Autumnal Miniatures Review

Somehow I have only painted (i.e. finished painting) THREE THINGS (minis, I painted some actual paintings too) in Autumn (i.e. September-November). The first of those was mostly done in August, too, and the last was done entirely on November 31st. I'm slow, what can I say, but at least I make up for it in quality the number of games played with the models imagination I guess.

1: A Dark and Rainy Night Upon the Bay... (32mm, presumably Ricardo Andreis, Bestiarium Miniatures)

Beneath lowering skies, a light can be seen far away. Surely, it is some safe harbour? (It is not).

I don't have a name or much of a story for this guy. He was inspired by my love of the coasts of pretty much all of the western UK, from Cornwall up to the Hebrides (and the Orkneys can be included too) but especially around Morecambe Bay, a place which is very much not ideal for wreckers but with some deeper water would have had a lovely landscape for them. He's a wrecker, clearly, with his little light in a bottle. Rather sinister, then, clearly, but not overtly supernatural - his original mini, a NGorroth fisherfolk from Bestiarium, had tentacles protruding from his sleeves, but I trimmed them off because I was going for something much more grounded here. And he's clearly an aging man, very lanky, hunchbacked, in patchy clothing out on a dark and stormy night in the dim hope of chancing to lure a ship and earn a payday. If he's got friends about, we don't see them - only the owl up in the tree. Villain, or desperate? 

Probably the thing I'm proudest of about the mini is the water - the damp sand and rippled sea, both touched off by the use of light. It's made slightly harder to see by my godawful photo setup, but there's a lambent green glow effectively ray-traced from the bottle-lamp onto the rocks, the crests of the waves and one side of our antihero. Then there's also a fainter light from a thin moon above.

Despite the fact that he illuminates it, though, the main character of the piece is the terrain - the strange fungal slimy masses in the waterside streambed, the grass mingling with seaweed by the shore and wind-scoured soil above, the leaning tree - it should really be quite the other way, blown back from the shore, but that would look odd and imbalance the base - with its protruding roots, the solitary owl. They will linger long after he has departed (well the owl might not) but the very weather, the beating of the sea and precipitous lean of the cliff, serves as a reminder that they themselves are far from eternal. It was the terrain which originally inspired this piece - I saw a lovely lump of dry lichen and dead moss which I thought I might turn into seaweed, picked up a bit of old bracken I've had over a decade and a properly shaped rock from my collection, and I was away.

2: Murder Team Scarlet Dawn (28mm, kitbashed, mostly Games Workshop kits)

No, I've not amped the contrast on the image or photographed them at dawn, they really do look like that! I was experimenting with some chiaroscuro-like effects, as if the miniatures are fighting under the strobing lights of an underhive warzone.

I made these guys years ago, but their story only took shape as I painted them. In short: they used to be an Inquisitorial warband, but after they committed a few unconscionable atrocities and most of their comrades were wiped out they decided to turn on their masters in a fit of vengeance. Now, to give some meaning to their painful lives, this team of ultra-competent special forces hunt and kill inquisitors, and secondarily attempt to preserve others from their predations. 

Slugherd Nautil, team leader, steam-pistol, monofilament knife, carapace armour, rebreather

Callistephus Tallaym, markswoman, las-sniper, combat blade bayonet, flak armour and fenrisian wolf pelt

Skotak Sunbringer, Squat technician-medic, needle pistol, combat knife, 1+ of every type of grenade, backpack of random supplies, scavenged flak/carapace/power armour

 Inquisitors aren't easy people to catch, so they tend to track them for years and strike only once they're already embroiled in a crisis situation. All of them are already on (now-bootleg) life-extenders, so they've got time. Thus far, they have a 90% success rate and their existence is not yet suspected; if it becomes so, they may be in trouble, but they will have a wide range of planetary rebels, xenos, rogue psykers and the more benevolent kind of chaos cultist willing to do them a favour should they need.

Here's how I'd rule them in early 9th ed 40k (the secret best edition before it betrayed its promise, yes that includes Rogue Trader even though RT robots are funnier, do not @ me). It should be pretty obvious how to convert them for other editions. Feel free to use these rules in your own games, with your opponents' consent of course!

3:  Mapuche Toki and warriors with Longquilquils (15mm, Mike Broadbent, Khurasan Miniatures)

Especially awful lighting in these photos, as they were finished late at night.

Part of the reason I've painted so little this month is that I've been quite focussed on playing a three-month-long game of Imperial Diplomacy over discord. For those who know normal Diplomacy, the Imperial variant is instead set in the mid-17th century and has 25 players.

Playthrough and analysis of this variant available here. Also explains the couple of small rules differences succinctly at the start.

I was playing the Mapuche-Tehuelche peoples - the grey group to the far South of America, who I actually did some reading about for this and found very interesting. From roughly 1550 through the 17th century the Mapuche - whose culture by this point had heavily influenced many of their neighbours including the Tehuelches - fought Colonial Spain to a standstill in the Arauco War, adopting Spanish weapons, horses, and tactics as well as developing their own. They also resisted Jesuit conversion diplomacy - if Wiki is to be trusted, because they refused to give up polygamy, which was certainly a common cause for reticence amongst North American indigenous groups so seems plausible here. Anyway, they held out as an independent collection of peoples until 1883 when they were eventually defeated not by Spain, but by its successor Chile. From first contact with an actively colonial power in 1536, that's 347 years of entirely successful resistance, the longest run I'm aware of by a non-state group and giving even some of the large African kingdoms like Kongo (also on this map as the purple bit, 1483-1857 so 404 years) a good run for their money. Point being, I was excited to represent them in this game - and credit to the game for getting me to learn a bit of history I didn't know about before!

I didn't do very well in the game, being immediately stabbed by my Portuguese and Aymaran neighbours and almost annihilated, but I managed to play them off against each other long enough to forge a proper alliance with Portugal and cling on to the bitter end in a world increasingly dominated by hilariously ahistorical non-European megapowers. Halfway through when things looked bleak I ordered these minis, and promised to paint them before I died... which I suppose I managed, on the final day of the game proper.

Game's end. Green forces are my Portuguese allies (now clinging on only here and in East Africa, 5 centres total), dark red are Aymarans, light red is an English fleet coming to our assistance, yellow and turquoise fleets are the largely neutral Tokugawa Shogunate and the Spanish.

Toki Tahiel, leader of a grand coalition or Butalmapu of all the Araucanized peoples, leads a charge of Mapuche armed with longoquilquil clubs at the final reconquest of Tucapel from the Aymarans. The longoquilquil was a Mapuche technological innovation, a long club used like a mediaeval glaive to haul mounted foes from their saddles.4

The final world map. Mughals, khaki, control most of Asia, with the Ming dynasty, pink-red, just about to disintegrate due to lack of supply. Next up are the Inuit (light blue-grey, note Inuit Colonial Mexico), the Ayyuthayyans (pale purple, controlling most of Maritime South-East Asia and sharing Oceania with Japan), the Athapascans (pink, fairly obviously dominating North America and locked in a long hard war with the English colonies), and finally the Swedish Empire (dark blue, which has just conquered most of England itself with some help from the French).

Maybe I'll manage some more over Winter hahaahahahhahahahhahahahhahahahhahahha TTFN