From PeterD: Nickel's Warband for Badgers & Burrows (22 points)

Ollie, Nickel and Fennel

 

My second post today is three members of my Burrows & Badgers war band.  Curt got us into this system around Christmas time and we've had fun creating war bands and playing a few games, although the wide random variance in results takes some getting used to.  These are 3d prints from Curt, and I've no idea who the creator of the files is.  Full disclosure, when Curt handed me these to paint he asked me to return them with the ground work incomplete so that he could match his other B&B figures.

B&B includes a wide variety of animals to choose from.  Given the choice overload I sought inspiration from my local environment as shown below.

Back row Nickel and Ollie.  Front row Fennel, Orville Owl and Zippy Bat.

I am rather disappointed that the tree stump is sawn off and not chewed. 

Nickel the Beaver gets her name from the Canadian coin featuring a beaver.  In B&B she is a massive animal and she is the leader of the warband.  Well armoured she is fearsome in hand to hand, but it takes a while for her to get into combat.  The original Nickel came from the Hudson's Bay site and has a kerchief in the iconic stripes of a HBC blanket, which I've tried to represent in her helmet plume. 

The war band's 2iC is Ollie the Otter.  B&B counts otters as large critters with good speed and ranged combat ability (like beavers, otters can also swim and thus avoid movement penalties in water).  The original Ollie is a sea otter and I tried to give the model the buff face of a sea otter but gave this up after a couple of failures and painted him as a river otter.  His shield carries a starfish emblem.

I like that he's standing on a bag of gold coins.

Fennel the raccoon looks like he could talk your ears off, all the while drinking your beer, pocketing your silverware and flirting with your wife.  He's got definite panache, suitable for the masked bandit raccoon persona.  I spent a fair bit of time on google counting rings on tails and working out the facial patterns.  I did learn that raccoon fur varies from grey to brown depending on genetics and geography.

Points are anyone's guess. The raccoon is about the same size of a 28mm figure for 5.  The otter is a bit bigger, maybe 40mm for 7.  The Beaver is pretty massive so I'd say count her as a 54mm for 10.  That's 22 points, less deductions for not painting the bases myself, maybe 18 points? 

JeremyM would be disappointed with me if I did not share this video.

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Sylvain: Excellent painting job on these "small" animals (everything is relative). They look very furry and very tough with their weaponry. I'm sure Nickel's big hammer will help "even the odds" when it comes to rolling. For points, you know that it is "impossible" to subtract in the spreadsheet, so "have to" let you go away with 22 points. It was an honor to be your minion and hopefully you will be participating in the Challenge again next year. Ce n'est qu'un au revoir.

From JeremyM: Burrows and Badgers (55 points)

Phew this post comes in by the skin of my teeth. Our gracious host gave me a reminder today that the deadline was nigh. I must admit that I had completely forgotten about the challenge this year, but thankfully I have been painting.

Curt recently introduced us to the fabulous anthropomorphic game Burrows and Badgers. I had heard a lot about the system and after a trial game I was pretty taken. We've started a small campaign game and I decided to paint up my first warband...and a few other figures that I'm sure will make the table for future warbands....one can never have enough goofy animals after all.

I drew the freebeast faction for the campaign and I decided my warband would be bird based. I had a few bird files in my myminifactory library and I saw some quick potential to do some simple digital kitbashing to make them more anthropomorphic. Here is the warband thus far.

The backrow has a massive condor that I had to shrink down but also replaced its head with a plague doctor mask. The next one to the right in the back is a great horned owl with a golden mask I believe from rescale miniatures that just needed some rescaling work as well. Hard to see in the back but there is also a blue heron that I decided to add a magic wand to and a mickey mouse's sorcerer's apprentice hat as well. The front row contains a hawk with a spear, two small owls with guns (goonmaster miniatures), and a wizard owl as well. 

None have hit the table yet so I'm sure all my plans for greatness will go up in smoke quickly. The system is really crunchy to say the least with so many different options to try out...which led me to start looking at other factions, animals, equipment, and magic. So more animals had to hit the painting table.

