Steve - Arena Rex, Ludus Magnus, Jason

 My first painted Arena Rex mini, Jason from the Ludus Magnus.

 I tried about 3 different paint jobs on this before being satisfied enough to move on and put further efforts towards hopefully improving on the next Arena Rex Model.   In my first painting attempts I started with too light of flesh tones, thanks to using paint sold as "flesh" color.  Thanks to Byron for pointing me to use darker colors first, such as Khaki.  Painting flesh tones always a challenge, but I am good with the tanned and grubby look of a Gladiator what has been battling in the pits..   

Mierce Miniatures Viking #1 - ByronM

Two years ago Mike, Steve, and I all got sucked into Mierce Miniatures as the figures are simply stunning!  Then Covid hit and since we could not get together to play, they got set aside.  However, now that we can start in person gaming again I decided to start working on my vikings for the game and this is the first of them that I got done.

The figure itself is an amazing resin sculpt with tons of awesome details.  I hope I did it justice.

I have a whole 10 man unit of these in the works, but am working on them 1 by 1 to make sure I spend enough time on each.  Aiming for above average table top quality, but not show quality as I don't want to spend too much time on each of them.

For anyone that has not checked out Mierce before, you are missing out.  While pricey, they are amazing figures and sculpts and well worth looking into, plus the game itself seems pretty interesting (we haven't tried it yet though).

ByronM - A Kingdom Death: Monster story - Wierd Dreams event

 As many of you know, my favourite game of all time is Kingdom Death: Monster, a brutal survival game where you play as a settlement of people rather than individual characters since the characters die so often you really should not get attached to any specific one....

So, last night we had a great game of it, and I have to tell a story about why I love the game and love the friends I play it with!!!

At the end of the battle portion of the game there is a settlement phase where you deal with enhancing your village, crafting new gear and dealing with story events.

Well the story event that we drew last night was "Weird Dreams" where one player rolls on a few tables comes up with several strange items, and then the group has to nominate another player to tell a story about those items. Once the player does, the group then again votes on if that story was well told or not and then there are rewards or penalties doled out to either the dreamer or the story teller as a result.

I ended up being the dreamer and after rolling what the dream was about we nominated SteveA as the story teller.

Steve thought for a few minutes and then asked.... "So, I have to tell the story as one of the characters, correct? Then the pros or cons happen to that specific character?"  We answered that yes that's how it works.

Then Steve threw a beautiful and demented curve ball at us and said "Ok, I choose to tell the story as Torbuss".    Now, here is why it's beautiful and demented.... 

 

At one point in the fight, the Hand (who is an insanely hard fight, who you have no way to kill, he just toys with you until you hit him enough times to earn his respect and he then leaves) drew a fight card that had him point at the ground in front of him and wait....  You had to move someone in to be slapped by the Hand in the next turn, or he would attack everyone even worse than the slap....  Well, Torbuss stepped up to take the slap and as a result had his jaw shattered and ripped off his face by the hit!  So Steve started telling the story by grunting, moaning, emoting in various ways and waving his hands about madly!  

The rest of us lost it, laughing so hard we almost fell off our chairs!  Obviously, we gave him extra roll playing points and immediately said that it was an excellently told story!

In other madness that happened in last nights game:

- A character got sucker punched in the balls and they were destroyed and he can no longer father children!

- Another character went start raving mad and will always count as being insane.

- Yet another character went slightly crazy and has now sworn revenge on anything and everything and will go into a berserk frenzy anytime anyone dies (which in this game is almost every singe game)!

- We eventually earned the Hands respect by hitting him with a giant bone club right in his codpiece!

Man I love this game (and the people I play it with)! And next week we have to fight Spidicules....   A giant spider that drives a spike into the top of his preys heads and then uses the bodies as puppets to try to lure their friends in closer... lovely...