Dem bones dem bones…

 …dem surprisingly well armoured bones:

Way, way back in the shrouded mists of the past known as March 2022, my family all had COVID, which wasn’t ideal, but on the other hand having a week off work did give me the opportunity to start playing some solo Frostgrave. Having made my way through the three scenarios of Dark Alchemy, I decided that the next thing I wanted to do was hire a Captain, and the solo scenario ‘Alone in the Crypt’ from Spellcaster issue 1 seemed like the perfect way narratively to introduce a Captain to my warband.

Scanning down the encounter table for the scenario to see what monsters I didn’t already have in my collection, I saw that I’d need some armoured skeletons. Most conversions that I’ve seen tend to be in full plate, transplanting skeleton heads into Perry medieval knight bodies (which was my initial plan), but digging through my backlog of kits one day I came across a box of plastic Vikings that realistically I’m never going to use for anything, and figured I’d give them a go as a base for some chain mail wearing skeletons:

Each miniature is a mashup of Viking (from Gripping Beast) and leftover Mantic skeleton bits (that I’m fairly certain I was gifted years ago by Infovore.Tim). As the shield arms are generally single piece with the skeleton bodies, this often involves a lot of careful cutting, scraping and filing to get everything to fit together.

I thought I’d taken more WIP pics than this, but apparently not, so we’ll jump straight to this shot of my four converted boys:

I figured four was enough, as the most you’re likely to encounter per roll on the encounter table is 2, and anyway I’ll be smashing these to pieces so quick they’re unlikely to spend much time on the table (oh sweet hubris…). I gave them a variety of different weapons to make them look less like a uniform unit, but conversely made sure three of the four had matching helmets so that they would have that visual detail to link them. What can I say, I’m a walking contradiction.

Whilst painting them, I fancied giving them all a cheesy skeleton logo on their shields, so dug out an old Chaos Space Marine transfer sheet. I know, it’s a bit silly (did they have skull themed insignia when they were alive? Did they repaint it after they were reanimated?) but some things are just classic:

And here they are after the rest of the paint job was done, suitably weathered:

Top tip for anyone using the verdigris effect paint from GW: make sure the lid is firmly on when holding the pot directly above your finished models! There was an… incident, that involved frantically trying to dilute bright blue paint and mop it off of the models before it dried, and a few touch ups. I think they only place you might still be able to see it is on their bases, but I can always pretend that’s an intentional effect, representing the magic leaking from these walking corpses and leaching into the ground…

And just to complete the set of images, here’s the back of them:

Painting these brings the Tally to:

48 vs 46 = +2

Back in the positive, and also so close to hitting the ‘miniature a week’ yearly average of 52 miniatures painted with 5 months still to go on the year!

What’s next? Back to the main project of Skaven, of course, but for the next non-Skaven miniatures I still need some ghouls and a vampire before I’m able to play that Frostgrave scenario…

The peasants are revolting!

 Here they are, in their grubby glory:

Produced by Foundry, these were originally purchased a while ago with the intention of having some bystanders for a scenario in the A Song of Ice and Fire project where the Mountain terrorises the locals, but my intention to play some Rangers of Shadow Deep had me dig them out of storage and paint them up! They even have painted eyes, making them finished to a higher standard than the majority of my Starks or Lannisters...

Technically, I only really needed 3 peasants for the scenarios, but I figured I might as well get the whole pack done rather than resigning some of them to the fate of rattling round in the drawers of minis for who knows how long...

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

25 vs 68 = -43

Almost halfway to my target of 52 painted miniatures this year, with only four months to go...

So what’s next? Finishing these means that I should have all of the miniatures that I need to play though the first Rangers of Shadow Deep mission, so next comes terrain! I actually finished these miniatures a fortnight ago, so I’m further ahead on the next steps than you might otherwise expect...

Swamp Thing’s hillbilly cousins...

Here’s that promised post of miniatures finished over a week ago now:

Some Shambling Mounds, from the same D&D board game as the hogs in my previous post.

These were pulled out as I’ve been scribbling down some ideas for a potential campaign, and one idea involves an elvish incursion overlaying part of the Faewild onto the material plane, and I thought plants coming to life and trying to digest the adventurers would be an encounter you could do some fun things with. Lots of drybrushing, spot washes and little touch ups here and there to try and make the two identical models look slightly varied and we’re done, bringing to Tally to:

35 vs 27 = +8

3-5 feral hogs...

