Isaac Abraham Kook and his band of Partisans.

I finally completed my Pulp Warband as seen in a previous post. I picked up the figures I needed at Cold Wars except for the Golem. [Edit:] After a short wait, Monolith Design responded to my email, sent a Paypal invoice and informed me my order is on it's way. Good service from Jim.

The leader of this little group is none other than one of the most famous Rabbis and Kabbalah Mystics of all time... Isaac Abraham Kook. To create him in miniature I took this model:



And used green stuff to turn him into this picture:



To create the glasses I cut off two discs of plastic rod and super glued them to his face. Then I drilled them out to create the frames of his glasses. Right before taking drill to face I thought to myself "This is either going to work really well or I am totally gonna screw up this miniature." Luckily it worked and his glasses came out ok. To complete the conversion, I had to remove the belt and pistol and then shave down the collar. After that I drilled out the hand and the bottom two fingers and added a length of brass rod for the walking stick. After that I used green stuff to add a more full beard, jacket collar, and buttons as well as sculpting the bottom two fingers under the walking stick as seen in the picture. Also, it took a little filling out of the jacket to make it look right, but I was happy with the results.

This is how he came out:



Here's a little side by side:



For the Rock Golem, I ended up using Zap-A-Gap and gluing aquarium rocks to a leftover headless 40mm French & Indian War model. I figured the Golem would represent the mystical force of will of Kook and would be a hovering mass of rocks in a vague humanoid form that would smash things with it's floating appendages. I hope the "arms" and strangely floating balanced rocks for a head gets this across. To paint it I sprayed it black and drybrushed it a stone gray color then painted individual rocks all sorts of natural shades of grays and tans. Then after an overall wash of brown and black watered down, I waited until it dried and gave it one final very light drybrush of white. I named him Kook's "Rock of Jerusalem". For Pulp Games, I envision him as a vengeful earth Golem. This powerful guardian will allow Kook to travel the world, fight Nazis, and search for ancient artifacts and solve ancient mysteries. When switching gears to Weird WWII, he is the ultimate Nazi killing machine made up of the rocks placed on Jewish graves killed by the Nazis. He will protect Kook and fight alongside the famous Bielski Brothers partisan group. Nothing better than smashing in Nazi skulls!

Here he is:



The rest of the gang is made up of the leader's and some members of Bielski's partisan group.

First there is Tuvia Bielski (based on the real historical figure). I nicknamed him "The Shepherd" due to his role in saving thousands of Jews during WWII and hiding them in the forest of Belarus. The model I thought that looked most like Tuvia was this one from the Copplestone Figures Partisans pack (Tuvia is flanked by two other partisans):



Then, there is Tuvia's brother Alexander (known as "Zus"). Also a real historical figure. I made him more of a lone wolf type for my warband. The lone wolf and shepherd characteristics I took from the movie Defiance which portrays the brothers as being very different in personality and approach for their mission of fighting the Germans and protecting the Jews under their care.

Here is the figure I chose:



These two figures actually look a little like their historical counterparts. Or at least a little like the actors that play them in the movie (well, a little anyway).

This rounds out my nice little 500 point warband. I used the Iron Ivan Games Where Heroes Dare Dossier character creator to create these for my games. This sweet little tool allows you to quickly create a warband of Lead, Companions, and Supporters. Some time later I might put up the stats, Schticks, and gear I chose to make the warband. I hope to get them on the table soon and see how they do against some Nazi filth.

Here is the whole warband in a group shot:



Hope you enjoy looking as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Vatican Warlock Assassins and Kabbalah Mysticism.

This actually has something to do with the whole Charlie Sheen mania. I was thinking about picking up my Pulp project I had put on the back burner (so back burner in fact, I hadn't even purchased the miniatures). I was planning out some purchases for Cold Wars and surfing miniature manufacturers for the minis I will need for my Pulp Warband. Then it hit me:

Vatican Warlock Assassin.

That's right, thanks to the genius of Charlie Sheen (don't do crack kids!), I had found the perfect theme for a Where Heroes Dare warband. Now all I need are the models. That will take some time and some more surfing, but I will be keeping my eye out for good models to represent this awesome winning character.

