the Un-Gentlemen. He is from West Winds Gentlemen faction starter set.

Zombies! These Victorian zombies are from West Winds zombie box set.

I have a bunch of familiar figures. I really like them, I guess that's why I have 15 or so of them. I've mounted some of them on cobblestone bases to use as artifact markers for scenarios.