Men In Boxes

Oooooooh, Dwarves!

Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern and The Ship Who Sang,  passed away this November at the age of 85. I was first introduced to her work through a paperback copy of Dragonsong. I was lured to the book by the fantastic cover illustration and the fiction inside captured my imagination. Since then, I've hunted down other books written by her and have enjoyed them immensely. R.I.P. Ms. McCaffrey and thank you for the dragons. Art by  David Fairbrother Roe. Read more here . 

What do you do when you have a large diorama with trees and buildings and terrain features lovingly modeled and set up right in front of you? Why, you break out the beer and send a lambda-class shuttle with a gaggle of the Empire's very capable stormtroopers to hold the area until Darth Vader arrives! With the penguin townsfolk still being prepped for attachment to the christmas village ( see previous entry) I mucked about with some Micro Machines Imperial Stormtroopers. Too bad i couldn't find the rebel troopers amidst the chaos that is my storeroom and I had to hurry before the wife noticed the guys in white armor taking shots at her mom's penguins. Will the rebels be able to take back the town? Let's see...

We decided to make a christmas village this year to go with the home decorations for this holiday season and the family turned to me to lead in making it. So, we took out our small collection of Christmas village buildings and proceeded to make a diorama that depicted the main avenue of the village, a frozen pond and a large tree display. Unfortunately, we only had a small number of figures until we realized that this would be the perfect time to use my mother-in-law's collection of penguin figurines. Thus was born our Penguin Christmas Village! Here are some WIP pictures. The pond will feature a snow globe centerpiece, park benches and cotton candy. The frozen pond was made from glitter glue gel and left to dry overnight. The houses are being wired for lights and small vignettes are being made to be scattered around. Here's the main avenue. I'm trying to figure out a way to l;ight the streetlamps. How would the carollers get about if they dont have street ...

Here's a mummy from the Mega Blocks toy line that is a suitable Undead Giant for 54mm. Aside from the mummy, there's a winged vampire, demon, ghoul, Frankenstein's monster and a werewolf. Here's a side-by-side shot for size comparison.  After disposing of his enemy, the giant mummy looks around for his next opponent...   ... And engages in a deadly wrestling match with the giant scorpion! That stinger looks nasty!

Here's a D&D mini that could also serves as a monster for my planned 54mm skirmish. I'm not sure what the prepainted mini is called but I got it bulk with a boxul of assorted D&D minis. I'm not a fan of the prepainted and collectible miniature scene but I like most of the figures. The mini would also be a perfect Shelob for 28mm or 20mm figures!

I'm refraining from basing my 54mm Egyptians for HotT and plan to use them first for skirmish games using the demo Ares rules I downloaded from Freewargamesrules and FUBAR Medieval from Gaw'd Help Us Games .  I picked up a giant scorpion from the halloween accessories stand at the toy store  that will serve as a monster the figures can do combat with. There's an even bigger scorpion toy available but I'm afraid my table space wont be able to accommodate it for gaming. The one shown above is pictured with a 54mm to 60mm figure. The weeks leading to Halloween would be the perfect time to look for creepy crawly nasties like this.