RT601

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This past Sunday I’m thankful for Adventurers.

Specifically creators who’ve set about painting each and every figure from the Rogue Trader miniature series RT601. Thus:

I recently discovered there is a subculture of incredibly talented painters who — over the last decade or so — set themselves the goal of painting all of the figs shown in the above ad. Some have expanded their vision to include other White Dwarf listings, such as Bob Olley’s Iron Claw Space Pirates:

Here are three blogs to check out if you haven’t already:

Dr. Mathias’s Miniature Extravaganza

Oldenhammer in Toronto

Magpie and Old Lead

Spend some time on each. Wander around. Rabbit-hole. You’ll be glad you did.

I imagine some of these guys have had a field day with more of THESE LISTS and I just haven’t found their work yet.

These painters and their project remind me of when I learned Res Eve Knife Only is a thing. Some things really can be made better simply by doing them harder, faster or harder and faster.

Oh no! It’s the Iron Claw Space Pirates! We’re doomed. Doooooomed!

Heavy Metal Is Back!

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This Sunday I’m thankful for the return of Heavy Metal magazine.

Late in 2024 Heavy Metal ran a Kickstarter to relaunch the magazine with a new #1.

Such a great cover.

I backed it. And then I decided to support them for the first while by buying a one-year subscription for the next four issues. They’re all out now and apparently my sub includes an Annual issue as well, so not bad.

All five of these issues include chapters of the ongoing dark fantasy stories Gladiatrix, by John Stanisci …

… and Millstone, by Michael W Conrad.

They’re both quite good, and still running.

Also in these first issues I rediscovered Vicente Segrelles’ The Mercenary.

This story recalled something familiar. I was sure I’d seen that character before. And the art style. Long ago. Well it turns out Segrelles has been telling the tale of The Mercenary in Spain since the ’80s. So I must have read some of it somewhere in the deep dark past. This chapter is a well-told moment, beautifully illustrated, that hopefully will lead to more events in later issues.

There’s also an eerie story called Cold Dead War: The Aftermath, by Craig Wilson.

It picks up where the segment in the Heavy Metal movie about the WWII pilot parachuting onto the haunted island leaves off:

Kinda creepy. It wraps in issue 5.

But after all of the above, the big win for me is discovering an ongoing story about a couple of characters I’d never heard of before. Burton & Cyb.

Lucky for me they’ve been adventuring since the ’80s. Yes, again. And yes, in Spain. Again. And it turns out they’ve been appearing in Heavy Metal for decades; I just never came across them. I don’t know if the ones I just discovered are new stories or old. But I’m liking them a lot.

Something I’ve been thinking about is taking the palette of a serialized story from Heavy Metal and using it as the guide for painting a unit or two from my collection for Xenos Rampant. I think Burton & Cyb would make a good place to start for a squad of scavenging scroungers. And Millstone might be a good source for my Black Spiral Dancer Vargr.

If you want to know more about the history of Heavy Metal, the wiki entry is a pretty good place to start.

Alien Legion

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This Sunday I’m thankful for Alien Legion comics.

I mean, look at these magnificent bastards!:

I collected it as it was coming out in the 1980s and -90s. It was such a fun read!

About a decade ago I tracked down a few of the compilations and graphic novels. I still pull them out once in a while and flip through my favourite pages. Good stories illustrated with great art.

Comic Vine has a nice gallery of Volume One’s 20 issues.

Cover Browser has a listing of Volume Two’s 18 issues.

It’s always baffled me how it never got an animated series, along the lines of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. It’s too bad Mainframe didn’t get to produce a show of it. I think it’s better suited to a long-form serial rather than a film. But, hopefully we’ll get at least one or the other eventually.

Now, if you want to game with Force Nomad, fortunately you’re spoiled for choice.

First up, Tangent Miniatures. Theirs start HERE on Space and Science Fiction, page 2 and continue on page 4 and page 5.