*For those of you living under a rock, Charlie Sheen has been saying some awesomely insane stuff to his interviewers lately. Regardless of what you think of him, the stuff that has been coming out of his mouth has been epic. One of his quotes: "Guys, it's right there in the thing, duh! We work for the Pope, we murder people. We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they're not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that goes."

Charlie you magnificent bastard.

Meanwhile...

I have been planning out my first Pulp warband again, the one I had originally come up with but had never put together. Not quite as cool as Charlie Sheen, but I like the idea enough to stick with it and do it first. The beauty of Where Heroes Dare is that you can quickly and easily put together a warband and it not only doesn't cost much because there aren't that many models, but it is an easy project to get painted up and in the game.

After seeing this miniature in the Monolith Designs Catalog several years ago, I thought the idea of a Rabbi with a stone statue golem would be a great concept for a Pulp warband. The problem was, Monolith Designs minis are 40mm and would not fit with anything else I have (unless this Rabbi was 10 feet tall...). I figured I can still use the golem (if Monolith even sells minis anymore), because that can be any size, and will in fact be even more impressive with the smaller 28mm minis.

Since I like to base things on real people and historical events I went in search of Rabbis on which to base the warband leader. I quickly found that Kabbalah mystics would be the perfect theme and would allow me a lot of elements to pull together for the project. While researching Kabbalah for ideas, I ran across this fellow:

This is Abraham Isaac Kook. He is one of the most famous Kabbalah mystics of the 20th century and lived in the 1920s...the perfect time period for Pulp gaming. With a golem by his side (and maybe some elementals like fire, air, earth, and water) this guy would search the world for sacred and secret knowledge while fighting Nazis and ne'er do wells. With the idea that he would lead a band of men in search of lost artifacts it gave the perfect background to allow him to show up anywhere in the world a Pulp game might take me...including the Center of the Earth.

But The Kookster, as Jayson dubbed him, is a mystic and not a fighter. Besides the golem as a trusty companion and wall of stone to defend him, I needed a few other bullet sponges...err loyal followers to help him. Since the Nazis are the perfect antagonists to this guy, I figured I would be within the spirit of the Pulp world to use the enemies of the Nazis. Last year I watched Defiance, a movie about Jewish Partisans operating in the Belorussia and Poland during WWII led by the Bielski Brothers.




These guys would be perfect companions and guards for Kook's adventures. It puts the timeframe more into WWII than most pulp settings, but for any scenarios earlier than the war, I can just use them as generic Eastern Europeans (or Latvians, which is where Kook is from). Besides, never mind that Kook died in 1935...I can just say he found some "answers" to that whole mortality thing. He is doing God's work after all.

So funky timelines aside, I think this rounds out to make a nice little Pulp warband.

Now...how to model the Kookster. I naturally turned to the Pulp Figures catalog first. Luckily, I found the perfect model to base him on:

This is one of the Sinister Spies from the Pulp Figures Personalities range. It will take a lot of modeling and green stuff to turn him into the Kookster, but I think it will be fun. I will probably remove the pistol and give him a cane, add some buttons and make some changes on the jacket as well as do some work on the beard and add glasses.

For the Golem, I will just use the Monolith Designs figure I mentioned above as is.





For Partisans, I am turning to the Copplestone Castings range of Back of Beyond figures (BoB is a genre of wargaming set in the far east in the 1920s interwar period).

These are perfect:



So that's pretty much it. All I have to do is think of abilities and stat out Kook and I think I have a nice little warband here.

Oh, last year when I got all excited about this project and told Jayson...he worked up this cool pic for me. It'd be a shame to let it go to waste, so here it is. Who knows, maybe now that I put this project in print on the internet I will HAVE to do it. You never know, this could even end up as a series of scenarios we put out as a PDF like Jayson's Kong Fang series.
































And I will get to the Vatican Warlock project, so don't anyone steal the idea...

Where Zombies Dare...

