So sometimes, I move quickly. Last Thursday I posted a preview of a ruleset I have kicking around: Frigates and Fireballs! It’s a convention oriented fantasy age of steam and sail ruleset. The notion here is to get just enough of the feel of “ships” while layering some fun magic and keeping things eminently learnable. This was all because my son saw some cool fantasy ships and wanted to play. He’s shown interest in naval stuff, so…

These delightful pieces are from Mantic’s game, Armada, for its Kings of War universe. They’re easily found on MyMiniFactory and I can report favorably on the files. About the only thing I didn’t like is that you have to super glue the resin parts together. Those sails up there—specifically the front triangular shaped sail—have to be superglued on. For the upright sails that’s no issue, but for the other ones, like the ones you’ll see on the back or the front end, hanging off one of those upright sails, you have to glue them into place. If I were to do this again, I’d assemble those digitally so they print as one piece.

I do like the sails printing separately, as that gives you the ability to readily paint them. These blue sails were simple: a triad drybrush, followed by picking out the brown bits, followed by gold on the emblems. The bodies were a triad brown drybrush, following the same logic for the bits. I didn’t wash the vessels, though I wouldn’t be opposed to it. I felt they looked great as is.

To be fair, that’s because the models themselves are great. My sincere kudos to Mantic on these. They were genuinely inspiring. The above ships are from the Basilean fleet. I believe you could get these in plastic (maybe resin) in retail boxes as well if you can find them.

The steam fleet here are the Ratkin from Armada. I believe they’re an MMF exclusive for now. They don’t even have fully tested rules in the game proper yet. For my purposes, I don’t care. They’re the steam fleet I’m using to test Frigates and Fireballs, and they were a delight to paint.

These started with a brown triad drybrush, followed by a bronze drybrush, followed by a very light silver drybrush. I then went back and alternated between thinned gold, bronze, and silvers to highlight various panels. The bone “tusks” were a simple ivory. The flames were a dry brush from black to brown to grey brown to a somewhat heavy pale yellow. I then hit them with warpstone green contrast paint.

In short: drybrush to hell. It made the whole project very easy. About the only thing I found annoying was the emblems and masts on the sails, and even that wasn’t all that bad. I have one more sailing fleet I’d like to paint, already printed, but that should land me with more than enough ships for playtesting.

As for playtesting, well… it’s underway. More on that another day.