Is that still topical? Either way, I’m falling behind in both painting and posting, as these were actually finished last week but I’m only getting around to posting them now:

Boars! These are single pose minis from an old D&D board game that I dug out whilst rooting through boxes in the basement, and I thought would make the basis of a good potential wilderness encounter if I ever get round to running a D&D game...

Whilst discussing what I was currently painting with someone at work, I told them ‘boars’. ‘What’s a borse? Some fantasy thing?’ They asked, to which I replied ‘no, you know, like a hairy pig?’

Tally:

33 vs 27 = +6

In other news, my wife recently bought a fancy pop-up photo booth for her business, so expect pictures on the blog to show glaring flaws more obviously (not in the next post though, as the photos were done for it before the booth showed up - I mentioned at the start of this post that I’m behind on posting right?)

(See also our new rug, that my wife is very happy with)

Freak on a Lich

Another random mini plucked from the painting queue:

He's a Mage Knight figure originally I think, so the detail is a little funky, but I quite like his imperious pose. He's been in the painting queue for so long that that's actually a GW base he's on, so he was prepared before I started buying bases specially for miniatures rather than just scavenging them from Warhammer kits.

I originally had ideas of trying to speckle a starry design on his robe, but the pressing need to finish an average of about two miniatures a week to hit my total of 52 for the year put paid to that! I added a little extra detail to his tabard though, to jazz it up a little. Also, carefully applied some guyliner.

He'll probably be a Lich (a word that should rhyme which 'itch', but I tend to pronounce 'leash' when I'm tired, much to the chagrin of my D&D group) in the generic fantasy project, or can get added to the box of miniatures that can be used to menace Conan. Which reminds me, I should get around to painting some more companions for Conan!

Tally:

36 vs -46 = +82

Lurking in the shadows...

...to suck out your brains - finished painting my converted Illithid rogue (that I finished converting from a Hasslefree figure way back in December of 2014):

Lord knows when I'll meed a Mind Flayer in studded armour, but when that day does come I will be ready.

His flesh was one of those times when you finish painting happy with what you've done, then come back to it the next time and decide it needs more done to it over and over, hence quite a stark difference between the darkest shade in the deepest recesses and the lightest areas. His weaponry was painted in non-standard colours after being inspired by a flick through the 4th Edition Monster Manual (hence the aqua/teal hilt to the purple-sheened blade, and grey rather than colourful gems on the scabbard of his secondary weapon).

I also had a play posing him with some of my wife's plants (more and more of which seem to appear in the house each week):

As well as playing with the settings and applying filters to make moody pictures like this:

Tally:

7 vs 0 = +7


In other news, a family emergency last week led to us heading down to Portsmouth a week earlier then originally planned - horrible times, but one upside to spending four hours each way on trains was that I cracked on and managed to mostly get the set of zombie rules that I've had knocking around half-formed in my head longer than I've had this blog that have been previously alluded to on paper:

Don't worry about trying to decipher my scrawl about rules for fighting across barricades, the picture is just illustrative to break up blocks of text ;)

It's in no particular order currently, fairly free-form as I remembered / thought of things, but I think I've got a fairly workable framework once I rearrange it and chisel out the heart. I have a vague thought to run a zombie game at halloween, which would need some scenery building and cards making (well, as well as actually playtesting these rules to see whether they actually work at all!)

Otherwise, I'm still wanting to get on with Necromunda, although I'm in a bit of a quandary - I'm reticent to start building models until I've built a gang roster, but don't want to build a gang roster without knowing what's good or that I like to play with... I could just build the models in their stock poses (which are lovely, don't get me wrong), but shouldn't I choose their loadouts myself? Argh, such conflict...

I also starting playing the Game of Thrones: Conquest game whilst waiting for the laptop to fire up tonight, which I'd assumed would give me a hankering for that project, but the game is so buggy (oh how it crashes) that hasn't kicked in at all...

Cut off one head, and two more adorable ones will grow in it's place...

Whilst finishing off the Flameskull from the previous post, I also started a couple of other miniatures that have been sat undercoated for far too long, and managed to finish this baby hydra:

One of many of a number of rather lovely Mage Knight sculpts, potentially from one of the Dungeon sets. He's old Mage Knight (and lord knows how long ago I cleaned him up) so awkward mould lines are a bit of an issue, but I quite like it flaws and all.

