Feartigo

Feartigo is my second Pulp City mini of the year, making for a better start than 2016 (although I had a very good February).

I got inspired to do him when I saw someone else had painted theirs up, helping motivate me. As I had a few days off work (a lot spent assembling terrain), I felt confident I would get him finished without him falling into 'painting queue limbo', and thankfully that proved accurate. With all the browns he was going to have I thought the purple/magenta trousers would make a nice counterpoint while sticking with my colour vocabulary for Villains.

In terms of game-play, Feartigo straddles two Factions, as a Necroplane agent who has infiltrated the Coven ranks through subterfuge, secretly serving Dr. Tenebrous, but whose loyalties may be uncertain for either side. Painting him adds my first new Coven in fifteen months, and my first new Necroplane in three and half years! At least one of those Teams needs to make it to the table this year I think.

Feartigo is a Blaster with added durability, whose Actions all work against Spirit (ideal against A.R.C. or Heavy Metal). His added durablity is due to the fact that he has two defensive Trumps, adds +1 die to Defend when Attacked out of Base to Base, and because he also Damages Attackers who Damage him with Mind or Spirit Actions. Basically, as an overall package he can be a nasty surprise for an unwary opponent, especially as his main Attack will typically generate 4 dice against Living Targets.

Feartigo
Villain, Blaster, Level 2, Mystery
30 mm

Night Fright & Leech

Click to enlarge-ify

Night Fright gently eased Leech into a turn towards the primary portal. They were both ready to feast on the horrors in the souls of any unfortunates whose paths crossed their own. Yet somewhere deep down, Night Fright could not escape the feeling he had experienced something very much like this once before.

As ever, this has taken a while to finish!

I finally got around to assembling the mini in January (see here for the WiP) when I worked out how I wanted to manage to lift the model up. I did not want to use a transparent strut, and I did not want it to be attached by an object, since more often than not neither is too satisfactory a solution for my liking. I have seen some flying/leaping models lately supported by capes and trailing cloth, and that gave me inspiration when I saw some smoke effects from Tabletop Art.

I had a plan.

And like any plan, and as any regular reader of this blog know, my painting plans rarely survive contact with the enemy; the enemy in this case being my ever-fleeting motivation.

Well motivation returned in the past few weeks and it is finally complete. I am pretty pleased with the outcome and think that this very cool sculpt by Paul Muller will both fit in with and stand out from my Necroplane and wider collection of Villains.

In a nutshell, Night Fright is some kind of unliving remnant, possibly from outside the Necroplane, and he rides atop Leech, the wildest of the Nightmare Engines.

In the upcoming Pulp City SE, Night Fright & Leech is a Level 2 Speeder. Speeders can use more Movement Actions than other Roles. they are much, much faster as a consequence, but generally less hard-hitting. Except when it comes to Night Fright & Leech. This Nonliving partnership has one of the most powerful Overrun Actions in the new rules; an Action Type that allows a model to crash through a number of Targets at once. Arguably the only better Overrun may be Seabolt's, but that should be clear when the new rules are formally unleashed.

For my Necroplane, currently I have Doom Train and the soon to be released Papa Zombie and Comte Vendredi to complete. There are a few other Pulp City minis I have yet to finish so hopefully soon I will have more done to show off. The horror-themed Necroplane could be a cool choice for this year's Hallowe'en Madness, so I must get chatting to Rob about that very soon.

Necroplane (Sub-faction)

Click on image for bigger version

Following on from the Forgotten, the Necroplane.

Invaders from another realm, the Necroplane harvest life energy to drive their machinations forwards.

A growing collection of Supremes and Minions, they are (left to right):

• Necro GI's (and right); unliving foot soldiers able to infect unwitting opponents who in turn become more Necro GI's - a self-sustaining army.
• Mourn; screeching Supreme possibly empowered by a malign spirit which Mourn hosts.
• Dr. Tenebrous; lord and master of the Necroplane; twisted scholar with designs on extracting the abundant life energy of Earth.
• Supreme Zed; unstoppable agent of the Necroplane, Supreme Zed was a hero on another world before becoming an unliving engine of destruction.
• Sanguine & Draku; vampiric agent of the Necroplane on Earth, Sanguine is the head of Royal Investments, but his loyalties don't always lie with the Necroplane. Draku is his vampiric canine companion - beware of the dog.

Necro GI's

These Necro GI's are finally done. Not brilliant, but at least finished enough for my purposes.

I think I first posted about these on the blog back in July - so it has taken around 4 months or so to get them completed. They probably haven't had very much work on them, but that is likely because the approach I was first using on them was quite off-putting. So I eventually salvaged the paint jobs to a certain extent, but I wish I had started on them in a different way.

The sculpts are excellent in my view, more superb work from Paul Muller whose aesthetics suit the Pulp City range, and the Necroplane in particular. So with that in mind any short-coming are simply down to ye olde Pulp Citizen, and nothing more. I will try and see it as a lesson learned, even after years of painting, and maybe a sign of my outlook on the painting hobby changing as well.

In game terms these guys are amped-up contagious zombies with guns; what isn't there to like about that? I reckon they will be a given in most games using Necroplane for me going forwards - especially as there is already a formidable coterie of Supremes available. I painted 4 in anticipation that I will always need more during an Encounter. I love the simian-like aspect to them as well - it evokes a certain primitive feel to the minis.

