Black Seas Pirate Sloop | Hobby & Season of Scenery

While it may be true that Black Seas is set in a more "modern age", there be some room for a more... Piratical flavor. I can't be invested in an Age of Sail game and just ignore the whole pirate thing. That's probably what got most of us into the whole period in the first place. Luckily, the Hold Fast supplement book came with rules for "A Simpler Time" to address this exact need. To be honest, it's really just removing carronades from everything and a few other small changes, but it's the thought that counts. That book also came with a second waves of models, one of which was this here fine sloop. 

What's a sloop you might ask? Who knows? The name gets slapped onto everything that isn't a ship, or sometimes gets slapped onto a ship depending on who's commanding it and what nation you were born in. What's a ship? Stop asking questions. Warlord says it's a sloop so we'll call it a sloop. 

For all practical purposes this is just a more archaic brig type. It's actually almost the exact same sculpt as the HMS Speedy. So much so that I'm convinced they took the CAD model of the Speedy, raised quarterdeck and added an accompanying stern gallery, or vice versa. Instead of a metal hull though it was cast in the excellent Warlord Games resin. Still came with those pesky metal masts though, but these are at least the chunky ones and so are much less prone to bending.

I did a very minor bit of conversion work though. Like the Speedy model, the sloops come with a mast arrangement that makes them ketches (for you lubbers, the front mast is taller). I wasn't really happy with how that looked on the Speedy, so I remedied it and just swapped the two masts. I had to do a little bit of cutting to let the spanker boom and gaff (the parts of the mast that hold that last bit of sail sticking out over the quarterdeck) go onto the original foremast which is now the mainmast. 

When it came to painting I followed pretty much the same colors I used for my Pirate brigantine. I don't normally like to use contrast paints on these ships as it has a blotchy look to it that you have to be careful with. However, in this case that blotching helps give the whole ship an aged look. To give the ship that extra Pirate-y feel I went with bark tanned sails instead of the usual canvas look. I dig it, has a bit of a sinister air to it now, which suits the theme. 

I had originally left the sails as is, but they had these awkward sail edges that were incredibly obvious now that the whole sail wasn't a white color. I went back in and colored that and it helped out the whole model a ton. 

-The Space Dinosaur