The Zoidyssey – Adventures with Warriors of Athena

My North Star order arrived last week and I’ve been busy reading through the books.  I’m tackling this solo to start off with so I’m happy to read ahead through the Quests book to start thinking about putting my miniatures requirements together.  Before I can get too far with that I need my party of adventurers, called Warriors in the game.

The Heroes book takes us through putting our main hero and their accompanying companions together.

This morning on the WoA facepage there was a link to an app someone has written to do the generation process for you.  I had a go and it seems to be working and certainly is well detailed.

Hero

You roll up for your hero using the tables provided to find out some basic information like their parent and what skills and weaknesses this confers.  There are baseline stats for the core characteristics that can then be enhanced using the allocation given and then a set of skills are selected.

Finally starting equipment is selected and paid for from a budget of 100 wealth and you won’t be able to buy all the best gear straight away.  Given the miniature I have in mind I’ve picked a hand weapon, 2x javelins, light armour and a shield.

All of this is recorded onto your Hero sheet and at the moment mine is done in rough.  Once I’ve got it written out neatly then I’ll post a photo.

Companions

Next we move on to Companions.  As a solo player my hero gets 160 base recruitment points to spend and can have up to 7 companions.  There can be a mixture of human and animal Companions.  There are some interesting choices available and I decided to stick to humans to start off with.

I’m partly working around the available miniatures I have or have just bought.  Some are larger than the majority of my standard 28mm minis, being more of the epic 28, 30-32mm foot to eye size.  I’ll try to use these as the characters as they stand out more easily.  The companions come with specified equipment so I’ll have to try to match as close as possible to the miniatures I’ve got.  I selected the following:

An Archer 20RP, a Guardsman with 2 handed axe 20RP, a Songmaster with staff 13RP, a Hoplite 35RP, a Hunter 30RP, a Savage with 2 handed weapon 30RP and a Thief 10RP =158RP Total and all 7 available spaces used. Again there is a template sheet for recording these and when I’ve got a neat one I’ll take a photo.

Some miniatures are still on order but I’ll paint the ones I’ve got next.

Second set of Argonauts are finished.  Same process used as I’d like a really unified look across this group.

I order a new background book by Jon Hodgson from Bad Squiddo.  Arrived super quickly.  Annie still has the best customer service in the industry.

I bought all four sets of Argonauts from Wargames Foundry.  I’ve wanted to paint them for so long and now have a project worthy of the expense and effort.  The inspiration for their design was the Harryhausen “Jason and the Argonauts”.  The Argonauts had a similar costume which looked like this:

I was also very inspired by the diorama “Attack of the Harpies” by Martin Buck in ‘Kevin Dallimore’s Painting and Modelling Guide Master Class’.  Martin uses three of the Foundry Argonauts and he wanted to show the black armour as shining in the sunshine.  To do this he went for a deep navy blue midtone and then navy blue highlight.  Personally I think there is too much blue and it doesn’t look black any more, but each to their own:

On to painting mine then.  Small batches of 6/7 at a time as there is a bit more detail to do than usual for me.   I want an unbleached linen/wool look for the cloaks, chitons and horsehair crests.  I blended Pallid Bone Speedpaint with medium and some Vallejo GameAir White (2/2/1) to give an unbleached material undertone and because it is mostly Speedpaint the darker tone element still falls into the deeper areas and any uneven surfaces to give a look I really liked.  This  was highlighted with a wet blend of Vallejo Game Bonewhite (cream), P3 Menoth White Highlight (ivory), and GameAir White.  I put a dot of each onto the palette and then depending on where on the model I’m working I can blend a great tone or highlight by hand.  I can also work up gradually to a highlight colour which is never plain white so I keep the unbleached look.

Armour was Tyrian Navy Speedpaint with highlights in AP Blanche Masterclass The Darkness (my new favourite paint).  This is less blue than the harpy diorama but still looks like light is reflecting off black.  Shields are black undercoat with Tyrian Navy overcoated and then highlighted with The Darkness before edging with Dark Star Royal Gold.

Skintone was a blend of Speedpaints – Crusader Skin and Warrior Skin with occasional highlights/blending using Vallejo Beige Red.

Metals are a base of either Dark Star Baroque for the steel and Dark Star Royal Gold.  These were highlighted after varnishing with DS Bright Steel and DS Renaissance Gold with edge highlights added using Vallejo Pale Burnt Metal and Gold from the Metallics range.

I had to wait for the sun to come out to try and get some nice pictures that give us a feel of being in Greece.

I also did a Warlord Games sacrificing priest I had lying around.  The Argonauts are forever sacrificing to the gods so this felt appropriate to go with them.

The game uses D20 for both the player’s party and the monsters.  There is also a standard deck of cards that is needed to help with randomising activations.

I found a cool looking deck of cards by searching for Greek myth themed cards online.  Someone had a deck on eBay and after some negotiation I got them for £15 which wasn’t too bad.

This may seem like an unnecessary expense, I do have plenty of other packs of cards.  I’d still rather play with everything designed to fit the theme.  This helps with the suspension of disbelief and keeps you in the game’s world.

Then to The Dice Shop to get some specialist dice.  I’m getting old and the minces are going so I need bigger than standard dice to see the numbers at playing distance without my glasses.  I’ve therefore bought 34mm D20.  They are more than twice the size of a standard dice.  You are supposed to only need two and I already had two for playing Silver Bayonet (black and white) but I wanted something different for this game.  I went with blue with gold numbering for the player die and the multicoloured metal ones with extra glitter for the monsters.  These were on sale (£20 down to £3) and clearly aren’t popular but they suit this purpose just fine.   They look and feel totally different which is great for getting a different “feel” in-game.

