Superhero Gaming

The next batch of Dwarves is coming along slowly. I am trying to push through and actually keep this project moving. There's not very much that's complicated about them, but I am a slow painter. One of the guys asked me how long it takes to paint each one, and I estimate my time at 1.5-2 hours per figure. So I'm figuring it will take a little over 200 hours for the army, once you figure in the time it will take to base them and brush on a coat or two of varnish, as well as waffling around and painting character models. I may even hit 300 hours on the 2000-point Dwarf project.

I didn't work on the figures tonight, as I had to watch some football. I'm glad the Packers beat the Bears, and it looks like the Steelers are going to beat the Jets. That would make for a good Super Bowl matchup. I sure hope the Steelers lose to the Packers, though. Roethlisberger has an uncanny ability to move around in the pocket, but his decisions off the field make me root against him. Of course, you can't throw a football in an NFL stadium without hitting a player with some legal and/or personality issues. But the Steelers should have some bad karma coming to them after they stole that Super Bowl from the Seahawks a few years ago.

I've been getting a little tired of using the same GW paint colors for everything, especially skin tones. I've been looking at other paint lines, like Foundry's paint system, but switching paint systems is not the cheapest thing to do. I will probably just pick and choose a few different colors from other lines to supplement GW colors that I want to switch up. I know there are a lot of people who use cheap craft paints that come in big bottles for $0.99, and I use some of them for bases and terrain, but they just go on a little too thick and grainy for me to use them for my figures. Even watered down they don't go on the way I'd like. There's no doubt that hobby paints are expensive, but so are most hobby items.

A couple of blogs that have caught my eye recently are those showcasing superhero figures. I love comics and the brightly colored heroes and villains who populate their worlds. We're even naming all of our kids after various comic book heroes, which is something I hope they'll appreciate as they get older. We haven't done anything too crazy with their first names, though, as it's important to me that they'll be able to suppress the comic book connection if they want to later in their academic or professional lives. But enough about my kids, here are a couple of blogs I've spotted recently that heavily feature superhero figures. There are a lot of neat figures out there for superhero gaming, quite a few from Reaper's Chronoscope line, a bunch from Superfigs, some Heroclix that can be rebased, and probably a hundred more I don't know about just yet. I've only painted one super so far, but I have big visions for teams and individuals that could inhabit a four-color world. I just need a rules system and a pile of lead.

I also wanted to bring some attention to this Death Mountain terrain piece over at the Ricalopia blog. There are a few work-in-progress posts prior to the post I linked, so you can see the process that went into it. It's a combination of GW kits and foam that come together to make something really neat and unique.