I hadn't really thought about how many 'generic fantasy' miniatures I've painted in between other projects, but when you look at them all at once it's quite a few! Especially when you include the ones tucked in other drawers that I'd forgotten about... Hey ho, they can all menace Conan or get drafted in for Dungeons & Dragons though, so there's hope for them seeing a game table yet...

Here he is menacing a Lannister Foot Knight that whilst digging out I discovered one of the aforementioned drawers of finished miniatures that I had forgotten were there:

And here's an aerial view so that you can see that yes, some of the heads are a little cross-eyed!

Tally:

6 vs 0 = +6

The plan at present is to finish off a couple more miniatures in the queue to make space for some figures from the Necromunda Boxed Game. Part of me wants to make some more terrain though, considering the piles of interestingly shaped pieces of plastic and polystyrene I've been hoarding over the last couple of months...

You won't believe how long this took...

So, after a period of low painting mojo (aided and abetted by .hack on the PS4, Super Bowl etc), i knocked off another miniature that had been sat half-finished in the painting queue for six years or so:

Yup, it's a flameskull:

In the 4th Edition era of Dungeons and Dragons, at one point I considered painting up a miniature for every entry in the Monster Manual. So, for the Flameskull, I grabbed a spare skull from a GW Skeleton Warriors sprue, pinned it to a base, basecoated it green, and then carefully stored it away in a drawer for more than half a decade. I think it moved house like that at least twice.

So, finally freeing it from it's hellish limbo, I popped on some mystic symbols in lurid shades of green and called it done:

I mean, it took so long that in the interim Games Workshop actually released a kit containing flaming skulls, which probably would have worked better for representing a FLAMEskull...

He's so tiny, it's hard to get a decent picture. Here he is posed on a sewer tile:

And with a Heroquest wizard for scale:

Finished is finished, regardless of size though, which takes the Tally to:

5 vs 0 = +5

Bird.....oh!

Managed to finish another half-painted miniature from the queue:

Originally a Dreamblade figure, he got lopped off of his base, rebased, undercoated, then abandoned until recently. No real plan for it, but what can I say, I see a weird bird monster with a very wormy tail wearing a cape made of flayed bloke and I'm on board:

Tee hee:

Perhaps the fact that it was destined to go into a box labelled 'generic fantasy' potentially never to see the light of day again had something to do with how long it took to get finished...

Here's a picture with some other large monstrous type from the last year to give an idea of scale:

Another line through something on the Challenge, as he was started so long ago that that's actually a GW branded base he's on, rather than the slimmer non-brand types that I prefer these days as modelled by the Bell Golem (although I have a feeling this rate of completion isn't going to be maintained):

2018 Challenge:

• Finish something years old
• Finish something pre-blog old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)
• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics
• Finish a member of the Nextwave team
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

Hmm, posting the big old list every time something gets crossed off is a little unwieldy. Maybe next year, I'll get 24 things and make one of those bingo cards that other, more popular bloggers seem to be using...

This was the last miniature out on my desk after a mini tidy, so I decided to go whole hog and clear the decks for the next batch of hobby projects:

Mmm, all that space for doing things.

Let's see how long that lasts...

Tally:

4 vs 0 = +4

Ringing in the New Year...

So, it looks like much like the Tally, my ability to come up with punny blog post titles also resets with the changing of the year!

Thus, I present for your delectation a bell golem:

An old Dreamblade sculpt that I've had tucked away for years awaiting the right moment to hack off of his base and repaint. I fell in love with the ridiculousness of this sculpt the second I opened it - I firmly subscribe to the idea that wizards are dumb and nonsensical. Not the idea of wizards, I hastly clarify, but wizards individually - this is why they think things like 'hey, I can use magic to cross an owl with a bear and that's definitely a good idea' or 'why don't I enchant a golem that as an alarm system will smash itself in the face with a mallet to alert me to intruders. I am truly the greatest thinker of my generation'. Amazing.

The original paint job on the miniature was pretty much monocoloured, so for a little more visual interest when I repainted him I gave him a wooden haft on his hammer, and painted some of what I assume were originally intended to be rivets on his hammer as jewels. Plus, some weathering, and carefully picking out the very shallow detail on his face, and we avoid having a totally bland finished figure.