As well as those I got a bag and tray and a D6 to use as a turn counter.  Don’t know if I’ll need one of those but it doesn’t hurt and so got a bigger one again.

The theme for this month’s PaintComp here in the OTT Forums is “Olympian”.  As I can’t paint the North Star gods yet, (ordered but not released until the end of the month) I’ll have to go with what I’ve already got.  I have an Avatar of Artemis miniature by Crocodile Games.  A brilliant sculpt from Chris Fitzpatrick who some might know from his GW days (he did a famous range of Dark Elves in the early 2000s amongst others).  This miniature is in the 36/40mm range and North Star say their gods are 36mm so it should be a good match.

Inspiration.

I wanted a nice bright look for her drape emulating the look of silk in the sunshine.  She is the goddess of hunting so I’m going for green as her main colour.  For her bow I’m going for a yew longbow look.  A yew bow is made from two types of yew wood, the springy outer wood which is very pale and the strong and resilient dark orange of the heartwood for the back of the bow.  Looking closely at the model there is a clever bit of sculpting to cover the awkward space in the crook of the right elbow.  This might have a hollow in it that would be difficult to cast correctly.  Therefore, Chris has put a couple of feathers in there, either attached to the top of the quiver or her wrist cuff.  I’ve looked at pictures of hunting birds and have selected a hawk feather as the most obvious pattern to paint.

Process

I started with a zenital highlighted undercoat using rattle can spray, white over black for the maximum in contrast.  Skintones next.  Crusader Skin Speedpaint folowed by so boosting of the tone with Darkoath Flesh and Guilliman Flesh Contrast paints.  Then in with a solid acrylic, Beige Red which was blended with the three speedpaints on the palette to strengthen the tone further in key areas.  Finally highlights added with these mixes and Bonewhite acrylic added to brighten the tone.  Thin washes over and between applications to complete the blending.

Clothing was next, Shamrock Green which is described as vivid green and certainly doesn’t disappoint.  Then bow, quiver and metallics followed – all using a blend of paint types and tones, carefully overlaid.

Hair and face followed.  Thinned Dark Wood Speedpaint, extra blending and highlights.  Eyes are filled white and then a thin black line is added.

Basing
Krautcover Soil of Sparta is being used with all of the models, as a one and done finish for most.  For the gods and characters I’ll add some extra tufts and flower tufts from the stack, mostly from Tajima1 or Mininatur.

I’ve been ordering miniatures for this for a while and will have loads more than I need for WoA but will likely also start pulling forces together for OGAM as well.

Here is the first haul, my Christmas Foundry order and a trawl of the Pile.

Working from left there are a range of character models down the left hand edge including; Warlord Games (Sacrificing priest), Crocodile Miaitures (female and owl in tree), Reaper Bones (Priest adventurer), Crooked Dice (Perseus and Bubo), Lucid Eye (Odysseus), Ral Partha Europe (Harpy) and at the bottom Theseus and the Minotaur by Foundry  Next to them are the Wargames Foundry Argonauts (top) Lucid Eye Achilles and Myrmidons with Relic Calibos and then more Foundry below, harpies and two blisters of Greeks, Spartans and Athenians.  In the middle there are Relic undead with some shield transfers and below them more Foundry, satyrs, Trojan characters and Aeëtes with guards.  In the bags are some Lucid Eye Sea People and Amazons as well as some Wargames Atlantic skeleton sprues and then bottom right are some Amazon and Ptolemaic command bases which are mostly Forge of Ice (next to the Krautcover Soil of Sparta basing material), and finally a couple of Foundry columns and tropaion from Footsore.

Still more to come of course 🙂  I have my preorder in with North Star for the books, gods and some other bits. I have also got an order in with Element for some Reaper monsters.  According to the video previews I’ve seen on YouTube I’ll need up to 15 bees and 3 cyclopes for the first scenario.  I’ve therefore had to order a couple of extra cyclopses from Alternative Armies and I’ll need to go back to North Star for another couple of sets of bees.

To harness some of the prerelease excitement I’ve got some inspirational reading together.

Broadly there are two categories, the military history books and the myths.  I find artists particularly inspiring and there are some of my favourites illustrating some of these; Angus McBride, Peter Connolly and Alan Lee (he illustrated the Rosemary Sutcliff book and she was one of my favourite authors when I was young).  Clearly as this is a fantasy game there is no need for historical accuracy but I do also game historically so I’ll try and paint humans is vaguely believable fashion.

The Osprey Myth series has three excellent titles covering in a succinct and no nonsense way the three main hero cycles of the Illiad, Argonautica and the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Highly recommended.  The myths are all traceable back to the Greek Bronze Age (1800-1100 BCE) or possibly even before that.  The Trojan War is usually placed within the dating of Troy VI ending @1300-1280BCE.  Therefore, if I’m planning on depicting named heroes from the Trojan War, I’ll need Bronze Age miniatures in boar tusk helmets with tower or figure 8 shields and maybe even Dendra armour (although that feels like something an end of level boss should wear).

It is my intention to have an anachronistic approach, i.e. mixing up miniatures from different historical periods.  This will help a bit with the fantasy feel as those of us with some historical understanding won’t be able to pin the forces into an historical time frame.

Finally the backup plan is also in place.  I’ve got a copy of “Of Gods and Mortals” which will be the rules I fall back on in the unlikely event that I don’t like the new ones.