Lothar’s Expendables

Round 1

The crew makes good time, following Lothar’s unerring tracking skills, they find a clearing with four dog sized spiders in it. Behind them four nest trees quiver with more of the foul beasts.

Lothar, Squint and Quartermain head up the centre of the field. Squint lets fly with a magnificent shot from his bow but at the last second the spider he is aiming at dodges the arrow (rolls 19 vs 20). Quartermain lets loose with a magic bolt spell at the same beast but the spell fails. 

Lothar grins at his companions, “let me show you how its done boys!” he boasts as he nails the spider, that both have missed, straight in the head killing it outright.

The remaining three spiders scuttle forwards closing in on Lothar’s forward party.

Gibberish roars forward past the forward party to head off the spider swarm.

Gregori moves to closest cocoon ready to search next round 

Slink moves up and past him ready to assist if required or to head deeper into the webbed trees. 

Event: Lothar gets tangled in webs and for a moment it looks like he will be incapacitated but the hand of fate intervenes and he frees himself.

With Gregori finished and added to the table I am ready to start the next scenario.

The rangers make their through the woods following the tracks found by Slink in the village.

My ranger had accumulated enough XP to recruit another companion. I decided to follow the events of scenario one and make that companion Gregori the young farmer that Squint rescued.

I didn’t however have a suitable miniature that met my vision of Gregori as a somewhat halfwitted fellow. I dug out this model, and painted him this morning. I used contrast paints as I wanted a quick slap of paint to the low Tabletop quality of the pre painted minis I am using.

I quite like the quality you get for a quick hour painting him up. Not bad for such a small investment of time.

The figure is from Red Box Games in the US. It is part of a lovely group of gawky looking soldiers and poor fellows. In the UK SNMstuff.co.uk stock them at reasonable prices.

This is really easy. I used the 4 Grounds trees of a medium size and draped them in the Halloween spiders web.

Top Tip: If like me you have narly middle aged fingers you will find that the web sticks to your fingers making it super difficult to manipulate. Every time you move your hand away from the model the Web comes with it. The solution is to wear disposable gloves – we all have those lying around right now – right?

Now whilst I am pleased with the effect I am a little concerned that removing the web may be more difficult than putting it on, and result in taking lumps of clump foliage with it. I shall report back on this once I have played the scenario and tried to get it off.

The last step is to mix up some UHU glue with white ink or paint. I prefer ink as it is more intense and used liquitex titanium white. Wait15 – 20 mins until the glue/ink mix is stringy and then use a cocktail stick to dob a blob on and stretch it from the centre of the egg to the base. This is where I think using a rectangular base was accidentally better than a round base – as some of the strings end up longer than others and you get what I think is a more pleasing effect.

Lastly I used just a few strands of halloween spiders webbing to cover the outside of the egg too give a wispy effect. I waited c ten minutes for the UHU to stiffen before just draping the webbing onto the egg. It sticks like crazy to anything so you don’t need to do too much to make it stay on.

One down four more to go

Edit: Top Tip – only make up enough white UHU gunk for one cocoon at a time. Getting it all on and looking good took longer than I thought and it was getting too firm by the end. If I had tried to do more than one I think it would less successful.

Next I glued the wotsit onto a painted base covered in scatter (again I used Luke’s APS Ready Base patchy plains). The choice of a long base was accidental as I had a few left over and nothing to put on them but actually this proved advantageous in the next step.

Edit: the glue I recommend is super glue. I also sprayed it with an activator to fasten it quickly. I tried PVA but it took too long to dry and didn’t hold as firmly. Something in the wotsit seems to resist it.

The next scenario calls for 5 spider cocoons. I took a couple of those loose packing wossnames that look like white wotsits (an English potato snack). I cut each in half and used scissors to trim them into more of an egg like shape at the end I had severed.

The scenario is designed to be an introduction to the game and it succeeds. There was one moment when I thought I had managed to lose one of the companions but realised this because I had not read the rules carefully enough and was mobbing and resolving the enemies out of sequence. I got a good haul of XP managing to complete all the major XP objectives quite easily. That said I rolled outrageously well for Quartermain’s spells – quite fitting my vision for the brilliant but erratic mage.

This is a sweet little game and I’m looking forward to Scenario 2 which I hope to run this weekend.