"Jane Fondue" - Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish Character

Janes first recollections is the warm fur of the mother. She was left into the wild to die as an infant. Miraculously instead dying, Jane was adopted by a female brown bear who raised and nurtured her. When a little older, maybe 8 or so, she got totally bored waiting 5 months every winter for mama bear to wake.

Jane left the cave and after a while, a band of knights from Silvery Moon ran into her. They "saved" the girl taking her to the city. She couldn't speak and no one knew where the girl came. People assumed she was either blessed or cursed by the gods of the wild and handed her to druids, with whom she lived until adulthood.

The druids taught Jane to speak and behave, sort of. She didn't have an aptitude for magic and thus became a ranger instead.

With such epic and portentous background it surprised no-one, that Jane turned up an adventurer. Being a bit antisocial she never kept jobs for long before she ran into Bors and his band of heroes. Bors' straightforward way of doing the business of "adventure heroism" appeals to Jane. Their method is:
a) Identify the bad guys/girls/humanoids/monsters
b) Kill them
c) Take their treasure
d) Receive gold from civilian authorities
e) rinse and repeat

Statistics:
"Jane Fondue" - Good Companion - Wild Ranger
Spd 6, Def 4, Hits 2, Str 3, Agi 3, Int 3, Mor 3
Special Power: "Call of the Wild
Abilities: Concealing Cloak, Dodge, Eagle Eyes, Loner, Luck (1), Move Silently, Treasure Hunter (1)
Weapons: Short Sword (4+), Bow (4+)
Cost: 38 Gp

Other members of the Party of Adventurers:
"Bors the Axe"

"Bors the Axe" - Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish Character

"Bors the axe", "The Bald Blade of the North", "The Loinclothed Avenger", the man has many names and he came up with them all. Other folks just call him Bors or Mr. Bors, and try to stay away from him mostly, especially when he's drinking (which is most of the time).

Bors likes to boast and to fight and he does the latter well. His boasts are mostly clumsy attempts since his grasp of the common tongue is a bit weak, but no one ever tells him that to his face.

Bors is an Uthgar barbarian. He wields a a great two handed axe which he calls "The Axe" and wears a loincloth to all occasions and all year round. He's come to the north for he has heard there is trouble in Deadsnows, and also gold. Bors is planning to protect the innocent, slay the evil and take all of their gold (which was probably not stolen). He figures the innocent are sure to pay him for his services as well. They're supposed be digging gold from the mountain, so the pay should be good.

Statistics:
"Bors the Axe" - Good Legend - Valiant Warrior
Spd 6, Def 4, Hits 3, Str 4, Agi 4, Int 2, Mor 4
Special Power: "Reign of Steel"
Abilities: Martial Training, Onslaught, Rage, Blocker, Dodge, Roar
Weapons: Two Handed Axe (3+ to hit, 2-handed, Brutal, Unwieldly)
Cost: 61 Gp

Other members of the Party of Adventurers:
"Jane Fondue"

Ogre Mage for Otherworld Skirmish

It's been so long that I almost forgot how to write. Been quite busy, so my limited hobby time has been spent on painting and playing games and sadly this means no time for blogging. I've reached a point where I must post something else this blog will totally die so here goes.

I'm actually in the middle of basing and finishing armies for my 15mm Hail Caesar in addition to painting a Freeborn force for Gates of Antares. After several nights of monotonous basing or painting for the same forces, I went looking for inspiration elsewhere (I don't know if this is a universal condition, but I tend to get bored fast if trying to paint only for one game at a time).

Rummaging through the bookshelf Otherworld skirmish got my eye which lead to rummaging through my unpainted stash of reaper miniatures. This is what happened:

 So it's only partly done, but I promise to glue some flock and tufts on it tonight.

Old school D&D with my son and Otherworld with my neighbour

So last saturday we were at home and no going out because of some coughing and bad weather. My son (he's around 5 yo) asked what we could do. I suggested Age of Sigmar, since we played it a couple of times and he knows the rules.

He said fine, but I would have to paint his faction first (the Storm Cast Eternals from the starter box) and he could go build some legos while I'm at it. Then ensued an interesting discussion where I tried to explain to him how one can not paint 30 miniatures in 10 minutes, and he said "why" a lot.

The prospects of playing AoS with Stormcast Eternals, when I had one model at this stage and the rest of the faction in sprues, was...

With that out of the way we decided, we could play D&D which we have begun some months ago.