Here he is with Conan for scale. Conan is presumably jealous that this random monster got flock and static grass whilst he straddles bare rock.

Tally

1 vs 0 = +1 

Ah, it begins so strongly...

This post probably won't blow you away...

To accompany the previous post's rock themed monster, we have an air elemental:

He's from the same Mage Knight set, and was a fairly speedy but pleasing paintjob. Not speedy in actual time (as it was something like six or seven months between basing and finishing), but once I actually got down to brass tacks, layering up splashes of highlight a little more white at a time was a delight that just flowed rapidly.

Sloppy application of highlights is my favourite way to do it. There are more higher than lower on the model, to make it look like he's coalescing and spinning faster as he forms. I was a little concerned about choosing to paint him blue, thinking he might look more like water than air. The original model's colour scheme was grey, which I figured would look a little blah on a grey base, and too similar to the rock golem previously posted.

Tally:

47 vs 40 = +7

That's probably it this side of Christmas though, unless someone has a Sanity Claws miniature that they want to send me so that I can paint and post something festive...

Rock Lobster (has been the draft title for so long I guess it gets to stay)

Wow, the date on the draft of this post is exactly 6 months before when I started writing it...

In an unusual continued burst of productivity, I've finished a very, very grey beastie:

Everyone loves a rock golem, right (imagine the B52s song 'Rock Lobster', but with the word lobster replaced with the word monster, that's what is playing in my head right now), and he can run double duty for Dungeons and Dragons as well as menacing Conan in that project if need be.

My main concern was making sure that the grey of his body was differentiated from the grey of the ground, so I worked up from a brown basecoat rather than the black of the ground. Careful edging gave way to drybrushing as the sharp detail of the larger rock pieces gave way to the softer detail of the other lumpy... bits. Ah, Mage Knight sculpts, thou art so varied in quality. On the same model, sometimes.

The base was built up to look like the golem is either bursting out of the ground, or having just smashed down with such force that the rock around him is rippling with the impact. I'd originally based him on a smaller base than the one I ended up going with, so glued that straight to the top of the larger base to give some additional height:

Torn up cork sheet was then glued around the edge before being blended in with plaster, and then basing was finished in my usual fashion:

Here he is with Conan for scale - I think without the additional size given by the extra base size he would have struggled to really threaten anyone, especially given his hunched pose (I think he would have ended up looking menacingly at a lot of opponent's navels):

Finishing this nice Mid-Boss to speedbump heroes of all denominations brings the Tally to:

46 vs 40 = +6

What is best in life?

Yeah, it's everyone's favourite brooding Cimmerian, Conan:

Mood music:

I love Conan, and have had vague plans to game in Hyperborea for several years now. Small scale, run using the Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset, borrowing models liberally from the other fantasy projects, it's yet another one of those ideas I had where I thought 'this is small enough that I'll be able to finish it and actually get a game in' that then ended up getting mothballed until my attention swung back round again...

Admittedly part of the reason for the delay was finding a miniature that I was happy with for the main man, but in the end I went with this lovely lad from Hasslefree. 

You might notice a slight bit of shininess and or discolouration around his axe arm, which is a result of repairs and some minor cosmetic surgery after an escape attempt:

I have vague plans for a 'tree' style campaign (the kind where if Player A wins a game, you play one scenario next, but if player B, you take a different branch, potentially unlocking additional reinforcements or other boons in a final climatic battle along the way), which I'm sure I started sketching out on a scrap of paper that I should probably try and track down...

But wait, there's more!

Conan doesn't want to take on the cult of various snake gods on his lonesome, though, so I've also finished one of the chums I have for him in the painting queue:

Nice, classic Grenadier/em4 barbarian. Chosen almost entirely because I love the idea of a near-nude berserker taking the precaution of wearing a full helm (I assume his mother made him promise to never go out without wearing his helmet, and so he always has). He was also painted to a lighter skintone than Conan, to make the big guy seem all the more bronzed by comparison.

I feel like I might have missed a trick by not giving him a comedic beauty mark or heart tattoo on his backside though...

And here's the pair of them together:

The Grenadier barbarian looks a little bigger and chunkier than Conan, but that's fine, he's in a more dynamic pose, and was always described as being athletic as well as beefy, so I'm still happy with my choice!

Tally

41 vs 40 = +1

Back in the black!

Necromunda pre-orders went up today though. I've been good so far.