The Crude, the Mad and the Rusty: Mini Gaming Table

Greeting all! What do you think of this? I built it yesterday afternoon out of a few scraps I could find lying around the house. It is a scale scenic playing board based on the battlemat published as part of the Crude, Mad and Rusty scenario I have been working on. 

As you know, I have just completed the selection of models that form the pieces in the game and felt like experimenting with the old ruleset to tweak things here and there. It gave me great pleasure to see Mr. Graeme Davis, one of the original authors, contributing to that particular blog post with some background detail about the development of the scenario - it is really quite interesting so pop back over to my miniatures post to check that out of you have not already do so. 

Now many of you will remember that I a fan of putting together cheap and lightweight gaming tables. I have posted about this before. Have a look at these articles if you are interested in my previous endeavours. Last summer, I produced a 'theme' board based on the first scenario for McDeath, Winswood Harbour. I thought that it would be fun to attempt another 'theme' board, this time for the Mad, the Crude and the Rusty - after all, the battlemat in White Dwarf 89 was shocking to say the least!

Let me explain how I built the mini-table you can see at the top of the post. 

My first step was to cut out some foamboard to represent the brown areas from the original battlemat. Now, despite reading through the scenario several times I just couldn't work out what these areas were supposed to represent - so I went for slightly higher ground. I made sure that I used diagonal cuts with the blade to create a sloping edge to each piece of foamboard before sticking them on in roughly the correct places with Copydex. For the base I used a thick piece of plasticard, which by an incredible coincidence was exactly the right size for the battleboard and required no trimming at all!

You can see here that I used the original magazine to work out the dimensions of the foamboard cuttings. 

Copydex doesn't take long to dry, which is what makes it ideal for building scenery and fantastic for cardstock houses like you find in Warhammer Townscape. If you have never used this glue for model making I really do recommend buying a bottle and trying the stuff out. It is excellent stuff and quite reasonably priced too - I think I paid £4.50 for my large tub. 

Using PVA, I just painted on adhesive in rough strokes around the edges of the foamboard pieces and across the base of the plasticard. I rarely cover the whole surface of a gaming board with sand and prefer just to cover the areas I am going to keep 'exposed' so to speak. I dried this with the wife's hairdryer on the lowest speed setting. Shhh! Don't tell her! 

I used a black acrylic to basecoat the whole board and while it was drying I cut out a second piece of foamboard to act as base for the mini-table. I left about one inch around all of the edges. Placing this aside, I began dry brushing the board with my darkest brown shade and worked up in stages until this looked like this! 

Drybrushing complete, I slapped on the PVA once more, this time concentrating the adhesive over the flat untextured areas of the mini-board. I made sure that the glue was spread out in a fairly natural way, as nothing breaks that sense of immersion with a gaming board than poorly applied flock or static grass. 

With the grass stuck on, I again recruited the services of my wife's hairdryer to slowly dry the glue that held the static grass. Nothing beats leaving this to settle naturally, but I was working on a strict timetable of a couple of hours - I don't think you can tell can you?

The final stage saw me sticking the board onto the base and painting the foamboard black to create a defined edge. I also added some different shades of static grass in patches around the board, to help break things up a little. Gale Force 9 do some excellent seasonal tufts of scrub, and I opted to add a little selection of the autumnal stuff here and there to further break up the edges of the gaming board. You can see that I printed out the original title graphic too! 

Highlighting the larger stones in white was the final touch. Oh, apart from adding a miniature or two!

Now to think about testing out how the scenario works and implementing any changes that spring to mind.

Orlygg

The Crude, the Mad and the Rusty Ride Again!

From left to right: The Tinman, Oxy O'Cetylene, Gore, Blood, Spikes Harvey Wotan and Skrag the Slaughter.

I have been busy over the last day or so completing this group of models. Well, I say completing -three of these were already painted before I started and have only seen mild touch ups (steady Chico!) while the remaining three have been painted from scratch. Can you work out which ones?

Skrag the Slaughterer is the oldest painted model here having been completed by me way back in 2012. He has been rebased for this little collection and his armour has seen a tiny sort out here and there too. Oxy and the Tinman were completed quite recently and you might well have read the post I did about them a few months back. The two chaos goblins, Blood and Gore, were finished off today, along with the wonderfully named Spikes Harvey Wotan.

