Frog on your Throat!

Ah, finally some new material - with some old thrown in for good measure!

Here is my Round 9 entry to the LPL - the Slann wizard on his Palanquin, borne aloft by lobotomised slaves. This mini has been on the hit list for some time and you may remember a rather jubilant post a while back when I finally got my hands on it.

Testudo Tank - Take Two!

Yup - I've been busy with the new camera!

Definitely struggled taking good pics of the Bog Gob's Tortoise tank first time round with the old camera so here goes again...

Empire Knights - Take Two

Hello again - more improved pics with my new camera.

This time the Front Rank (War of the Roses) mounted knights and General

And the Perry Pikemen led by a Citadel Fighter.

These guys will have to wait awhile for reinforcements - got a few other projects to get through first!

The Stoutbacks - Take two!

I have finally got back the brand spanking new camera which we bought approximately 11 weeks ago. The camera was left whilst we visited my parents up in the Lake District - rather frustratingly just before the LPL started! After a rather pleasant Sunday afternoon last week, spent barbecuing, drinking and generally enjoying the summery weather, the wife managed to remember to retrieve it - good job as my mind was rather befuddled thanks to one or two tinnies!

Don't feel the need to comment as I've already posted pics of these entries already - albeit vastly inferior ones shot with the old 2 mega pixel brick I had to fall back on. This is mainly to keep me happy as the original pics were doing my head in!

Anyway here's the Stoutbacks again - this time in HD! Original post can be seen here if you've not seen it already.

All Quiet on the Martian Front

Well the Alien Dungeon Kickstarter for their new game , All Quiet on the Martian Front, is over and amazingly the amount raised exceeded $300 000! That means lots of extra freebies and in particular, a resin model of a downed Tripod and an escaping Martian, which I'm really looking forward to.

To stop me climbing the walls in anticipation (and I've been hankering after some kind of H G Wells inspired table top action for a while now!) I've set up a new blog, called Of Men and Martians, to explore all things Wellsian, Martian, tripedal and generally connected to the War of the Worlds. I'll also be using it to get to grips  with a new scale - 15mm - and all that entails in terms of scenery and playing area.

Worry ye not however - I'm still committed to my Lustria project! Building continues on the Shrine of Rigg and I have an update to share soon with a trial paint scheme for the interior which I'm pretty happy with.

As the LPL draws to a close I'll be looking at the Lustrian stuff I've painted up for it and cracking on with finishing off whichever faction inspires me...

No one would have believed...

... in the last hours of this evening that the All Quiet on the Martian Front Kickstarter campaign was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's and yet as mortal as his own.

Yet across the gulfs of cyberspace, a mind immeasurably more easily tempted than yours regarded this game with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, I drew my plans to buy it!

 Yep, afraid I couldn't resist this one - I just need to convince lots of relatives that chipping in would make a great Christmas present, especially if the good folk at Alien Dungeon are able to ship in time for their target this December.

As you might have guessed I'm a bit of a fan of the whole War of the Worlds thing - I've read the book countless times, had Jeff Wayne's musical version on heavy rotation in the car, got the Orson Wells radio broadcast on tape(!) and I even quite like the various American movie versions.

I tracked down the "sequel" to H G Wells' original text  Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss, a while back. I say sequel - it was published as a serial six weeks after War Of  the Worlds was serialised and involved an Earth counter attack on Mars, led by Thomas Edison and his marvellous inventions, which included a fleet of space ships and ray guns! Strangely the Martians were giant humans but the story is great fun and must be one of the very first genuine Space Operas.

Lets just hope there's more likelihood of the stuff getting delivered on time than Ogilvy's predictions of anything coming from Mars!

Update - Since pledging last night the total has shot over $260 000 and is headed for $270 000! What's more if $300 000 is reached before the campaign ends in 9 hours then all backers at Invasion level or above get a free resin Downed Tripod model, including an escaping Martian! Sounds like a great objective marker to me, if not a fantastic model for the collection.

Go on - you know you want to! 

Everything's better with Dinosaurs!

I had to pinch the title of this post from the excellent TV tropes website because its so true. And there were certainly plenty of them in kid's TV and literature back in 80's.