It's been ages and ages since I wrote a `Skulking' column. I have many excuses for this, but you've all heard excuses before. So I'll just be honest about it. I was kidnapped by agents of Dr Fu Manchu, kept chained in an Egyptian tomb, and fed unspeakable drugs by evil (yet beautiful) Eurasian women in scanty silk clothing. But I'm all right now. WHAT AM I UP TO? Since I left Foundry last autumn, I have been engaged in several forms of semi-gainful employment. My primary means of support is painting figures for paying customers - I specialize in singly based Victorian and Pulp Era skirmish figures, although I'll have a go at most things, and I like to think I do a better than average figure for a reasonable price. I'm not Kevin Dallimore (who is a deity), but I don't charge what he does, either - nor do I spend hours on a single figure, because that's not what my customers want. I'd rather paint for a smallish group of people who are on the same wavelength than do the Ebay thing, or make vast armies in the hope that somebody will want them. I've made loads of scenery for them as wants waterfalls and Russian churches and cave formations and African trading posts. I've written two novels for young people, funny Victorian adventure stories involving flying machines and rubber boys, pterodactyls and knife-wielding princesses from Inner Asia; the first of these, `The Strictest School in the World', will be published by KidsCan in 2006. I've been repping model soldiers to the retail trade for several companies. I've published `Astounding Tales', which I'll lay on the blarney in a page or two. Right now I'm working on a 1920s gangster game in collaboration with Mark Copplestone - early days yet - and what may be a graphic novel for 8-10 year olds, in collaboration with award-winning Canadian illustrator Bill Slavin. I'm re-doing `Science versus Pluck' for a new generation, and hope to have that out this autumn. And - to pay the rent, right now - a whole batch of Pulp Figures Zeppelintruppen and other `fantasy figures for historical gamers' from the brawny hands of two-fisted sculptor Bob Murch. He demands I say that - ON PAINTING FAST I usually take about 15-20 mins per figure, give or take, although complex items can take much longer. I am constantly amazed how quickly things like basic WW2 things get finished. I paint in batches of 30-40, which is the most I can do without getting sick of them, and usually try to get a mix of different types within the batch. I am not an assembly-line sort of person; I remember, Hal always said he'd have made a good factory worker, but I am a natural anarchist. So, a mix of stuff is good. But here's the thing. Limit your choice of colors. Even if the figures aren't uniformed regulars. Take a group of confederate infantry, who will be dominantly grey. Select some gangsters, who will have grey suits. Some Pulp or Copplestone Chinese regulars in grey uniforms. Some vikings in grey cloaks or trousers. Paint `em all. Use the blacks and browns and maybe light blue confederate colors as the key tones for the gangsters and Chinese and Vikings. Add other colors for a bit of contrast. That way you've saved on mixing 17 hues with different shades and highlights, and with 40 figures, that might be an hour's total thinking, choosing, and mixing saved. I know people whose painting is slow primarily because they agonize over colour choices! It doesn't matter if you have six gangsters in grey suits and six vikings in grey cloaks, because, next time you are doing something mainly blue, or mainly tan, you'll do six vikings and six gangsters in those colors. Mixed in with your whole collection, nobody will see a theme - although I'd limit the use of dayglo and tie-dye if I were you. ON DIE CAST MODELS Most of my gaming and collecting in the past couple of years has been 19th and 20th century skirmish stuff in 28mm. Victorian adventure, 1920s/30s Pulp, some WW2, some modern or near future cheesy adventure of a Hollywood variety - you know, spies, assassins, aliens. One of the many things that differentiates the last two centuries from time before is the proliferation of vehicles. Two hundred years ago people walked, or rode horses; there were some wagons, carts and coaches, and I have models for those. In contrast, your Victorian adventurer need to at least hail a hansom cab, your 1930s detective needs to tail that Packard in a taxi, and - if you are doing `the Bourne Supremacy' (which I saw this week and immediately viewed through a wargamer's lens) you'll need enough vehicles to feature an 80 car pile-up. Which leads me to die cast models. We all had them as kids, in my case the 1/43rd scale Corgi and Dinky toys of my 1960s boyhood, and the smaller Matchbox cars. Nowadays the brands change, but the scales are much the same. I see people using 1/43rd models with 28mm figures. I have no idea why, except that they are easily available. 1/43 goes with figures about 40mm high. I know that 28mm figures tend to be bulky, and stand on a base like a paving stone. I blame Games Workshop for the strange sense of scale some people seem to have. It indicates to me how grotesquely built the 40K style of figure must be. 40K figures have a bulk that makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Kate Moss. I saw something recently in my local paper; a Honda Civic is 176" long (under 15 feet) and 67" wide (5'7") while a Lincoln Navigator - a huge vehicle as passenger cars go, is 205" long (c 17 feet) and 87" wide. What that means is that an average car is a little less than the height of a figure wide, and around 2 1/2 figures long. Of course, if we were talking about accurately scaled 28mm figures, you'd want something around 1/60th. At 1/60th scale, where an inch equals five feet, both of these vehicles would be about three inches long. 1/48th is big, but looks OK for vehicles that you want to look imposing. Military and giant-redneck-big-wheelie items can be absurdly overscale in a Hollywood game. I take an `average' figure when I go looking at model cars. Most of the smaller toy cars are made to fit the packaging, which means that a fire engine and a VW