I think I explained then that Oxy and the Tinman, though an '80s Limited Edition blister pack, were also connected with a little known Warhammer scenario published in White Dwarf '88: The Crude, The Mad and the Rusty. 

Like a career criminal (which he may well be, incidentally) Skrag the Slaughterer has a fair bit of previous, as can be seen in the advert atop. Here he is advertising his wares in White Dwarf 79 alongside the scrabble friendly Lovecraftian, Hrothyogg. Interestingly, this advertisement is one of the few published references to our old friend Malal and here the renegade god lures Skrag towards a lump of starmetal and encourages his to persuade some dwarfs to forge it into a giant axe. Great fun! 

I often wonder if the success of these models lead to Jes Goodwin's incredible range of ogres a little later on, as it seems odd to have an entire range produced and then do a colour ad for just two of them! 

Anyway, back to the plot. White Dwarf 83 boasted a 'Free Pull-Out Battlegame' on it's front cover and the prospect of fighting a Fantasy Battle straight out of the magazine probably sounded very exciting for a large number of readers. However, delving into the pages of White Dwarf that month would lead to a strange disappointment, for this was not a battlegame of massed ranks, brutal charges and the ebb and flow of combat - no - it was a few paper cut outs being manipulated around perhaps the worst full colour poster ever printed anywhere in the 1980s. Jump the bottom of this article if you do not believe me!!

It is a well known fact that you cannot polish a turd. And some have accused the Crude, the Mad and the Rusty of being an absolute clunker of a poo sticking to the toilet bowl of wargaming life. They have lain it upon the altar of poor gaming releases (probably alongside Gary Morley's Nagash) and wished it to the pits of non-existence forever. 

I don't agree with them. For there is material enough over the supplement's few pages to polish up a gem of a scenario - if you are prepared to do a little work. 

Reading the story helps understand the scenario a little better. After wandering the wastes and being seduced (if that is the right verb for a huge, sweating ogre) by Malal, Skrag locates the starmetal and forces a bunch of dwarfs to craft the ore into his gigantic axe, and make him a huge suit of armour to boot. In thanks for all of their hard work, Skrag promptly slaughters (yes, that is why he is called that) the lot of them and consecrates his new found weapon in their blood. Charming chap! 

Unfortunately for Skrag, he leaves a single witness. A solitary Khornate chaos dwarf by the name of Spikes Harvey Wotan (whether this character is inspired by the chap who appears in Judge Dredd's Cursed Earth series, which included Ronald McDonald executing customers for spillages, has yet to be decided) who, rather understandably, swears an oath to track down and kill Skrag in vengeance. During his travels, Spikes meets another crazed dwarf, Oxy O'cetylene, and persuades him to construct a deadly tinman to take on the Slaugheter one on one and picks up two Khorne worshipping chaos goblins named Blood and Gore along the way. 

So far so good really. It is wacky, zany stuff just like Warhammer should be. Once you start looking at the rules it all starts to fall to pieces, a bit like if the scenario was written on the back of a fag packet after a particularly boozy lunch one Friday afternoon. Things start well, with a D6 roll to determine Skrag's initial wounds, halving the result and adding 2. This makes sense in several ways, firstly to add a random factor to help vary the way the game is played (it is obviously trying to be one of those quick scenarios you might play through more than once) and secondly to represent the damage done to Skrag during his dwarf rumble earlier on.

However, once the rules for the Tinman are introduced things start to unravel quickly. The table describing what happens to the machine once the fuel runs out is great fun, and introduces a little more random fun to the proceedings. It states that the player needs to decide how much fuel to give the Tinman at the start of the game, up to six units with each unit providing enough energy for one turn, but no reason for this choice is given, nor does it seem to make a difference how many units you choose to use! In that case, every player will always choose 6 units as it is the maximum available and gives you the best chance of killing Skrag. Surely, there should be a penalty for adding more fuel to create a little tactical thought before hand?

So there is work to be done there!

The second issue that raises it's head is the total lack of Oxy in the game. Why include him in the backstory and provide a miniature for him and not include him somehow? This looks to me to be a terrible oversight and one that needs to be corrected. 