Sticking with themes I decided one future warband would have to be made up of reptiles and amphibians...toads, frogs, and a snake. The first toad is in the backrow right holding a hammer. The front row contains a toad wizard with a suitably fancy hat. And finally the front row on the left is the snake. I scaled him down...likely a bit too much but also added a digitally kitbashed hat to fit the theme. But why stop there as analysis paralysis with all the options simply means more models. So I also painted up a couple of fox archers both in the back row for a future kindred warband as well. 

So there is my first Burrows and Badgers Warband and the start of two new warbands to come as well. 

That's a total of 11 28mm figures at 5 points each for 55 points.

JeremyM

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 Sylvain: It is, literally, the eleventh hour. Congratulations, you're not kicked out of the Challenge! But jokes aside, you're proposing a remarkable set of anthropomorphic animals. (Praise the 3d printer!) The poses are dynamic (or restful...), the colors are lively and imitate quite well fur or slimy skin. And the bases are top notch, a great demonstration of your talent as a painter. I'm so glad we did not loose you to oblivion as we'll get to see more of your work. Excellent travail!

From Curt: 'Rodentovsky's Mischief' - Warband for 'Burrows & Badgers' (43 Points)

 Hey There!

Last spring Byron introduced me to 'Burrows & Badgers'. To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much, thinking it would be a cute game, but nothing to take too seriously. A skirmish game in a world of cute anthropomorphic animals? Maybe fun for one-off games, but no real legs to it, right? Well, I was proven wrong. 

The game is simple and straightforward, but is quite nuanced, having a few key mechanics that really make it sing. The other thing that makes it a winner is the depth to how you can build and develop your warbands, making them unique and telling a story. It has a bewildering number of creatures to choose from for your warbands, an astonishing depth to its magic system, a wide variety of weapon's and armour, powerful skills, and even rules for building your warband's den (think of the charm of Bilbo's hobbit hole, but with an armoury, apothecary and archery range thrown in and you get the idea). It's pretty amazing, and I recommend it not only as a great game to play, but also as a terrific example of quality publishing. The 272 page hardcover rulebook is both beautifully designed and wonderfully illustrated, making it a pleasure just to flip through and enjoy.

Our group recently started a B&B campaign which is proving to be a lot of fun. We have six warbands battling it out, three Royalist troupes and three fighting for the Freebeast Union.

So, for my second entry this season, I have a warband for the Freebeasts. This is 'Ratatevsky's Mischief'. 

Warbands in B&B can be as small as three creatures, or as many as ten. Players have 350 Pennies to build their beginning warband. The bigger/more powerful the creature, the more they cost in Pennies. As I knew several of the guys would create some low model-count, heavy-hitting troupes, I decided to take a different path and maximize numbers. Mice are the least expensive creatures to recruit, so I thought I'd try to 'flood the zone' with these little fellas in the hope that their increased numbers would allow me to take objectives, soak up casualties, while still being able to swarm for attacks. (By the way, a group of mice is called a 'mischief', which I thought was too charming to pass up so I worked it into the troupe's name.) All of these figures are 3d prints from 'Dragon Trappers Lodge' on MyMiniFactory.

This 'Mischief' of mice is led by a Great Grey Rat, Anna Rodentovsky. I really like her rakish, rapscallion appearance.  Anna sports a fencing blade and has a lot of sass.

Anna's second-in-command is Maizy the Mage. Like magic users everywhere, she's a bit of a glass cannon with a few powerful spells, but is otherwise quite fragile. 

The rest of the warband is split evenly between four close combat mice and four with ranged weapons. The models here have crossbows, but they are serving as proxies for calivers in the game. (Calivers are ferociously powerful in B&B, and having four of them will give a bit of pause to opponents who wish to move carelessly in the open.)

This is a warband that requires a good amount of luck and timing to work, but nonetheless can take a bit of punishment. Time will tell if they prove themselves worthy on the tabletop. 

The nine mice are pretty much all 20mm in size, while Anna is quite tall, coming in at 40mm. All together this makes for 43 points in total. The 'Mischief' will also provide a squirrel point as an added bonus.

For those who have read through this whole thing, I thank and applaud you! I hope to have a few more creatures for Burrows & Badgers over the coming months, but we'll see where the brushes take me. 

Again, thanks for stopping in and have a good one!

