28mm miniatures and conversion bits roundup

The bulk of our 28mm miniatures are obviously from Games Workshop; few other companies offer such a diverse range of models or similar value for money. However, now that I've returned to the 28mm hobby, it's been an absolute delight to discover so many companies around the world supplying both high-quality 28mm miniatures and piles upon piles of conversion bits. Over the last year or so, we've had the distinct pleasure of shopping with several of these companies, and it's high time I put together a list with some links.

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Statuesque Miniatures

Our Imperial army would be a lot more boring without Statuesque Miniatures and their heroic scale accessories line! The heroic scale female heads are perfect for head swaps with GW miniatures and other 28mm heroic minis, and I absolutely love them. Especially the beret and veteran heads are really good. The techno roider heads, on the other hand, go great with space marines and even Terminators. Highly recommended!

We also got Commissar Vespera Venko for our commissar collection, and I was very happy with the model - especially at such a competitive price!

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Bad Squiddo Games

Bad Squiddo miniatures are simply wonderful. Here's the Women's Land Army picnic and the lovely Time for Beer model in my Blood Bowl stands:

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Apr 30, 2019 at 2:56am PDT

These are all excellent quality models, very characterful, and I will definitely be ordering more!

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Wargame Exclusive

Wargame Exclusive do a line of fairly spectacular character models who are, well, let's say especially suitable for a Slaanesh army. Here's my Dark Apostle and an Imperial Guard Commissar.

I'll be ordering some of their Mechanic Adepts to use as, well, Warhammer Tech-Priests. Frankly, the models are good enough that these folks could do original stuff as well.

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Brother Vinni

St. Petersburg's own Brother Vinni have a small range of good quality models I've quite enjoyed painting; below is our Imperial Guard captain and totally not Morrigan from Dragon Age.

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Eureka Miniatures

The invaluable Eureka Miniatures are where I got my Blood Bowl team and several of my Blood Bowl spectators, and their samurai rabbits provided the essential components for my Stormbun Eternals and Zootopia's finest. They were also kind enough to send us some complimentary frogs, one of whom is in the stands. I really like their models: they're full of character and very decently priced.

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Oathsworn Miniatures

Speaking of my Blood Bowl stands, I ordered several figures from Oathsworn Miniatures for them, and I have to say that out of all the miniatures I've ever gotten my hands on, I think these may be the best. I posted a bunch of pictures already, but in addition to my spectators, I've also got a Dandy Highwayfox and a fantastic Badger Mercenary waiting in case someone wants to play Burrows and Badgers. These are simply brilliant miniatures, and I think everyone should own at least one.

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Here are the first spectators for my Blood Bowl stands! Top row: #oathswornminiatures Mouse Nun and Starling Rogue, bottom left #companybminiatures tank commander and bottom right a @reaperminiatures Eastern Mousling. Very pleased with how they turned out; swipe to see them on the stands! #bloodbowl

A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Jan 5, 2019 at 5:16am PST

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Victoria Miniatures

I can't say enough good things about Australia's Victoria Miniatures: their infantry models and conversion bits are fantastic, as are their character models. I also bought and painted one of their vehicles as part of their brushfire fundraiser, and it's a really good kit too.

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Anvil Industries

Another excellent company, Anvil also produces character models and top-notch infantry bits. Several of our Rogue Trader characters are built from Anvil bits, and they are simply a delight to work with.

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Dec 26, 2018 at 10:46am PST

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Reaper Miniatures

Reaper have been around long enough that they hardly need me to advertise them; hell, they even have a Wikipedia page. What I can tell you, though, is that their very affordable plastic Bones range is pretty decent, and paints up quite nicely with Vallejo paints. I've got a couple of their models in use as Heralds for my daemons, and some Eastern Mouslings in my Blood Bowl stands and Burrows and Badgers warband. They're good value for money and in my experience, perfectly usable in 28mm games.

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Perry Miniatures

The Perry brothers should need no introduction: I've got several of their boxed sets and they are absolutely excellent, and they're also the go-to source for horses. I'll show off what I've done with them as soon as those projects are finished!

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Raging Heroes

A French company who specialize in female miniatures. I've bought several of their models, and I have two mildly critical observations to make. The first is that to some extent Raging Heroes are victims of their own marketing. Their miniatures look amazing online, but when you actually get them, they're, well, a lot less heroic than they looked in the pictures. I've found them to be surprisingly small. The second problem is related: the models are very fiddly, even annoyingly so. I've still got one of them lying around unfinished because I straight up lost its other arm. This does not usually happen. No other 28mm models have been anything as flat out annoying to assemble. Especially the metal models are annoying. Then again, I got some resin Davidians, and they're brilliant.

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Jul 2, 2020 at 8:52am PDT

So I'm kind of on the fence here: when the models are good, they're very good, but then they have to be for the amount of trouble they are!

