In Rust We Trust: Simpso Shield Slam

I sculpted a shield!

In Rust We Trust is a wonderful Discord community that celebrates the “28” style of the miniature hobby, including kitbashing, sculpting and playing narrative style games. Excitingly, the discord group recently passed the 600 member mark, suggesting how a niche aspect of the miniature hobby is growing in popularity! To celebrate this, they are holding a contest encouraging people to experiment with sculpting using modeling putty. Specifically they teamed up with Tanner Simpson (@simpsominiatures) to create a contest to sculpt a face on a shield and send pictures to ‘inrustcommunity@gmail.com’ by September 30th 2023. Shields with faces on them are a classic element of GW designs in the 90s, championed by John Blanche himself. In the spirit of 90s design, I wanted to create a shield that paid homage to one of my favorite GW artists of that era, Wayne England. His style is iconic, with its grimacing skulls and warped faces, with taut skin, bulging veins, and singed hair.

Flames of Orion - The Sumar Conflict

Pitch black resolve.

At the beginning of September, Steve (sovthofheaven) of the Under the Dice/Hive Scum fame asked if I wanted to take part in a playtesting session for his mech combat game, Flames of Orion. I had played a game of it at Rich Grimmond 2023 a few months earlier, and had a great time with it, so the opportunity to play a few more games was one I was not going to pass up (even if I had to drive quite a few hours to do it).

Resin Casting: One-piece cut molds

One-piece silicone cut molds are a relatively easy way to cast miniatures in resin.

Six years ago we ventured into the world of resin casting to make copies of some of our conversions. It took a lot of trial and error to get something that worked consistently, but we found making a pressure pot was essential. All of the molds we created over the years were two piece molds, which are quite labor intensive. After watching a few YouTube videos by Miscast, where he talks about some of the imaginative models he converted and cast, I started to think about the prospect of creating molds again. What interested me most was trying to make single-piece cut molds, like Miscast favors. These are molds where you pour the silicone all at one time, creating a solid block of silicone surrounding the model. You then use a blade to cut the original model out of the silicone, taking care to cut it just enough to release the model and remain as a single piece. Robert Tolone has some excellent YouTube videos about the process that I encourage you to watch if you are interested. In one of his videos, he used one-piece cut molds to cast some characters from the excellent board game Root. In it, he attaches the models to small plastic cups and pours the silicone into them. This seemed like a relatively straightforward process, so I decided to give it a try, making molds of some old metal Games Workshop models I hope to use as a basis for conversions in the future!

The Rot of Hondious: Battle Reports Games 1-3

The Rot of Hondious - Martin McCoy

Last month we had the absolute pleasure of attending the hobby meet-up Rich Grimmond 2023, hosted by Martin McCoy and Mike DeBolt. One of the highlights of the event was a narrative Inq28 campaign called The Rot of Hondious, that Martin and Bill Ford (of the Mordheim 2022 fame) co-ran. It centers around a backwater feudal planet largely shunned by the Imperium. Its isolation has escalated into a strict quarantine in the last twenty years as the planet has been wracked by a curious plague. The Red Joy seemingly takes hold of its victim’s central nervous system, compelling them to dance with joyous abandon, a rictus smile on their face until they collapse dehydrated, blood leaching from their pores. The Inquisition has recently taken an interest in the phenomenon, and the plague has started to become sentient, having infected the planet's meager psychic population. We played a Red Joy warband at the event and wanted to use this post to describe the narrative and how the event went!