Casting your eye over the malfunction rules helps restore faith in the scenario. Again, they are zany, fun and suitably random as all '80s roll charts have to be. I also like the character trait of Wotan's, though it isn't very Khornate at all, of using your underlings to soften up Skrag so you can move in for the kill! In fact, that is the ONLY way of winning the game if you are the chaos dwarf player. You have to time your attacks perfectly and kill Skrag yourself if you wish to emerge from the battlefield victorious. Anyone else doing so will put the game into a draw. For Skrag to win, he just has to survive and kill anything that is foolish enough to come at him.

Simple stuff. 

Also, nearly every character is subject to frenzy! Ahhh! 

As I said earlier, the 'battlegame' came with a pull-out battlemap and it is certainly 'interesting' on the eyes looking at it now. 

Still, having now collected all of the figures in this small scenario set and got them painted, this scenario offers something quite intriguing to the Oldhammer player. Could the rules be tweaked to produce a more workable game AND somehow include a way of including Oxy O'Cetylene? I like to think so, and it is something I intend of thrash out in the coming weeks. So, hopefully you will see a battle report based on this game coming your way soon. 

Does anyone have any advice or ideas to help me on my quest? Or even better, have your actually played this scenario before and can offer some tips on play before I start?

I am ever hopeful.

Orlygg.

So what was your first miniature?

Psychostyrene Dwarf Artwork used as the backing art for the blister they were sold in.

As miniature collectors and painters we ask each other all kinds of questions. How much did you pay for that miniature? How did you achieve that effect with paint? What are the rules for using chariots? I could continue in this way for most of the day, easily, as I suspect could any other grognard. 

One question that we don't seem to ask very much concerns that moment in time, long past, when we bought our very first miniature. For the first time, we peeled open one of those blister packs and held a miniature in our grubby hands, or perhaps tore away the cellophane wrapping around a Big Box Game, like the immortal Heroquest, and sat gaping at the mass of plastic sprues that lay before us. 

So to ask my question: What was your first ever miniature and in what year did you buy it in?

Casting my mind back, it is actually pretty difficult to be sure what my first miniature (or miniatures) actually were. I know when I bought them, in late '88 in Wonderworld near Bournemouth. Surprisingly, the shop is still there, though not quite in the original location, and it concentrates on the comics trade these days, so I doubt that there will be a copy of Rogue Trader left on the shelves after all this time. I am 90% sure that the first pack of models I bought were these: 

Oxy O'Cetylene and the Tinman. But I have vague memories of having a Paranoia robot or two way back then, so it may have been one of those, though it is more likely that I bought both at the same time. I can recall spotting the advert for Wonderworld in White Dwarf and badgering my dad to take me. The shop wasn't far from a Model Railway Shop and dad was a keen enthusiast of steam trains, so was happy enough to take me after I had spent what felt like forever wandering around looking at tracks and signal boxes. 

I can still feel that excitement upon entering Wonderworld that day. It was dark, dingy but crammed from floor to ceiling with gaming kit. Car Wars, Dr Who soundtracks (illegal copies on tape), roleplaying books and rows of movie tat. Then there was the enormous Blister Wall and the boxes and boxes of Games Workshop products. I expect that Oxy and friend were part of a bargain bin lot, as I can faintly recall grubbing around in a pile of battered blisters. Being a parent now, I know that you don't really want to spend much when your offspring get interested in something new, you must purchase something cheap first to check that the interest level maintains itself before spending the serious money. So I guess that is what dad did. 

When I got home, I used pots of Humbrol enamel to paint the Tinman but considered Oxy too fiddly to attempt in that first session. Though later, I did use the paints I had for my plastic Airfix Napoleonics to blob colours on Oxy. He didn't look a pretty sight and my dad put him in turps so I could have another go. Which I did a few years later, when I painted him up as a leaving gift for my Teacher, Mr Cooper. Sadly, in my teaching career, none of my pupils have presented me with an unusual Citadel miniature at the end of the year! 

And so Oxy left me. The Tinman lived on for a while, taking part in many a battle on the bedroom floor. In my games, he was elevated to a more powerful central character, and fought a long war against the ogre, Vomitbreath, until suffering that most serious injury of the snapped ankle. In the days before I knew about pinning, this meant retirement for any of my models. But this disaster had a positive outcome in future years, as because he was broken, my Tinman model survived the two periods of 'selling off the collection' that I carried out in the early 2000s. Hence, I was able to find him in my garage the other day when I was thinking about our question at hand. 

