Stargrave – Crew of the Beltalowda
Over the past couple of years I’ve been enjoying playing small skirmish games in several periods with rules like Warcry from GW and a Fistful of Lead games from Wiley Games (a rather good family of rules that allows you to play almost any period including fantasy and science fiction). I’ve found that building and painting small bands of figures is rather enjoyable and acts as a pleasant palate cleanser between larger projects.
I’ve already done a couple of SF warbands, Nurgle Space Marines and Undead Space Marines, but have recently become enthused about the new Stargrave rules to be released by Osprey at the end of this month. So I went looking in the “pile of opportunity” (no “pile of shame” for me) and found some Warhammer 40K figures dating from the 1980 and 90s. In particular I had few Imperial Army (what later became the Imperial Guard) bought in 1988 (I knew they would come in handy some day) and some Van Saar I painted up when we had a club Necromunda campaign in the late 90s. So I’ve turned them into a Stargrave crew.
I have been watching The Expanse recently and really enjoyed it, so I decided to make my crew Belters, or at least the descendants of Belters who have maintained their identity and creole language during the expansion of humanity throughout the galaxy. This group of of have come together after the war and breakdown of civilisation that form the background to Stargrave. Their ship is named the “Beltalowda”, the collective name for the people of the Belt. The ancestors of the crew probably left the solar syttem behind centuries ago but they still identify as Belters (including the Squat),
The crew are all veterans of the recent war, with the ones in blue being lightly armoured navy crew and the ones in green being more heavily armoured marines. The beaky space marine is an Armoured Trooper and they have a guard lizard, who acts just like a Stargrave Guard Dog.
Crews in Stargrave are limited to ten models, but I’ll be using these figures in other games and painted more than that. I’ll sort out the details of their roles, skills and weapons when I get my hands on the rules.
I also found some old figures from a Star Wars collectable miniatures game that was discontinued in the mid-2000s. For a while you could find boxes of them in Pound Shops at the usual bargain price. I’ll be using some of them for my next crew.