Beastmen and a Monster Hunter

 I've never painted any beastmen before, but I've always liked the concept of them. They're the rural equivalent of the skaven: while the skaven are plague and urban squalor personified, the beastmen represent the brutal, violent side of nature, always looking for hapless peasants to batter and kill. 

I found some plastic 40k beastmen from the game Blackstone Fortress on ebay. They're quite recent models, and are very nice sculpts. They come in pieces, so you can introduce a little bit of variation by swapping their faces around. They've got slightly less bestial faces than the Warhammer beastmen, but still look as if they've come straight from the island of Doctor Moreau, and aren't happy about it.

I did some conversions to make them suitable for Mordheim. This involved cutting off their pistols and some grenades from their belts. I sculpted a rag over the former grenades on one of the beastmen. The other one (the one with running legs) had more mess to cover. Luckily, I had a metal plate taken from a plastic ogre which fitted really well. I stuck that on and painted them. The standing guy got stripey trousers, which he probably stole from some unfortunate treasure-hunter. Their decrepit shields - also probably stolen - were taken from some old plastic skeletons. the running bloke got a new sword, also from the skeleton frame.

Next up is a metal Privateer Press model. This isn't the cheapest miniature I've ever bought off ebay, but it's close: it cost me the king's ransom of £2, and had some slight damage to the bow protruding over its shoulder. This guy is Victor Pendrake, a sort of travelling scholar/monster hunter. His combination of cloak/coat and armour reminds me of the Mordheim witch hunters. There's lots of nice detail on the model, especially given that it's quite old and from a period when Privateer Press sculpts could be quite ropey: he's got books in his pockets and little spectacles on his face.

I found that it was too easy to paint him in shades of brown and metal, so his coat got a red lining and his armour had a blue wash for variety. I really like the way that he's got his boot up on what looks like a beastman's head. I repaired the top of his bow with - oddly - a spare Eldar shuriken catapult magazine. He reminds me of a cross between Blade and the Witcher, which seems appropriate.

Blackstone Fortress - The First Few Expeditions

The heroes: "UR-025", "Espern Locarno", "Janus Draik" and "Dahyak Grekh".

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Last year, I was looking for one-player games, and I bought a copy of Blackstone Fortress off ebay (minus the miniatures, which I could proxy from my own collection of random space people). I later decided that I'd wasted my money, but in the current circumstances it has come to seem like a pretty good use of £20. The pictures throughout this post are from my collection of models that I've been using as proxies.

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Blackstone Fortress is a strange game: it's like a skirmish wargame pretending to be a dungeon crawler. You control a group of four explorers, who are looking for treasure in a space station. In the process, they fight villains and gain items. What it isn't, however, is a literal mapping-out of the floorplan of the station like, say, Advanced Heroquest. Instead, the overall story is described by cards, which consist of either a "challenge" (this usually involves rolling dice to avoid taking damage) or a "combat", where you set out a network of floor tiles as required and fight your way through a horde of baddies to the turbo-lift on the other side. As such, there isn't the same feeling of moving forward and discovering what the next room is like, which I find a bit unsatisfying.

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The mechanism by which the characters move and fight in the combat sections isn't anything like that in GW's big games. Instead, it's about expending dice to do things. You roll the dice at the start of each turn, and the things you can do depend on the numbers rolled (there's also a pool of spare dice that everyone can use). So it's about managing your resources of dice to make the most out of your characters' skills. As you might expect, some characters are tough and deadly, others are more about defending and assisting than actually fighting, and some do crafty things that tweak the rules involving turn order, and so on. As characters take damage, they lose dice, and so a character who loses two wounds will lose two dice. In other words, they start off quite good, and if they get hurt, they become a liability very quickly.

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Blackstone Fortress is, I think, a reasonably hard game, and wouldn't be easier with more players. It works fine once you've got the hang of the rules, but they aren't very well laid out: what it lacks is a strong, immediate sense of what we're doing and why. I was two missions in before I realised that one of the key aims was to pick up the deployment markers in each combat zone.

A typical day in the Blackstone Fortress

My little team (chosen solely because they resemble the main characters from the Space Captain Smith books) has done reasonably well so far. But it doesn't feel as if they'll get much better. It'll be interesting to see how they fare in future expeditions. £20 well spent, I think.