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Warlord Games

The place for World War II miniatures, Warlord Games's flagship product is Bolt Action, a 28mm WWII miniature game that's also an excellent source of Imperial Guard infantry and vehicles. Here's a Panzer IV next to some GW metal Sisters for scale:

And here's my latest purchase: the cutest little Renault FT.

I love Warlord Games tanks, and will definitely be buying more of them. The resin ones are good; the hard plastic ones are excellent.

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Sloppy Jalopy

I bought a Sloppy Jalopy BMP-2 via Sally 4th, and I'm very happy with it!

You can see it painted up here.

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Sally 4th

A UK company with a line of fantasy football accessories, I've got their crowd waiting to get into my Blood Bowl stands. They're very good quality miniatures.

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Kromlech

A Polish company, Kromlech are a great source for conversion bits, especially for Marines (the "Legionary" line); my Terminator Inquisitor has a Kromlech power maul. They also do some pretty neat Ork stuff, I've got an Orc Commissar lying around, waiting for my Blood Axes to show up...

High quality miniatures and bits, definitely recommended!

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Zealot Miniatures

I've used several Zealot conversion bits and been very happy with them. My Tech-Marine has a servo arm and power axe from them, and I've been meaning to order some of their dungeon scenery for ages.

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Dark Sword Miniatures

I mentioned the complimentary frog we received from Eureka Miniatures earlier; we couldn't just have one frog in the stands, so in addition to ordering a pile more Eureka miniatures, we also went to Dark Sword Miniatures for a Frog Bishop, as well as several other models from their Critter Kingdoms line. They're absolutely lovely.

They also do a line of Game of Thrones miniatures, and how was I supposed to resist their Cersei? Would definitely throw a child miniature out of a window for her. We also received a complimentary birdman, which is also a really neat model and is definitely going to be watching some Blood Bowl. All in all, these are very high quality fantasy miniatures; definitely recommended.

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Modiphiüs Entertainment

Modiphiüs are the creators of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare, which I'm kinda interested in, but slightly put off by the high price and the fact that most of the models are, in my opinion, kind of bland. I did get their Boston companions box, so I could have Piper in my 40k Chaos army, and I can testify that the models are very high quality. It's just that most of them aren't very interesting.

Hint: if you play Fantasy Flight's Fallout board game, and you should, Modiphiüs's bottle caps are worth your money.

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Fantasy Flight Games

Finally, I should mention that we're using quite a few models from Fantasy Flight's Imperial Assault in our Warhammer 40,000 games, from Primaris Psykers and Eversor Assassins to Armiger Helverins. I've quite liked the miniatures, and in my experience they fit in just fine with the more heroic-scale GW minis.

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I think that's everybody! I can't tell you what a delight it is to have so many different places to buy quality minis and bits, and for affordable prices too.

Let's Play Elite: Dangerous

J.Jameson Jnr
51a South Dormitory
Fish Processing Plant 3142
Sirocco
Merlin
Ross 154
-1/0Rs2a S16
31.12.3199

To whom it may concern

It is our duty to inform you of the death of your grandfather, Commander Peter Jameson.

The wreckage of his ship was found in the Reidquat system on 11 November 3199. He was presumed killed in combat after a "misunderstanding" over some stolen goods according to the local press.

A last will and testament was prepared on 3 February 3199 and section 4.1 has been circulated to all living grandchildren as instructed by our late client.

If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact us. The normal fees of fifty (50) Credits per hour (including service tax) apply.


Yours sincerely


Mr Edmond Sneer

When I was a kid, some computer games made an indelible impression on me. One of them was Frontier: Elite 2. I never played the first one, but Frontier embodied the magic of computers, space and everything just by being a space simulator game that procedurally generated the entire damn galaxy for you to fly around in and fit on a single HD disk. There was no plot as such, and no way to finish the game; you went out there and you made your own plot. It was adventure enough to do some trading and missions to save up for a better ship, and then head out to see the galaxy. I still remember deeply impressive stars like Sirius and Arcturus, finding permits to visit places like the federal prison colony on Ross 128 and the religious fanatics at van Maanen's Star, and eventually making my way to the Empire. So when some irresponsible bastard gifted me Elite: Dangerous on Steam, of course I was going to have to try it. I'm going to ramble about some of the practicalities of getting into the game, and then try to give some kind of verdict on whether it's worth it or not.

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When you start Elite: Dangerous, you're put through a tutorial of sorts where you get your pilot's license and the title of commando Commander. You're then given a Sidewinder Mk I and let loose in a beginner-exclusive area called the Pilots' Federation District to learn the ropes.

Luckily, there are a lot of resources out there for anyone just starting out. I've gotten a lot of help out of the beginner's guide on the Caffeinated Pixels blog and the wiki, but there's a couple of things that I would have needed someone to explain to me, though. For anyone else venturing into the game, here they are.

