Back Through The Breach... ...A Return to Malifaux

[DaVinci's Cat]

As mentioned in the M3e thread, I've bought back into Malifaux and following a good read of the rules, have been busy putting some stuff together ready to get playing. As always, a log like this will hopefully provide me with some motivation to actually get the stuff painted.

Last weekend I sat down with several unopened M2e boxes, a pot of liquid poly and the intention of assembling it all. After several hours of passive glue sniffing, the odd stab of fingers and thumbs and a fair bit of cursing the exceptionally small and fiddly parts and unhelpful Wyrd instructions, I had finally assembled a core crew and a few summons. I wouldn't normally post a picture of unpainted figures but the pain the Goryo and Manos caused it might be justified this time. The main part of the Goryos were fine, it was the three spirits interwoven into them that caused more than a few issues and a fair bit of filling in post construction.

20190720_Res Sample.jpg

Post construction, I have actually managed to get some stuff finished. First up are the Gaki;

20190720_Gaki Fr.jpg

20190720_Gaki Rr.jpg

I've also knocked up some Turf War/Corrupted Idols Strategy Markers - I fancied something more 3D than a regular token, and also took the opportunity to practice a few different techniques with an airbrush to see if I can transfer them to figures.

20190720_Strat Markers.jpg

So far so good, now time to start on the crew proper...

[Dave]

Very nice start. Especially like the effect on those scheme markers.

[DaVinci's Cat]

I've have actually started on painting up the crew but not enough progress to post up results just yet! Given the temperatures over the recent week I haven't exactly felt like sitting down and painting...

That said, I've taken the time that I should have been painting (and probably more importantly, looking for a new job... ) to further my 3D printing design skills specifically to design a multi-colour item to make use of the printers recent upgrade (I can now print with up to 5 colours at once!). Although there are several companies who do really good acrylic tokens and counters, the latest version for M3e have left me feeling rather indifferent (yes, I do have some of the new condition markers in the post...), especially activation and pass tokens. So with a focus on the tokens that perhaps are more likely to sit on or near the characters Stat Card rather than on the board, I thought I'd see what I could knock up for personal use and therefore not infringe Wyrd's IP Copyright.

So using the new logos as reference, I've come up with the following as either activation or pass tokens (I'll have to see now the game 'process' pans out) and also thrown in a simple yin-yang design for chi tokens (I know yin-yang isn't strictly related to chi but it's easier visually than the appropriate Kanji). To allow for reasonable detail on the printer, and the fact that the latest trends (with the X-Wing community anyway) are for larger tokens, these are 42mm in diameter and 5mm thick; Gaki included for scale only.

20190728_155754.jpg

20190728_155924.jpg

I also had a quick go at something to hold the character cards in place. The idea is that rather than mark wounds on the card, the cubes to the left of the card are the wounds track. With Ressers, wounds will come and go frequently with summoning and healing and I've never found dry wipe markers to be 100% effective (especially with the continual handling of cards) so was looking for a way of easily tracking the wounds whilst enabling myself and my opponent to see the state of the model. This is very much a work in progress (the final version won't be silver/grey!) and will probably go through quite a few iterations before I settle on a final design. Again, probably dependent on how I end up looking after the 'house-keeping' aspects of the game.

20190728_160024.jpg

20190728_160048.jpg

I've tried to capture some of the game's steampunk aesthetic (again, a little more work required) and am now looking at how to integrate the activation/chi/suit tokens in a similar manner to the wound track.

I have actually also finished the scenery tiles for Puppet Wars .
Anyway, best pick up that paint brush again....

[Dave]

Cool stuff! I have started painting my Sonnia crew but had to buy a few box sets to round it out.

[Ronq]

Wow. This is all amazing, even though I donā€™t play the game!

Iā€™m sure people will buy a few of those character card holders from you as well, looking awesome!

[Tom]

That Gaki is top drawer. And I'm sure people would pay for accessories like that. Nice stuff.

[DaVinci's Cat]

Time for another small update, but before any pictures, many thanks for the comments and thoughts - much appreciated.

Painting has been a little slow, motivation (or lack of it) more than anything. I've had these Seishin sat waiting to be painted for quite some time, I just couldn't face putting the effort in for what are just 2 Soulstone Models. I certainly wasn't going to do all 5 as they'd rarely, if ever get used, so 3 should suffice. So including a reasonable Soulstone Cache, I've only got another 38 odd points left to paint! (Gaki don't count as they are probably just summons rather than initial deployments ). Also thought I'd try out a little bit of OSL - hasn't worked out too bad, but as always, a little more practice required but happy with the overall result.

20190821_210612.jpg

20190821_210636.jpg

20190821_210711.jpg

20190817_135047.jpg

[Darkson (Simon)]

Nice.

[Tom]

The green glow looks pretty amazing to me!

[DaVinci's Cat]

It's clearly being a while since I last posted in this thread - mainly because I've been busy painting a variety of frog monsters production line style for Hellboy. That said, I finished off the Onryo a couple of weeks ago and have finally got around to posting up.

Tried a few new techniques on these and generally relatively happy with the results. The top of the coat (both front and rear) for the one on the right looks a little messy at this scale which I hadn't picked up on when painting (curse my failing eyes!) but the figure is only 40mm top to bottom.

From the front:

20191103_100038.jpg

And the rear:

20191103_100059_001.jpg