Pathfinder - a first adventure

With the impending arrival of my daughter and the attendant construction of furniture and hiding of knives that that entails, I've not been able to get any painting time in, but fret Ye not fans of this blog, I've been getting in some alternate geekery in the meantime, playing in a Pathfinder campaign, the last session of which was last night...

My character, as previously posted

The original concept for my character was something along the lines of:

Vampire Hunter D 

meets 

Gungrave

But over the course of our level one adventure, he's turned more into 

Vash the Stampede

meets

Immortal Rain.

As is often the case, at level one, your heroic intentions are usually let down by your low ability scores, but more often than not it's been my dice rolling that has caused this! Whenever I have some elaborate plan (often culminating in a ridiculous one-liner), staring up from the table at me seems to be this:

Elaborate acrobatics to spring at the villain's wife whilst disguised in his clothes and lying in the road covered in blood? Oh no you don't, and take a flash bomb to the eyes!

Also, my originally planned dark, brooding outsider with a dark secret and a dark past (did I mention dark enough times?) has found himself the face of the group, in part due to our party composition (one player is very reserved, the other took roleplaying as 'hurr, I'm a dwarf, I hit it with my hammer' while he still turned up), and in part due to me being a goon. He's gone from moody badass to goof with a determination for theatrics in very little time, and I'm okay with that!

We played through the published adventure Murder's Mark, which despite a couple of niggles was good fun - although it was quite slow going at times, as we approached the murder mystery with the determination of a CSI team, sure that if we asked the right questions (of everyone that could talk) and prodded every thing that we could prod, we'd find the right clues to piece together the puzzle and work it out for ourselves, rather than what would have been faster, bobbing along from encounter to encounter and having it revealed to us at the end! 

Long story short - we blundered into who was behind a string of murders, generally talking our way out of fights (as we're in the middle of a city, and trying to avoid devolving into murder hobos), accidentally murdered an innocent dwarf along the way (in the middle of the enemy lair, the one time I shoot first it's a prisoner being pushed into the room), and got handshakes and rewards from the grateful citizenry. The villain's wife, however, managed to escape (as our high speed chase was somewhat hampered by working out how to lower a wolf down a 25' shaft rather than leave him behind), so it looks like that will be our next adventure, to our GMs surprise - perhaps he assumed we'd rise above petty vengeance?

And so, Ichabod is level 2, with enough gold to fancy up his firearm, and we go on hiatus until my daughter is born, when hopefully he'll spend more time succeeding at needlessly acrobatic theatrics, and less time bleeding out...

My Pathfinder character, painted and converted!

So, as I've joined a Pathfinder game, I needed a character! Although I'd originally envisioned rolling up some sort of wild magic using bunny man sorcerer (borrowing heavy inspiration from a certain Crit Juice character, I'll admit), after perusing through my DMs (quite substantial) stack of rulebooks I remembered a particular Mage Knight miniature that I had knocking around that I could build a character around... Which is how I ended up rolling a Dhampir Gunslinger. 

(Hmm, this pic of the still wet wash on the hair is blurrier than it originally looked...)

Honestly though, despite my emo leanings, I'm aiming for more Vampire Hunter D meets Vash the Stampede by way of Gungrave than Edward Cullen!

After rolling stats (4d6 and take the highest 3, we're not so hardcore as to roll 3d6 in order as we briefly considered) I came up with this:

Well, I'd best not let anything hit me. Ever. Plus, being a dhampir, if he does get hit, it's going to be tough to heal... Never let it be said I choose the most powerful option over the most flavoursome!

Anyway, on to the conversion itself; this is the model that inspired my choice of class: 

An old Mage Knight Fanged Gunslinger, because what's not to love about a vampire with flintlocks?

Although my DM had said that if I had my heart set on using the mini as-is he'd find a way to let me have wings, I thought that might be a little munchkin-ish and overpowered so they were the first thing to go:

Two quick snips and a quick filing later we have one mini with his feet firmly on the ground:

Speaking of feet, being a plastic prepaint that has been sat in a box for gods know how long, his stance was a little ... wonky, for lack of a better word.

 A quick dip in some boiling water, a slight reposition and then a bath in cold water to set the pose later though and he was ready to get pinned to his new base:

Then it was just a case of adding some finishing touches, like green-stuffing over his back to smooth out where I'd removed his wings, and doing the same on his chest where I'd carefully scalpelled off the somewhat garish bat motif he was originally emblazoned with:

I'd originally planned to have him carting around a backpack and length of rope (both from my Mordheim box), but in the end settled on just a sheathed sword, as I couldn't seem to find a way to utilise the other pieces without him looking like a child on his first day of school...

Although, with his fairly low Strength score, it makes sense for him to be travelling light! Theoretically, he should never need to actually use his sword (as hopefully nothing will ever get that close!), but as they say it's better to have it and not need it than the opposite!

Then, it was just a case of getting him painted! I'm not entirely sold on the skin tone, as I mixed up a grey based flesh tone to try and give him a sallow, unhealthy look, but hey, if you don't experiment you never learn anything.

[Tally - 67 vs 36 = +31]

To anyone that follows me on Instagram, I apologise in advance if there's a sudden surge in pictures of me winning Pathfinder (and other such cliched jokes) tonight, but it's the first proper session with this group...