First of all, you may have heard of nav beacons. Scanning them gets you information on everything useful in the system, so that seems like something you'd want to do. However, what no-one will tell you is that the nav beacon you can select as a destination on your navigation computer and supercruise to is not the nav beacon. Instead, the nav beacon is a white square that shows up on your scanner when you drop out of supercruise near the beacon. You then have to point your ship at it, target it and wait for it to scan. Simple, but initially incomprehensible.

Speaking of incomprehensible things, there's the mission board. I've played enough Frontier to know that when you're starting out and your ship doesn't have a lot of cargo space, you want to do courier missions and stuff like that. Also, it's good form to check the mission board to see if someone might be willing to pay a premium for whatever cargo you've got on you. Sadly they've made this last bit harder: whereas in Frontier they'd just straight up pay you for whatever you had, here you have to have a specific amount of what they want.

Anyway, say you find something on a mission board where they want you to either take something somewhere else, or bring them something. Below is an example: some folks wanted me to haul two units of Performace Enhancers to this base.

What puzzled the shit out of me was that I would increment the bar so I was delivering them the two units they asked for, but the button at the lower left was still greyed out and said "partial complete" or whatever. It took several Google searches until I figured out that I was supposed to click the "deliver items" button.

Once you've done that, the Complete button activates. I don't know, maybe this is just me being a moron, but the double confirmation required just completely confused me.

Finally, a third thing: beware the Advanced Docking Computer. So far, the landings have been fine, but the departures not so much! Once I found myself sitting in queue for so long that the timer ran out, and flight control very pointedly told me to leave or get fined. Since it was one of my first real flights, I may have panicked a little and crashed. I came away with slightly damaged shields, dented pride and a fine for reckless flying or whatever. Another time I had to cut out the docking computer when it took off from a landing pad and was very determined to rear-end another ship. Given that launching is really pretty easy to do manually, I think it might actually be wiser to leave the computer out of it entirely. You can set this up in the systems panel.

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Anyway, after a couple of trips between Matet and Dromi, hauling space steroids and whatnot, I made enough profit to advance from Penniless to Mostly Penniless trader rank.

Once you've achieved a rank in anything, you get a "graduation mission" to leave the Pilots' Federation District. As you can see, it's very easy to achieve with just a little trading. My mission took me to HR 8526, a fairly massive trinary system some 75 light years from Sol. Along the way, I made my first proper manual landing at one of those rotating starbases, namely Noriega Port at Arare, and I think my hands shook for the rest of the day.

This experience simultaneously convinced me that I need to play more Elite, and that I needed a joystick. I was quite surprised to find how cheap some of them were; certainly you could spend hundreds, but I got a Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X, i.e. a joystick and throttle, for 70€. I'm old enough to be genuinely shocked that it really was plug-and-play: you stick the USB cord in and it just works. Elite even has bindings ready for all the twelve or so buttons and various other controls, and when you actually use it to fly, it just works. I can't imagine going back to a mouse and keyboard.

Changing the button bindings is theoretically easy, but in practice requires wading through a fairly large menu that isn't always subdivided quite as logically as you might wish; it occasionally took quite a while to figure out.

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The nearest Imperial system I could find was Ngalkin, so I headed over there to find some courier jobs. There are two major factions in Elite that you can gain ranks in: the Federation and the Empire. Back in Frontier, two of the three starting locations were in the Federation, so the Empire always seemed more exotic and interesting, and they had the coolest ships. My general plan at this point is pretty much to fly around and make some money, so I can get a better ship and maybe do some real exploring.

One thing the game could really do with is at least some geographical structure. Right now, when I left the Pilots' Federation District, I've pretty much been to systems that just feel totally random. There's not much glamour in grinding out courier missions to HR 8526, especially when I barely have any real idea where in the galaxy I am in relation to anything meaningful. I get that grinding is fundamental to MMO's, but in Frontier, two of the starting locations were in the core systems of the Federation, with marked trade routes leading to stars whose names you could actually recognize, so there was something for you to orient yourself by. Here there's nothing.

But then, I guess that grinding out trade and courier missions in unnamed systems does kind of get to the heart of the Elite experience. As in Frontier, so in Dangerous: you very much need to make your own story. I mean you're not going to be swept off your feet by the plot and the setting; there barely are any. Although there is an actual game, as opposed to a roadmap to a roadmap. So I don't know. If you're looking for an immersive, dramatic movie-like experience, this ain't it. Even as an Elite fan with lots of good memories attached to the franchise, I'd be lying if I said Elite: Dangerous captured my imagination. If you're interested in some zen space trucking? See you in the 'verse, commando.

