Project Zeke Miniatures: Zombie Survivors and Swat Team

Project Zeke Miniatures are a brand new miniatures company set up by Simon Hunter. Simon is a passionate Zombie Gaming fan with a dream to sculpt and produce his own 28mm zombie war gaming skirmish miniatures.

Kudos to Simon because: he is not a professional sculptor, he doesn't have the backing of a big company and he has avoided the crowd-funding route. He has done what he wanted by hard graft and focused on doing exactly what he set out to do. Simon has taken an idea all the way from concept to execution and that in itself is a head shot in our book.

Simon was kind enough to send us some free samples of his new miniatures hot off the press. Thank you Simon.

First up is William, a survivor armed with a hunting rifle with a knife taped to the barrel. He is clearly an outdoors type with cargo pants and shoulder length hair and a beard. He's also got some impromptu anti-bite armour (magazines and duct tape) which is a nice touch.

Second up comes a Private Security Squad, three miniatures in CQB getup which we think could find a lot of use anyone's All Things Zombie: Final Fade Out games.

Simon has also released a Limited Edition miniature 'Young Eddie' a biker armed with a street sweeper shotgun. Eddie ain't gonna take no $h*£!

These first few Project Zeke Miniatures look pretty nice to me with pretty crisp lines and minimal flash. They come on flat bases, which is not big deal although I'd honestly have liked to have seen them on slotta-type bases. I'm so used to re-basing now that it's not an issue.

A pretty neat feature of the Project Zeke Miniatures is that every survivor comes with a free random item of luggage, a holdall, military kit-bag, hiker's rucksack or teddy bear. We think that's a pretty darn cool idea and it'll be nice to see what everyone does with them.

Pick up these three brand new sets at Project Zeke Miniatures Web Store and to celebrate the launch Simon is offering a 10% discount to all customers up until the end of march, just use code launch10 on checkout.

Go check out Simon's Project Zeke Miniatures Blog and keep up to date with new releases and teasers at the Project Zeke Miniatures facebook page.

We'll be painting ours up right away, so watch this space for an update and scale comparisons.

Dust Tactics: Ammo Crates

Dust Tactics makes a relatively limited use of terrain. In most standard scenarios each side gets to deploy just one ammo crate in a square where no other terrain is placed. The ammo crates provides 'Soft' cover.

In theory you could use any terrain element, a tyre stack, oil drums, rocks, crates, a fallen tree, sandbags etc.

These two ammo crates come with the Dust Tactics: Revised Core Set.

Simple enough to paint, undercoat, base-coat, wash and gentle dry-brush. Decals added (leftover from an old WW2 model kit) and then a quick coat of matt varnish.

Dust Tactics: Axis Sturmpioniere

I'd decided to collect both armies, that I had a full play-set. That way, whenever any of my gaming friends were over we could simply jump right into a game.

Rather than point too much of one side in one go, I decided to keep both sides relatively even and paint an no more than 2-3 units for one side without painting some for the opposing force. It meant that pretty early on I could try out a few quick games with just a few units per side and as the project developed no one side became overtly over-powered.

These Sturmpioniere from the Dust Tactics: Core Revised Set were pretty fun to paint. Once again, I attempted to keep the colours pretty light, using some lighter base colours and much more subtle shading in the form of a watered down wash.

By doing these this way I found the limits of watering a wash and experimented with using De-Ionised water, which I'd been using for cleaning my airbrush, which seemed to help. Which got me thinking about some of the other tools that 'expert' painters use, i.e. thinning mediums.

My conclusion, I think they're onto something.

Music for Zombie Gaming - Part 7

Bear McCreary is a name that has popped up quite a bit in recently years, if you're a bit of a nerd. The American born composer and musician lives in Los Angeles California. Not only does he have an awesomely manly name, he is also responsible for the soundtracks for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead and Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. among other things.

He also composed the theatrical film score to Step Up 3D... which is actually rather good... but less talked about, certainly by most Walking Dead fans.

Although he studied under the legendary Elmer Bernstein he has undoubtedly created his own sound which, whilst clearly versatile, shows a superb understanding of pace and timing and is quite distinctive.

Bear McCreary normally works with a limited pool of musicians, typically around 10, often using less traditional instruments, with a considerable emphasis on percussion and the deliberate inclusion of discordant counter harmonies, his themes are subtle and build into considerable crescendos.

Bear McCreary's instantly recognisable opening theme to The Walking Dead is a great example of how this works and is a perfect mood-enhancer for any Zombie Board Game, Card Game or  Zombie Miniatures game.

Dust Tactics: The Hammers

This squad of 'Hammers' for Dust Tactics were pretty easy to paint, I even managed to salvage the pre-printed insignia on their chests.

Soft plastic figures do present a bi of a challenge when it comes to de-flashing. To be fair to Fantasy Flight and to the whole Dust studios production team, the models were pretty sound in the first instance.

The Hammers

I was pleased that I was able to keep them relatively light although I still think they could have benefited from lighter base-coats. After finishing these I started exploring some slightly lighter tones to replace my standard 'olive drab variants' palette.

Conan VIII - The Golden God - LARP Event

My name is Adam and I'm a LARPer, or more precisely an LRPer.

I state the latter because when I was mostly involved in the hobby it wasn't even know as LARP, it was LRP, the action got missed out, why? Probably because 'Action' was a given. I don't know who coined the phrase LARP, but they we better marketeers than we were, it certainly rolls off the tongue better than LRP.

Point of clarity. What has widely come to be known as LARP in the public eye is not what I actually did. It was the same sort of thing, just different. I don't think there's anything wrong with the 'Sport' LARP that has become so popular, but I was always very much firmly on the European side of the fence, immerse interactive improvisation theatre, story lead rather than rules led, is what we did. In fact, the first event we ran didn't even have a rules system. The mantra was 'The is movie-make-believe, if it's fun, awesome and might happen in a film, run with it'.

As a life-long fan of Robert E. Howard, our games were for the most part set in Hyboria and visually John Milius's 1982 classic Conan The Barbarian, whilst not true to the text, certainly 'felt' right.

I was fortunate enough that many of the friends I fell in with were writers, model-makers, prop-makers and costumiers to the film, television and theatre industry (I did a short stint in the industry myself just before heading off to college). So, to put it bluntly, the games we played had pretty high production values, especially considering the relatively limited budgets.

I drifted away from the hobby for one reason or another. I still played quite a bit of horror themed and Zombie LARP but I hadn't picked up a sword in years.

In last 2012 we received an out of the blue invite. Some of the people involved back in the day were ready to run something once again... it was settled then, we were headed back to Hyboria.

Atlantean Sword: When choosing a sword, there was no competition.

To be continued...

Dust Tactics: Hell's Boys Ranger Attack Squad

This was my first attempt at any kind of camouflage in a long time. In fact, the first attempt at anything with a pure military theme for a while, so I had to re-buy a few choice olive drab and olive colours.

This Ranger Attack Squad for Dust Tactics turned out a little darker than I really wanted, so I started to think about getting the top coat, pre-wash, colours a little lighter and diluting the washes a little more.

Hell's Boys - Ranger Attack Squad