Tangent also have a Legionnaires Assemble – The Alien Squadron deal HERE. Sadly there’s no photo.

And I tried to buy them but was told they no longer do mail order, well not international anyway. They only sell at shows. So that’s that for me.

The other range is by Checkpoint Miniatures. Thus:

These I have a number of. Good figs. Sadly, Checkpoint don’t make a Sarigar analogue.

Their figs can be found HERE.

My favourite from this range is the Lord of Xaam. Pretty big title, right? And he is listed as being 28mm scale, but when I got him I discovered — happily — he’s really only about 20mm tall. So a while later I ordered two more because three of them are perfect for The Iks.

Aren’t these little dudes great!?

 

Cowboys and Dinosaurs!

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This past Sunday I’m thankful for Wild West dinosaur movies.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain

Dinosaurus!

And, of course, The Valley of Gwangi

All three are on Blu-ray now! Though I’m sure you could find them in a few places if you looked around.

The only way any of these films could be improved is if El Guapo was in them. Well, him and his plethora of pistoleros.

Also, I continue to pester Reaper to make Dino-Cowboys as one of the next groups in that range.

Man, I’d love to see a Westworld-meets-Jurassic Park — metal versus meat — mashup movie. With hapless guests and terrified staff caught in the middle.

 

Catalyst Alpha

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This past Sunday I’m thankful for the upcoming 50th Anniversary Edition of Metamorphosis Alpha!

A year ago Catalyst Game Labs posted news they are going to release a semicentennial version of that greatest of SF RPGs, the Madness-in-a-Can that is MetAl!

Metamorphosis

Catalyst

That just feels right.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this new crew navigates the Warden come November.

 

Vargr!

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This past Sunday I’m thankful for Vargr in combat armour.

Some time ago I backed this Kickstarter in hopes of finally getting my hands on some Zhodani commandoes. That didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped it would.

What did happen though was an unexpected bonus.

Over the course of the project they announced 20 additional figure stls, the Daily Reveals. Some were civilians and nobles. Some were Sword Worlders and Darrians. But a handful — five different scupts — were Vargr, in combat armour!

I first printed a batch of them as is. They were too small for my liking so I ran a second larger group at 110% to get them to the size I wanted; I was going more for Werewolf: The Apocalypse in space than the lightly-built Vargr of Traveller proper.

In addition to being able to scale the size of your prints, the other big advantage of stls is that you can shoot the files mirrored, to vary the appearance of your squads and to get some southpaws into your units.

Check them out!:

Ready for paint!

Soon my Vargr Corsairs — the Black Spiral Dancers — will be loping across the battlefields of my Xenos Rampant games.

Hydronauts!

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This Sunday I’m thankful for Easter, obviously.

I’ve also finally made my first move to STLs. And what better way to start down that road than with the spawn of the Frogstar, those batrachian bastards, the Hydronauts!

You can find Interloper’s page on MyMiniFactory HERE.

Commandant

The toad-things hail from the pages of the Spaceship Zero RPG.

There are a few copies on eBay.

It’s a fun space-pulp game with a great soundtrack. Dig it:

I’ve statted five figs up as a unit in Xenos Rampant:

And as a crew for Galactic Heroes:

Vaguulg’s Raiders           Crew Trait: Amphibious

They were sculpted by the ever-awesome Red Nebular. Patreon HERE.

Hybrid

I asked that they be sized to wear the 12mm bubble domes made by Bombshell Miniatures. You can find them HERE.

Trooper

I’ll post pics of a painted gang of these goons in a couple weeks.

And finally, I’ll be getting my Chickens scanned soon, too! So keep your eye peeled for that.

Teleport Jump

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In Xenos Rampant, the xeno rule Teleport Jump is a tough sell for me. I want to use it. Paying 1 point to be able to jump 11 inches (ostensibly 12) sounds good, but having your whole unit swallowed by the Warp on double 5 or 6 is hard to take.