- Curt

From ByronM - Challenge 15 sign off post

 Well, I made it to the end of yet another Painting Challenge, even if I didn't meet my target points.  This year was a lot of fun, and I finally felt good about my painting again now that I got some better glasses and light in my paint area, so that is a win.  Also, I could have hit my points goal, but made the concious choice to go work on some other projects that I really needed to for my company (NorthernLightsTerrain.com), which I will show off later in the post.

First up, the obligatory group shot of myself and all the models I painted, and even though I missed my goal by a little, I am really happy with how much I got done and the quality of most of it.

Next up is a shot of my still in disaster mode painting table...  I still have a ton of odds and ends kicking around that I never got to.

I also realized I never got back to post a group shot of all of my Burrows & Badgers stuff (which I did not get everything done, so there will be a lot more next challenge).  I love how these came out, as the sculpts are awesome with lots of detail, but not too much that you are left painting little bits forever.

And lastly, for the last few weeks of the challenge, I got sidetracked on getting a set of trenches and bunkers ready for sale on NorthernLightsTerrain.com for use with Trench Crusade, which we have been playing a lot of around here.  While I know you can make trenches easily out of foam and stir sticks, foam tends to break down over time, and is harder to pack as it is always the one size.  So, learning from my stacking basic Infinity buildings I made a bunch of stacking boxes with wood texture sides and flat tops that pack up easily for storage.  I sell them like that, but recommend people use whatever modelling compound they want for the tops to give more character, plus glue some random bits and bobs all over and it looks pretty sweet.

Textured and base painted trenches

20 Trench boxes stacked for storage

Unpainted and no top texture added

I also did two style of bunkers to go with them, which gives a complete set for Trench Crusade or any other WW1 style setting.  Are they perfect, no, as it's hard to create angled sections with MDF and a laser, but they work pretty well!

Well, that's it for this year!  

Thanks again to Curt and all the Minions for all the hard work, see you all again next year!

ByronM - Two Foxy Fellows [14 points]

After last weeks big submission I am down to a two model submission this week, made up of 2 foxy brothers for Burrows & Badgers.  These two should make a nice addition to my outlaw (rogue) faction once I have enough games in with the faction to earn enough pennies to hire them.

These two brothers will be called Todd and Robin, some pretty obvious childhood references, but hey you can't always be cryptic with references.  I painted them up to match each other, so they are in mainly the same colours, and in dark forest green cloaks and jackets to help hide in the woods as they lay in wait for the Royalists to come by so they can rob their carriages.

Nothing fancy about the paint jobs on these two, I just tried to keep nice clean colours to match the brighter than normal cartoony style I am going for with my Burrows & Badgers figures to make sure they pop from table top viewing distance.  To that end, I am not doing any blending or subtle work on any of these figures, they get a base coat of the normal colour, a wash to add shadows, then a highlight with the base colour again and an extra highlight when needed.  That's it, plain and simple, but I think it really works with these figures as while they have detail, they tend to be a bit simplistic with fine details (I think to keep a cartoony overall look, but I could be wrong).

These guys are pretty chunky for 28mm scale, at almost 50mm tall and on 50mm bases! So they size well with the Badger I painted from a few weeks ago.

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Wonderful additions to this delightful project Byron. Your subtle colours and shading really suits them beautifully - they look like illustrations right out of Beatrix Potter!

Given their chunky yet sly disposition, I've scored them as 40mm figs

- Paul

ByronM - Burrows & Badgers [60 points]

Today's second entry is one that I have been looking forward to for a while.  I happened across this game last year and picked up a bunch of the figures as the game looked like fun and the miniatures even more so!  I mean, which of us didn't grow up reading Wind in the Willows, watching Disney's Robin Hood, or watching way too many Saturday morning cartoons with anthropomorphic animals in them?  Seeing these bits of memory from childhood turned into a wargame fills me with memories and was way too much fun to pass up.

I wanted to paint them up as soon as I got them, but set them aside for the challenge and for new glasses so that I could attempt to do justice to them.  Having got my new glasses mid-December, and having booked holidays from late December through mid January, the time was right to spend way too much time painting these lovely little miniatures, so without further ado here is the first batch of my Burrows & Badgers collection.