Warhammer 40,000: Imperial reinforcements

We command bread and awe!
- misheard Sisters of Battle line from Dawn of War: Soulstorm

I made a new year's resolution to finish modeling projects, and when most of my teaching work evaporated because of the pandemic, what else was I supposed to do except paint? Therefore, here are some random Imperial units I've picked up over the last few years, finally painted.

Aubrey Beardsley: The Achieving of the Sangreal (1893-94)

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I got a Scout Sentinel in Ophir colors, because I like Sentinels. They're very handy in Dawn of War: Winter Assault and Gladius! The legs and the inside of the cockpit are in German Camo Dark Green.

We also participated in the Victoria Miniatures charity drive in the wake of the terrible bush fires in Australia by buying a Kangaroo APC, which I'm happy to report is an excellent model. Here it is as a van Diemen pattern Chimera in Chirikov Rad-Guards colors.

I also painted a Jokaero! Delightfully, one of the special resource tiles in Gladius is a Jokaero encampment, and it inspired me to get one for myself.

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I painted up my old metal Sisters earlier, but even before the new codex came out, I was keen to expand my collection. Or as they put it in Soulstorm: Behold! The Immolator!

Hint to anyone assembling the old Immolator kit: figure out how the frame for the glass dome fits into the turret before gluing any of it together. The instructions really don't make this clear, and it'll save you some trouble. I actually prefer this model to the new Immolator; I mean there's baroque grimdark and then there's that stained glass window...

My Sisters are from the Order of the Sorores Gratiae, and have made an appearance in my Rogue Trader tabletop campaign, where Canoness Julia Aquilia is currently leading a crusade against the foul xenos in the Acheron sector. Their home world is the shrine world of Lavina in Tertia Pars of the Acheron sector, and they wear emerald robes over their black armor.

Eventually, of course, the codex came out. As it happened, the first models I ended up building out of the new range were a Rogue Trader Arch-militant and a Sister Hospitaller, using a Kromlech apothecary conversion kit. I didn't like the new Hospitaller model; I'm all for scenic bases, but when it starts to feel like you're moving an entire diorama around the tabletop, it's too far for my taste. Instead I made her:

However, this highlighted a problem. Compared to the ancient metal figures, the new Sisters are gigantic.

You could maybe get away with having old and new Sisters in the same army, but the same unit? No way. So there goes my detachment idea.

I still made a Preacher from a Raging Heroes Davidian:

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So, the long-awaited plastic Sisters turn out to be a mixed blessing. I kind of like the squad box, but like I said, the parts aren't as interchangeable as I'd have hoped, so they're actually not that interesting to build. I also get that they needed to scale up the Sisters because of how tiny the old metal models were, but I'm still disappointed the difference was so massive.

Also, of course, we're now in ninth edition, which seems to confirm that the turnaround in editions is now three years. That's just completely absurd, and I can definitely feel my interest in keeping up with Warhammer collapse. It's time to look at other miniature games.

Let's Read Tolkien 71: The Last Debate

The morning came after the day of battle, and it was fair with light clouds and the wind turning westward.

Legolas and Gimli go strolling around Minas Tirith, where they find Merry and Pippin and discuss stonework and seagulls. Legolas tells the hobbits how they passed through the Paths of the Dead and recruited a bunch of ghosts to drive the enemy from Pelargir and set up their dramatic arrival at the battle of Pelennor.

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to a staff meeting in Aragorn's command tent, presided over by Gandalf. He explains to Éomer and Prince Imrahil about the Ring, and they agree on a strategy: lead an army to the gates of Mordor to draw out Sauron's forces and clear the way for Frodo to make it to the volcano.

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Again, this is a fairly short and simple chapter: it's the second part of the breathing space between the battle at Minas Tirith and the Black Gate, and wraps things up before the climax of this book and the entire story.

The spirits of the oathbreakers Aragorn summons to do his bidding seem more like the classic ghosts with "unfinished business" than Tolkien's wraiths. I somehow really like Legolas's thoroughly matter-of-fact statement that he's not afraid of the ghosts of men, full stop.

A couple of things are worth pointing out in Aragorn's staff meeting. First, there's the simple fact stated by Gandalf that there is no way they can defeat Sauron at war, and that was never the point. This ties in to the theological point of the whole story, but I'll get to that when we get to it! But the point being made quite strongly here is that all the military heroics of the last few chapters are at best a distraction in terms of the real battle.

Aragorn makes a point of saying that he doesn't want to order anyone to march on Mordor, and reiterates that everyone who goes should be a volunteer. It's kind of hard to take this seriously, though, when they move straight on to discussing how many thousands of men they can muster in what time. It'd be one thing to claim that oh, sure, everyone volunteered, but they're not really even trying. It almost feels like Éomer and Imrahil are humoring him.

Anyway that's it: the armies of the Free Peoples are going to march to Mordor and certain defeat, to buy time for a hobbit and his manservant.

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Next time: Peregrin stabs a troll.