I played around with improving the ability without skewing its balance. Finally, I decided to not change the rules as written. Instead I added a tech tree, like Force Field and Psychic:

 

Teleport Jump – Risky (cost: 1 point):         Rules as written.

Teleport Jump – Improved (cost: 2 points): The unit only suffers 1 Strength Point loss on any roll of doubles.

Teleport Jump – Secure (cost: 3 points):     No Strength Point loss for rolling doubles.

 

I think this fits well with both Psychic/Psychic Species/Transportation and with the fact Teleport Jump is a Move action, not Psychic.

It also fits well with the new economy of my games. I’ve been playing 30 points as standard ever since I picked up Dragon Rampant, 2nd Edition.

The Kamandi Challenge

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This Sunday I’m thankful for older comics.

I collected this comic through 2017, and read the first three or four issues. Then my local shop closed. When a new one opened in the same spot a few months later I got them to order me in the issues I’d missed and then collected the rest through to the finale in 2018. But I never did get around to picking the story back up and reading it to its conclusion. So I’ve been sitting on them ever since, almost a decade!

The release of the Thundarr the Barbarian comic by Dynamite has lit a fire in me to go back and read through the whole story of The Kamandi Challenge.

One of the fun things about this comic is that each issue is written and illustrated by a different pair of creators. And there are some great teams throughout. For example Dan Abnett writes the first issue, and Walt Simonson illustrates issue 11!

The story has an overarching plot with a mystery running throughout. That’s why the tag line across each issue is “Can You Solve It Before They Do?” And then on the final issue it changes to “We Solved It! Have You?”

Each issue ends on a cliffhanger, The Challenge. The next creative team then picks up the ball and runs with it. This goes on issue after issue til the conclusion in number 12. I’m really looking forward to see how this plays out.

If you want to read the story yourself you can buy it collected online. Or maybe, if you’re lucky, your brick and mortar can get you a copy of the hardcover.

While we’re on the subject of Kamandi, I should mention another — even older — story.

Way back in 2009 DC published an anthology series called Wednesday Comics. It was a fun novelty release that ran for twelve weekly issues, each containing one page from 15 different characters’ stories.

When they collected it into a hardcover compilation the next year, they kept the large format. Kamandi was the second story, slotted between Batman and Superman. Not bad company for our boy here. Witness the majesty:

That’s the middle pages of the tale, and I added the central issues of The Kamandi Challenge for scale.

The story is a fun, fast-paced survey of some of the companions, gangs, villains and hordes Kamandi encountered in North America A.D. in the original comic as created by King Kirby.

It looks (at the time of this writing) like you can buy the compilation in hardcover online. But again, maybe your local shop can bring in a copy for you.

Hmm. Now that I have the tome in my hands, I think I’ll re-read this story before I launch into the Challenge.

[Edit: In re-reading the Wednesday Comics Kamandi story, I noticed something I’d missed years ago. The tale begins on page one at around noon. It then proceeds at a pace of about two hours per page over the course of a single night. It then ends at about 12 o’clock on the second day. The skilled use of light levels to convey both the passing of time and the urgency that carries with it — given the plot — is outstanding!]

Alien Horrors

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This past Sunday, and this St. Patrick’s Day, I’m thankul for Tim Curran and Weird House Press.

I first discovered Curran’s work in an anthology called High Seas Cthulhu.

That was a fun read. Curran’s short story titled, “The Wreck of the Ghost” really stuck with me so I looked him up. I was able to contact him through his blog at the time. We had a brief chat and he recommended I pick up a copy of his collection called Alien Horrors.

I’ve been reading them chronolgically, by publication date (2000 to 2022). Good, unsettling stuff.

So a couple weeks ago I looked him up again to see if he’d done any more work in this vein. Well, it turns out he’s got a whole new collection! All these stories are dated 2025, so I guess I’ll just read them in book order.

The stories I’ve read so far really are great fodder for Mothership and Death in Space. Check them out!