Fallout Wasteland Warfare – Farmer’s Fence

We have a little surprise for this week’s update! On Black Friday, I put in what has become an annual terrain order with Black Site Studio. It turned up recently and so in my excitement, I decided to put some of my purchases through its paces. This year I decided to pick up some much needed fencing and something else I’ll talk about in a minute. While there are quite a few things I need to really bring my post-apocalypse neighborhood to life, I figure fencing is a fairly high priority. I’m pretty sure Black Site made a pretty nice looking picket fence set at one point but they don’t any longer so I decided to go with their Farmer’s Fence for now anyway. The piece I worked on was quick and easy to assemble, if a little hard to glue vertically straight but I figure that’s okay because this type of fence is usually a little rickety. Here’s a look at it.

At first, I was going to paint the fence white and make it look like the paint is chipping off but as I’ve discovered in the past, Black Site’s MDF doesn’t like white paint and some kind of yellowish residue comes out as you try to paint it. So I decided to just make the wood look old and weathered instead. That is very typical with this kind of fencing as it is often put up and then neglected until it falls down as best I can tell. I bought a lot of fence (21+ pieces) so I need a way to get them painted up quick so I figured drybrushing and some mold applied with foam is about as good as I can do. Once I varnish it, I’ll get some grass tufts added to try make it look a bit more overgrown. Obviously, I’ve got lots more of these to do but I’m excited to use them and see them on the tabletop.

I also picked up another house variation that I don’t already own. This one is known as the Beaumont Residence and its a brick house which should be a change of pace when it comes to painting it up.

I still have a really big two-story house sitting around waiting on me so I’ll have to take on another housing project this year, if I can manage. At this point, I’m starting to run out of things that Black Site make that I really want. I think the last big thing is Astro Mart which is basically a stand in for Super Duper Mart in Fallout. Its huge and epic and will take forever to finish but it would be so cool to have at the same time. I very nearly ordered it on Black Friday but thought it was financially prudent to wait. Perhaps I’ll order it at some point this year if I can rub a couple of nickels together.

Its a bit of a shame that their post-apocalyptic selection is getting smaller and smaller as I like their kits better than anybody else on the market, by far. I missed out on a really cool industrial building I wanted, highway overpasses, and some other things.

A while back I started a saved search on eBay for their kits in the hopes that I might get a chance to grab some of the ones I missed and I haven’t seen any of the big ones thus far which doesn’t fill me with optimism but perhaps I’ll get lucky in the future.

I did put in more work on Lokaris this week as well. Its once again fairly modest as I’m taking my time and trying to do my best work. Painting the wolf jaws was interesting because I struggled to find good photo references. Every jawbone was either pristine or a super old jawbone from the Ice Age which is incredibly weathered. I tried to come up with something that is kind of a happy medium where there’s some wear and dirt at the bottom of the jawbones.

I also am working on the cloak which was my biggest concern on this mini. I like to paint cloaks that are pretty pristine and have smooth blends but that is not what this guy is working with. The entire thing is frayed at the bottom. I also noticed that people tend to add more texture to clothes at 75mm which I’ve never done before. Here’s a great painted example by Vincenzo Celeste that he did for Kimera as box art.

I tried to add texture to the front of the cloak similar to this and I wasn’t happy with the results. It looked too regular and neat. So I decided to go in a different direction. Its a little out of focus but I figure his cloak would have all kinds of scratches and damage so I attempted to show that as best I could. Surprisingly, the natural shadows of the miniature really darken the darker spots on the inside of the cloak so you can’t see how both the damage and cloak get darker as they move into the shadows, but I promise that they do look good! My hope is that this guy ends up looking like a really tough customer in the end.

And finally, I did want to share that the diorama brainstorming has taken me to a place that I wasn’t necessarily expecting but I think will be agreeable to everyone. In the last five years or so, I’ve watched things that I loved like Star Wars and even Marvel, go up and down in quality. Nothing feels like a sure bet these days in terms of what is going to be consistently good or great and I’m a slow painter so I’m looking for things that won’t go out of style for me. Since I first checked out the brand new, Conan the Barbarian about two or so years ago, I’ve become a big fan. The comics have been excellent and are easily one of the best things you can buy right now. There’s the main series, which is full color, and then Titan re-launched The Savage Sword of Conan which is in black and white like it was in the 70’s and its just as good. Now they’re rereleasing classic black and white stories and adding color to them and to my surprise, I like them as well, which is surprising because I strongly prefer modern comics from 2000’s and up.

I’ve often thought to myself that if I was going to do any other gaming, I’d love for it to be fantasy as I really enjoy painting in that “genre”. In the last week or two, I’ve been learning more about Conan and starting to better understand how versatile it is. Robert E. Howard made Conan’s world a kind of alternate history world where ancient civilizations that we know exist in Hyboria even if they’re also a bit different. The obvious example of this is Stygia. Its basically Ancient Egypt but with a fantasy twist. The Picts are akin to tribal groups like Native Americans but more savage. And so on. There’s even Roman/Greek parts of Conan’s world so I’ve got practically all the bases covered! Clearly, this is a setting where you can follow your interests and let your creativity run wild which is appealing. There are a lot of miniature possibilities out there, especially from Frostgrave but I think Lucid Eye and Crocodile Games could easily be added as well. Truthfully, these miniatures are not quite diorama quality when compared to anything by GW and so that is also leading me to think about doing some Conan gaming instead of my original diorama idea.

While there are Conan stories where he gets into bigger battles, a lot of the stories I’ve read are smaller and more personal so its pretty well-suited to skirmish gaming, which is yet another bonus for me. There is no Conan wargame out there (one was launched on Kickstarter years ago and failed to materialize, sadly), but there are some rulesets out there for people wanting to enter Hyboria. So those are something I will more than likely explore. Pulp Alley, which I reviewed years ago, and have never actually played also is designed to work with Conan and anything from the pulp era. Pulp Alley does something cool where they make it really easy to design your own characters. So I can create Picts or any faction in Conan’s world myself which is pretty appealing. Maybe it is seeing some other hobbyists dipping into game design but it sounds like good fun to me as well. Pulp Alley also supports Lovecraftian monsters which Conan sometimes crosses paths with so now you’re starting to combine multiple interests of mine into one thing. The possibilities kind of seem endless. So I think that settles it!

My backlog is getting to be larger and larger these days but by Crom, we’re going to have some Conan wargaming in the future! I picked up a new miniature this past week that might be just be from Cimmeria so I look forward to receiving that this week and hopefully getting it on the painting desk soon as well. It will take me a long time to actually get around to playing Conan, I imagine, but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless and I hope fellow Conan fans will enjoy seeing me enter the savage realm of Hyboria in the coming days!

Lastly, I want to share that if all goes well, I’ll be mixing things up next week and having a battle report. Its been far too long since I played Fallout and so I hope you’ll look forward to that.