This is the first of the base warband sets, which includes Shrew-zerker, a mouse nun, a squirrel archer, a rabbit archer, a barn swallow scout, and an otter pirate as the leader.  Quite an interesting mix of characters which will form the core of my rogue force.

I painted all of these miniatures as one offs, meaning by them selves and not in bulk with others.  This allowed me to focus on each one and give it its own character and look.  As an added bonus because I had such an interest in these figures I spend a bunch of time on each one (thanks to having the last few weeks off since the challenge started) and as a result I am actually really happy with them all, which for me is not very common as I am often my harshest critic.  I am super thrilled with the look of all of these figures and am only disappointed that I can not get around to the terrain that I printed up to go with them while the challenge is on, due to Curt dropping terrain from the challenge this year :-(  Oh well, I will get it done once the challenge is over.

This is the second of the base warband sets which includes 2 mouse (mice?) knights, a squirrel caster, a serpent caster, a weasel archer, and a rabbit knight.  These will form the core of my Royalist faction.

To not bore anyone with pictures of each figure separately, here are just a few of the ones that I really like how they came out.  First is the squirrel witch, and I think her red brown colouration really looks good against her green forest cloak.

Next up is the ferret crossbowman, which reminds me of the archers in the Disney Robin Hood cartoon. I know they were not ferrets in there, I think they were wolves or something, but it still makes me think of the show and I think he would fit right in there.

Technically, this one is supposed to be a sparrow, but while looking up picture of birds to go from for colours I saw a picture of a barn swallow and liked the blue and tan colouration so decided to go with that instead.  In person the blue really pops and makes the model stand out.

I still have about a dozen more models to paint up for this game, but will probably do them piece meal over the challenge, but I promise to put them all together for one big group shot at the end.  At some point I will need to go back and add some more basing elements to the rouge faction models as I 3d printed the ferns and plants for the loyalist models a while back and have since misplaced the files for them, so could not print up more.  That will be rectified shortly.

Overall there are 12 models here, but the shrew-zerker was submitted earlier in another post so only 11 count towards my points here, so 55 points (unless some of the bigger ones class as a different scale as they are quite big on 40mm bases).

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WoW! Those are wonderful sculpts and you've done them beautifully Byron! 

Looking forward to more submissions like this and the big group shot in the end

Take a few bonus points for the bigger models, and because I love Wind in the Willows too :-)

- Paul

From ByronM -WW2 German Infantry Squad + Shrewzerker [75 points]

Now that the Christmas Craziness and Family BS is over with, it's time to get down to what really matters, Wargames, Miniatures, and Painting!!!

First up today is a unit that I first primed up probably 3 or 4 years ago for a challenge and they have sat primed black hiding in shame in the back of the closet since then.  They are the germans that came with the second edition of Bolt action, that I have always meant to get around to, but never have.  There are more coming as I think there were 30ish in the box, so expect another few units over the coming days/weeks.  Since these have sat primed and waiting for so long I am counting them towards the First Circle of hell, Limbo for a bonus 20 points.

They are painted mainly in German field grey, with grey pants and an almost black helmet.  They are a pretty basic paint job, but it works at a distance.  I also decided to base them with small yellow flowers as seen in the Sound of Music, so that at some point I can maybe put on a game where the Germans chase down the incepted and ear piercingly annoying Van Trapp family and silence them once and for all.  They will of course keep Julie Andrews alive, but the rest of the family must be silenced!

Next up is my first test model for a project I am really looking forward to this year, Burrows & Badgers.  I love anthropomorphic animals so when I saw this game for the first time a few years back I needed to get it, but then got sidetracked on other projects so never got around to it.  This year that changes!  I have about 20 models for this game to get painted and have several more in progress on the paint table already.

Points wise this should be 75 points (11 28mm figures x 5 = 55 points, + 20 bonus points for Limbo)

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Terrific work on this German squad, Byron. You may have missed the refreshed edition of Bolt Action but you should have them done for the 2nd edition of Chain of Command this upcoming year. I also really like your maniacal axe-wielding shrew(?).  If ever there was a shrew in need o taming it may be this chap. I've not heard of the game, but a quick look at their website shows some very cool minis. I very much look forward to seeing you show us more of this range. Lovely work.

- Curt