I have a set of the old red box + the other colored boxes + a bunch of adventures for those (Castle Caldwell & Beyond, Palace of the Silver Princess and maybe some others too). All my old D&D stuff is in Finnish, which is great when you play with the kids :)

My son's character is Almaran the 1st level fighter. We are currently playing through the 2nd adventure of Caldwell & Beyond, where the hero is commissioned to clean out the dungeons beneath Caldwell's castle. The game took maybe 1 hour, and it was great fun, although he kept asking when he gets to level 2 every three minutes kind of when you're on a long car trip with kids and they ask "are we there yet."

Anyway D&D is great fun and I'm sure we'll continue before soon.

Red box D&D is still one of the best games eva :D

Almaran opens a door to a laboratory with 2 psychotic mages. After small chat he proceeds to chop them up and take their gold as is right and proper.

Just a few hours after we finished, my neighbour contacted asking if I'd like to "go play some boardgames" with him. His family had gone visit the granny for the night and the house had turned into a man cave for a while. One has to use these opportunities and I said yes.

Naturally I had to come up with a game being "mr. War Hammer" as he keeps calling me. So after everyone else went to bed, I collected my dice, miniatures, Dungeon tiles and Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish and off we went.

We played two games with the same war bands, which were a bunch of heroes:

• Ranger
• Minstrel
• Rogue
• Barbarian
• Wardog

and the villains:

• A necromancer
• 5 Skeletons
• 4 Ghouls

The best part was, I got to use the same dungeon tiles 2 times the same day. I'm beginning to fall in love with these tiles! My friend said he liked the game, but hinted that maybe next time we could try Dread Fleet. We played that last time and he apparently enjoyed it more than OwFS. Might be we drank more beer too last time. I guess, I have to paint the rest of those ships now :)

A band of heroes putting an end to the reign of N00b the Necromancer, which sadly failed this time

So it was a very game intensive weekend, and that's 2 in a row (wohoo!). I'm beginning to feel a little bit of pressure now from the approaching 3rd edition match we set up for the evening of 6.9. The pressure comes from the fact, that I have to paint scorers of beast men for my chaos army.I'll do my best to write another post about how that goes and maybe a battle report from the actual game too.

I apologise from all the Oldhammer enthusiasts that have read the last battle report. The next game I have to use my own miniatures so it will not go into the "acceptable in the 80's category." This is how the army looks at the moment without the beast men additions:

All the Chaos I can muster at the moment

I have been thinking very much about how the old hammer people think about people playing with "new" miniatures (like from this millennia). Can one be old school without old figures? I don't have so much passion about when the miniature is made if its aestethics feel "right." For example some of the new Age of Sigmar miniatures are cool, but at the same time I consider throwing 20 of new arrer boyz to the bin and instead buying these, because of the way the new ones look.

I found this great game called Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish

We went to the Salute a few months ago with my long time gaming friend. One of the more interesting things I ran into was (for me) previously unknown company called Otherworld Miniatures and their game Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish.

While strolling around the booths My eye stopped on a cute set of gaming tables with a sweet OSR wibe to them and the nice chap standing next to them offered to demonstrate the game, which I promptly agreed to. After being suckered to a demo we naturally marched to their sales booth and bought ourselves copies, dice, cards, miniatures and stuffed them into our bags :)

The game itself is a fun sandbox-like toolset with which you can set up old school D&D-like skirmish battles. It's not geared to campaign play like Frostgrave and most of the other skirmish rules out there, but if one should so wish setting up a campaign would be easy enough.

Another thing worth mentioning are the otherworld miniatures, which are AMAZING. They are not the cheapest ones out there, but every single model is dripping with character and that 1st edition feel. I have resisted the urge to order more of those (in addition to the female ranger which I bought from their stall at salute), but after getting my hands on the Men of Evil and Dungeon Denizens sets, my friend just got, I'm not sure I can resist for long.

Since I already have 25 years worth of fantasy miniatures, I got to play the game already. I did not have any dungeon terrain and it took me quite long to decide what to do about that. Investing hundreds of euros on a dungeon terrain set, which would only be used on this game did feel a bit much.

About a month ago I finally found the best possible solution, which was to buy D&D Dungeon Tiles: Master Set Dungeon pack. It should be enough for this game for a grand price of 20 € :D I reasoned, that if the game starts to "feel a bit flat" on those, I can always buy/paint 3d dungeon dressing or use my Hero Quest Furniture.

Here's a picture of a small game we played using the set with some reaper miniatures and GW goblins.

There are many great reviews of the game and also nice battle reports. Here are a few links:

A review from the Border Princes Blog
Raid on Pembroke battle report There're more great battle reports on the same blog, which I heartily recommend!

One more thing to mention is a monster manual type expansion, which Otherworld has "promised" to put on sale. Apparently its a bit delayed at the moment because of a new miniature line they just came out with (Official Judge's Guild minis if I'm not mistaken). I really am looking forwards to that book and hope its published soon!