After a spell in the Dettol, I attempted to clean the Tinman up, and in doing so nearly lost his other foot! At some time in the past I must have repaired both feet, but I had clearly forgotten that and risked losing a vital piece of him down the plug hole. Once clean, I did a really decent job of pinning him back together with decent wire. I left a long piece of wire sticking out of each foot and used them to attach him very securely onto a large, square base. Luckily, some time ago I picked up a second Oxy from eBay as I knew that I had the Tinman lying around somewhere. Scrabbling around in the collection for a while, I spotted him in the odds and sods bag in the Welsh Dresser and the two were re-united once again (even if Oxy is an imposter!) 

If you didn't know, the Tinman and Oxy were a limited edition release and were part of a scenario published in White Dwarf called the Crude, the Mad and the Rusty. There are only 6 models in this little collection and the scenario includes the original, and highly sought after, Skrag the Slaughterer. I may have a go at tracking down the rest of the models one day, to make Oxy and Tinman feel even more at home. 

White Dwarf 83 by ckapodistrias

If you are interested in finding out a little more about the scenario (including it's brain-meltingly bad full colour game board) then I have embedded a link to issue 83 of White Dwarf via Scribd. The scenario details begin on page 30 so it is pretty easy to just scroll through the other pages to find it. 

I suppose that simply sharing the story of your first miniature is not going to be challenge enough for some folk, me included. So I took things a step further forwards and set about actually painting my 'first ever miniature/s' in glorious technicolour. 

And here they are! Apologies for the unsightly blond hair, but my three year old daughter was playing with my scenery just before I took this little shot and left one of her little markers for us all to enjoy. Perhaps it is chaos tape worm? As you can see, Oxy is an interesting little dwarf wearing grubby working clothes, so I chose a suitably oily blue for his overalls and a dirty brown for the apron. Both painted up very easily. It was very easy to just basecoat the metal parts silver, give them a black and chestnut ink wash and highlight with two lighter shades of the colour. I added a few little spot colours to the other tools in the apron, which you can just about make out in my photograph, as well as using silver once again ti pick out files, hammers and screwdrivers. 

The flesh tone was my usual method, with an added layer of red to make Oxy seem a little more ruddy than normal. I used a red ink wash to draw attention to the spots that cover his face (though they might also be warts, I suppose?) and dotted their heads with a little yellow. His blond beard was easy enough to paint on, again with layering but I chose to fiddle around a bit more with his welding mask and blow-torch. 

The mask was a case of basecoating in a sliver/black mix and washing over in black ink and wiping away the excess on the flat surfaces with a damp brush. I then drybrushed over the top in silver to bring out the detail. Blue ink was dribbled into the eyeholes to give them a slightly different glassy sheen. The blowtorch started out much the same, only I watered down the blue ink wash and used it to glaze over the silver paint, giving the torch a blue tint. Once dry, I just drybrushed over with silver and used straight ink (black and brown) to make the end of the torch look used. Then, all I had to do was base him and old Oxy was complete.

Tinman was a little different. A nice black/silver mix created my basecoat and I washed over the lot with black ink. A brown ink wash followed up to create rusty patches here and there. Once dry, I blocked in a mid silver all over the body, leaving plenty of black lining to create depth, and highlighted in pure silver. Here and there I painted a few brass sections and a red wheel on a gas tap for interest. Then it was just a case of basing him in a similar way to Oxy and he too was done, though I may come back to him later and tart him up a bit more when I buy a brighter silver paint. 

So, to conclude. There is my story of the first miniature I ever bought: The LE14 Oxy O'Cetylene and Tinman blister. For bonus points I have tracked down the actual models and given them a sparkling new paintjob. Now, dear reader, you can do something for me! Kindly share with me the details of what YOUR first miniature was and the year you bought it. I'd love to know!

Oh, and if you fancy a challenge, why not have a go at tracking down those models once again and repainting them with all the flair you can muster today. Just let me know somehow because I would love to see what you come up with. 

Looking forwards to hearing your stories!

Orlygg