I just wanted to post a few quick pics taken at our club game on Monday of the Zombies vs Soviets game. We used a modified form of Where Heroes Dare with special rules to give it that zombie movie feel. It worked pretty well for a first run.

The zombies are a little overpowered right now, but we discussed some tweaks to make them work. They were a little too fast and some of the rules for spawning them and activating them made it too easy for the zombies to get around the table. We played two games and both times the zombies won, but I think with some of the changes it will come out to a well balanced game.

I am very happy with the way the rules give a really good feel for Romero style zombies. They can only be killed by head shots, they are slow but once they get close to prey they can move a little faster, when they mob up on you they can quickly overpower you and pull you down, but they also feed on that prey for a turn allowing others to escape (though the newly dead can also become zombies themselves, muhahaha), they appear where you least expect them but they can't climb...things like that really make the game tense. I had a great time.

The pics are all from Dieter's phone cam which seems to have a "creepy bleary misty zombie setting" which made for some great shots.

I don't really have much of an AAR as were just testing and having fun. The scenario involves a team of Spetsnaz escorting a tech team with Geiger counter equipment. They are ordered into a facility outside the town of Pripyat several days after the Chernobyl incident. They are told to take readings from what appear to be unusually high amounts of radiation, even higher than the meltdown site itself. There was a team sent in previously that disappeared after reports of gunfire. Rumor has it that the site was a secret KGB experimental facility which had a direct line to Chernobyl...but why the site has higher radiation readings or how it might be connected to the incident at the plant is unknown and no one in the Central Committee is talking.

The team arrives at the facility as the sun is setting and to an eerie silence.

That's when things got weird.

Here are some shots...



Table layout. I plan to do more buildings specific to this game at some point. For now we just used the set of ruins and rubble I had and a building from the Comic Store's collection.



Corporal Fedorov takes a reading at one of the objective counters.



The Sgt. gets mobbed...



Braaaaaaaaaains.



Some Soviets turn the tables on a lone zombie.



The support team of PK LMG and a sniper with a Dragunov go down hard...and then get eaten.



Zombies. Milling around and doing zombie stuff.

I hope to run this game at one of the conventions coming up. Probably Historicon. Too late to register a game for Cold Wars.

Enjoy!

Do you smell something, comrade?

Well, the horde is almost complete. I have a few of the toxic waste barrel zombies to finish up, but that's about it. It didn't take long to do these guys, surprisingly. I found that a nice quick drybrush of flesh, followed by a rotting flesh green on top followed by a few dark red and a purplish bruise color for washes finished off with an overall dark wash to add depth really gave them the right look. The only thing I did to add detail was pick out a few bones in khaki and white mixed. Oh, I also added a gloss finish to the guts and painted the eyes with a red/orange spot. I'm very happy with them.

Enjoy!



Close up of a few of the gang.



Some blurry "comin' atcha!" shots.



And a toxic waste barrel zombie for good measure. I will be using these for markers or spawn points in a game. This makes me think of that old Chevy Chase movie where he gets toxified (Modern Problems).

The question remains...will 46 of these bad boys be enough? You can never have too many zombies on the table. My Soviets are ready to take on the horde. All I have to do for them is a few of the support weapons I just picked up. RPG launcher (zombies go 'splode), a second PK LMG (head shot!), and a flamethrower (whoosh!). Though the last thing you might want are zombies that are on fire.

The whole thing gets a game test run on Monday at the club. Now I just need to come up with some rules and special events cards...

Pripyat.

A little diversion here, though continuing with the Soviet theme...

I was cleaning out a box of unfinished minis and found these 28mm Eureka 1980's NBC suit Soviets hiding in the back. I decided to finish them up and get them out of my backlog since they only needed a little work on weapons and packs to finish. Besides the NCO, Sniper with Dragunov, Specialist with Geiger Counter, and the LMG gunner with the PK, there are five grunts with AK-47s left to finish.



I picked these up a few years ago at one of the conventions with the intention of using them in a zombie outbreak containment game set in the city of Pripyat, Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster. Eureka actually sells these and a set of zombies to go with them for just that purpose.

All I need yet are the zombies! I'll probably need a bunch of them though...