Well, most importantly they are finally done. so what next? Gorgoroth, Taurus Captain? Xyllian, Master Sagittarius? Iron Train? Skyline? Time will tell.

Dr. Tenebrous

The dark tentacles of Tenebrous' agenda reach beyond Necroplane and its schemes. If the Supremes were ever aware of whom his contacts are among the Supremes and politicians on Earth, they would be afraid to ever fall asleep.

One of my two WAMP entries, Dr. Tenebrous has been in my 'to-do' pile for quite some time. Of course, when one paints at the speed of a comatose snail, that sense of 'some time' is kind of relative.

The mini was sculpted by Paul Muller and has a great spandex villain look in my mind; he has a design that would not look out of place as a threat to the Avengers or the JLA. The base is from the Maxmini range for Pulp City - it is actually the Ace of Wraiths base, but since it so closely echoed the swirling cape effect on Dr. Tenebrous it seemed a perfect choice to me.

Dr. Tenebrous is the big bad leader of the Necroplane Sub-faction. The Supremes of the Necroplane are determined to steal away life force from the Earthly plane for their own nefarious ends, and that is just the kind of thing Tenbrous specialises in. Like any Level 3 Supreme he is formidable enough, but what he does is add some buffs for Necroplane minis, as well as allowing the Necroplane to incorporate Forgotten allies as though they were Necroplane themselves - when more Forgotten appear this will give a very wide array of options for players wanting to focus on these deathly invaders, let alone future possibilities for Necroplane Supremes.

I don't quite know why it took so long for me to start this mini, but I painted it fairly quickly by my standards, and I am reasonably pleased with the results - although the gems are not great, that is an area that I need to practice on. The colour scheme uses a very similar palette to the one I used for my other entry - natural as they were painted at roughly the same time. It is a colour scheme I am pretty happy with and that I think works quite well.

Supreme Zed

First field test is over. Partial success, the subject, now codenamed Supreme Zed, got beheaded but that didn’t stop it from destroying two tanks. We had to evacuate the hit team as after VH’s blade mangled the subject, the odds seemed low.
Can’t even think how powerful the subject will be in a couple of weeks. And it already hates Blood Watch…

I loved this mini the first time I saw it. Sculpted by the supremely talented James van Schaik, Supreme Zed combines spandex-ness with the growing trend for zombie minis out there in a tremendous way, I think. The mini in-game offers a very durable undead Villain, although I have yet to game with Supreme Zed to see how truly nasty he is on the table.

It is the last of the Pulp City minis I collected at Salute 2010, and I knew early on how I wanted to tackle the colour scheme. Superman, that super-hero icon of icons, uses a palette of the three primary colours: red, blue and yellow (the latter on his emblems and belt). So I settled on going with a palette using only the secondary colours of the colour circle for Supreme Zed's costume. I wanted a grubby look to him, since he won't be concerned with dry-cleaning, but stopped short of trying to add dried blood since I didn't feel confident on achieving a satisfactory result.

Sanguine and Draku

Guillaume Sanguine, the French entrepreneur, whose blood thirst extends far beyond just the business, visits Pulp City.

I really enjoyed painting Sanguine and Draku - opting for simple colour schemes (including the flashes of purple to tie them in with many of my other Villains); the net result was that they were painted pretty quickly having obtained them from Maciej at Salute 2010.

Sanguine offers quite a few team-building options: he can be fielded as either level 1 or Level 2 (and the Level 1 option can potentially upgrade mid-game!), and he has the Necroplane allegiance, which he can drop thanks to the nifty new Freelancer skill. Basically that means he can work in either currently available level 3-led Villain sub faction - unaligned (Mysterious Man) or Necroplane (Dr. Tenebrous).

The minis are sculpted by James van Schaik, and I think he did a superb job on both. The posing is really suitable for a vampire, and the costume has arguable nods to comic-book characters like the Crow. James has sculpted a lot of the line and I think his work has been of a superb standard.

Draku offers a Minion that can hang around the game with decent HP (for a Minion) as well as having HP recovery, and to cap it all, if he is taken out, Sanguine gets mad and adds a bonus to all of his Action Rolls. Add to that that I think the model is incredibly cute, and perhaps best of all is that it is modeled on and named for the dog belonging to Maciej, the game's originator.
I believe the art on his Minion card is taken from a picture of the real-life Draku.

As a Pulp City SE update, Sanguine is a Support Supreme and Draku is a Tank Minion; a great little combination.

Mourn

Mourn is the Screaming Death, an agent of the Necroplane forces.


Sculpted by Jarek Smolka. Going in to painting Mourn I had a clear plan - and of course that went quickly the way of many failed endeavours. I wanted to emulate the colours of the Spectre from comic books (green gloves, boots, trunks and cape, white bodysuit/skin), but due to the cape melding with the bodysuit on the Mourn model, there was no clear line along which to use such a two colour scheme. Instead I focused on trying to get an overall colour I could be satisfied with.


I enjoy the mini immensely, and plan to paint another sometime in the future. It is without doubt one of my favourites, and not only within the Pulp City range. I wasn't wholly satisfied with the results, but I think it is reasonably effective. the next one will probably have a purple-hued colour scheme, but time will tell, as plans often change, don't they?

On the plus-side, I think my photography of my minis is improving a little.