Bug are the same length. There's a whole group of toy cars that are nominally 1/64th in scale, but this means little. Some - almost always the sports cars - look right, while larger vehicles are clearly underscale. I regard all pickup trucks as being the same, but different sizes - an enthusiast would disagree. Almost nobody drives a sensible family car, and there's not a minivan to be seen.There are far too many expensive-brand roadsters in my collection; I have yet to find a convincing American police car that matches my figures. Maybe I should make a donut shop for the cops to come swarming out of on foot. For my earlier period autos, I have been lucky to find many of the Lledo `Day's Gone' vehicles from England ( most are made in China, as is everything else) which fit 28mm very well. They make a lot of vans promoting, well, anybody who wants promoting, and there's a collector's market for them. I simply buy whatever's cheapest, and repaint it. Matchbox once made period vehicles, perhaps a little larger, and you can find those bronze pencil sharpeners, which repaint well. Early automobiles varied much more in size than do modern cars; some were the size of wagons, some the size of bathtubs, so again, I don't worry too much. If the seats look like a figure (minus knapsack, greatcoat etc) could sit down, that's fine by me. ON ASTOUNDING TALES! Forgive me, for a moment, if I give you my Barnum and Bailey spiel about my recently published rules - which have sold out two printings already. Huge print runs, he says, lying freely - You may have seen an early, short and incomplete version in this fine magazine. Hype mode is on now - Astounding Tales! is a simple, snappy set of rules for mayhem, murder and Weird Horror set in the period between the 1920s and the end of the black-and-white B Movie era in the 1950s: Film Noir, hard-boiled novels, pulp magazines with Charles Atlas advertisements in the back, that sort of thing. A world where down-at-heel private eyes fight vulgar, flashy hoodlums; where clean-cut heroes - often cunningly disguised by wearing a tiny silk mask- save the world from ambitious mad scientists, laughably inept villains and, quite often, the Germans. A world with garish posters featuring a lot of Colt automatics, green gripping monster hands, and women in far too much mascara and too few clothes for respectable tastes. WAR! It's the Yangtze patrol in China, Bolsheviks chasing British agents, raiders on horseback sweeping across the desert, revolution in banana republics with unlikely names! And I don't like the look of that Hitler fella, either - CRIME! Mad dog killers roam the streets. Jaded private eyes drink bourbon for breakfast. The Shadow Knows, Sam Spade snarls, and Capone's bringing the booze. HIGH ADVENTURE! From the Polar Ice to the steaming jungles. Travel with Doc Savage, swing through trees with the ape man, discover lost tombs and blow 'em up with dynamite. Land a Ford Tri-Motor on a South Sea Island where the only people who aren't cannibals are - lunch! INTRIGUE! Laugh at the Pharaoh's Curse! Foil the fiendish plans of Dr Fu Manchu! Light a cigarette for Lauren Bacall! Meet White Russian countesses with wide eyes and deep secrets! HORROR! Face untold terrors from the deep, ancient ones from across the dimensions, undead things and cold-hearted agents from Internal Revenue! Astounding Tales! is loosely structured, played in scenes like a movie. It's about action and storyline rather than victory conditions. One person acts as director, controlling the villains, and moving the extras. Players operate one or more characters, with a crew of sidekicks, comic foils and supporting cast. You can yell `cut', you can interrupt the action, you can demand changed to the plot! The game mechanics are deliberately fast and easy; you leap out of a speeding Buick, spot the secret lever and shoot up a speakeasy with simple die rolls. Play with few or thousands of figures.  Astounding Tales! is fifty pages of playing rules, character lists for everyone from Indiana Jones to The Phantom, from cavemen to the United States Navy. It's got snappy quotes, photos from games, authentic period `art', and a cheat sheet for those too soused to flip through the book. Full color Pulp covers, b/w interior. Trenchcoats and cheap floozies not included. Astounding Tales! is the official miniatures game for the 1932 World's Fair. Available from And That's The Way It Was... "We're making history on a small scale" Publishers of all things TSATF... and then some Online orders: http://www.amazon.com/shops/loribrom 213 3rd Street NE - Hickory NC 28601-5124 USA Voice/Fax: 828.324.1991 Hype mode off. I'm very happy with `AT!', not only as a published set of rules, but as part of my unfolding scheme to return the FUN to wargaming, and to give gamers permission to think outside the box (possibly use the box to stand their drinks on) and use their imaginations interactively. Many rules systems actually serve to limit the players' imagination by straightjacketing them into formal procedures that are the mechanics of the game. What's that all about? What I find is that, once players have been `given permission' to play up a role in B-movie fashion, most of them are good at it. More important, they enjoy themselves. Like those old Doc Savage novels? Wanna be Doc Savage for a couple of hours? Better still, be one of his semi-comic sidekicks? How about Bertie Wooster? Or jaded gumshoe Phil Marlowe? MISSING IN ACTION At Historicon I lost a couple of boxes of figures. I still live in hope that somebody picked them up accidentally, and they are in a big box in someone's basement, but I suspect they were stolen. If anyone sees 28mm WW2 Germans (including zombies and clunky robots) or Pulp types, finished in a semi gloss and mounted on washers with tan Woodland Scenics on the base, they might be mine. If anyone offers to sell them to you, please let me know. Ideally, knock him out with your super-powers, take the figures, and then let me know. Back to MWAN # 131 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 Legio X This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com