End of Summer Update

 While still blessed with some warm summer weather this last week, we are rolling through fall into inevitably into winter here in Manitoba. I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been both painting and building models. Last I left off, I was painting fantasy miniatures for Frostgrave and Forbidden Psalm. Here’s the rest of the fantasy stuff I painted since then:

Corpse Collector 3d print with Reaper vampire for scale.

Reaper ghost, golem, vampire. Armoured skeletons are from Diehard miniatures.

Giant frogs from Reaper Bones

Skeletons from Oathmark. These are super light so I strongly recommend a metal base to give them some heft.

That’s it for Fantasy for now, though I hope to do more this winter.

Forbidden Psalm Game! Plus Skull & Crown Skeletons!

WARNING: POST CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF SELF-HARM, HORROR, DEATH, GORE, COARSE LANGUAGE, NUDITY, SOME OF THE OLD ULTRA-VIOLENCE, AND SMOKING. 

So on Thursday Conscript Mike F. and some of the lads came over for our first crack at Forbidden Psalm, the super-grim tabletop game inspired by the Swedish RPG Mork Borg. Mike's been painting like a madman and I was really looking forward to getting a game on the table. We played the first scenario from the book - "Corpse Scavenging." Six corpses were laid out on the table and the two opposing warbands had to search them for treasure and "black fungus", a particular goodie that the Mad Wizard Vriprix would pay handsomely for. Above is Humfrid about to search a corpse. Mike had painted them and they were... horrifying.

Here's two members of Mike's warband trying to search another corpse. This one resisted all attempts to search it - seearchers had to make a Treasure Roll to successfully search, and these guys failed A LOT. Worse still, a model takes 1hp damage when they fail a search roll!

On turn 2 the Disembowelled Ghouls start to appear - these are pretty tough monsters and did for two of my warband. In the background you can see my erstwhile leader, Ulfnar, and great axe-man Karl (RIP).

Ulfnar and Mike's leader put each other out of action - we each used the Omen card that allowed maximum damage from one attack. Wow!

Karl here about to get put out of action by a skeleton summoned by Mike's scroll-user. He'd summoned him to menace my scroll-user, Astrid, but she used her own scroll to immunize herself from attacks by monsters.

This combat went on awhile - my rogue, Nils (second from right) snuck into Mike's deployment zone to mess things up. Unfortunately a Disembowelled Ghoul followed. (They are controlled by an AI formula).

Games run for six turns at most and at the end, I had three men down (one was killed) and I think Mike lost one. I got more fungus so a few more gold pieces from the Wizard. It was a fun game but took longer to play through than I'd anticipated - I felt bad that Frederick, Hugh, John and Dave didn't get to play also, but I think they had a good time kibbitzing. In any case maybe we'll play the four-player variant next time.

I'd painted this horror for Forbidden Psalm - it's the cover model for the game book - the Corpse Collector. Absolutely repulsive.

This model is a 3D print I got on Etsy, I think it came from Greece (!). This was before Mike tipped me to the guy in Quebec that's printing this stuff.

This'll give you an idea of the size of the model. In retrospect I probably should have gotten the next bigger one!

These bony dudes came in a recent order from Skull & Crown. They're super-cool obviously.

Dude carrying a brazier, he'll be the standard bearer if I ever build a unit of these guys.

The unit champion here, of course.

Skelly blowing a trumpet. Not sure how this works exactly but meh, fantasy.

I love this dude toting a huge basket of skulls and bones! Skull & Crown make some superb models and you'll see some more on the blog soon.

Well that's it for now, I hope you weren't too scarred by the Forbidden Psalm stuff :-)

Wendigo

 Forbidden Psalm has some really big monsters in it, including the Corpse Collector and the Puca. The Puca has a tall thin body with moose antlers and a savage looking mouth.  It’s basically a Wendigo. 

Various designers have made 3d prints of both models which are available on Etsy. I’m not a fan of the resin 3d print models are made of. I find it brittle and delicate and worry how well they’ll survive shipping. As such I wanted to reduce the amount of shipping time. Luckily, one of the Esty shops is based in Quebec and sold both the Corpse Collector and a nasty looking Windego which will stand in well for the Puca monster. Both models arrived last week and I was surprised to find that they survived Canada Post shipping intact. The first model I managed to paint is the wendigo. He painted up well, but there were a few times I was worried I was going to break the arms or antlers while painting. The model looks great but feels very fragile for gaming. 

Hopefully I can get the corpse collector done next week.

Thanks for visiting.

Evil Wizard

 One last model for June! Here’s a necromancer from Reaper Miniatures made in metal. He’ll be used as the “evil wizard” for one of the forbidden psalm scenarios. I kept him in purple to match the skeletons I painted earlier because every necromancer needs minions!

June has been pretty productive! Hopefully I can keep it going.

Blood Rage Vampires

 I’m on a roll here! Blood Rage Vampires for… you guessed it, Forbidden Psalm! All are from Reaper Miniatures. 3 are in metal and one in siocast. Look for the mold lines to figure out which one is siocast. 

Based on my reading of one of the scenarios, 4 should be sufficient. If not, I’m sure Dallas has a few more kicking around!

Thanks for visiting.

Skeletons and Large Monsters

 More painting progress now for Forbidden Psalm. I finished six skeletons made from the Frostgrave cultist box, a troll and giant worm from reaper miniatures and an old model, which I think was a horror clicks model. It originally came pre-painted, but I primed it long ago in preparation for a new paint scheme. I think I subconsciously painted it the exact same colors it was originally. I tried to find a picture of the model online to confirm this, but have been unsuccessful. This model and the troll will both represent the Puca monster for forbidden psalm, while the giant worm would make a good Great Maw monster. The two Reaper models are made of the same siocast plastic as the dire boars were in my last post. One gripe about siocast is that it’s a bit harder to clean off mold lines. Metal and conventional plastic mold lines can usually be scraped and filed. Siocast doesn’t respond as well to this. I find that is tends to resist scraping or drags off larger pieces of material than intended. Filing also seems to cause the material to clump a bit, damaging some detail. It is comparatively cheap, so maybe this is just a you get what you pay for situation.

Thanks for visiting.

Cultist and Morka-Porkas

More progress on my Forbidden Psalm/Frostgrave project. I finished a group of 13 cultists from Northstar and 5 Dire Boars from Reaper. The Dire Boars are from the Bones line and made in that weird siocast plastic. I primed them with brush on primer as I’ve read that aerosol primer can be problematic on siocast miniatures. The detail is pretty good and they paint up nicely. Forbidden Psalm uses a beast called a Morka-Porka which is basically a giant pig. You need several of them in a scenario, so I painted up 5 of them. Unfortunately they only have one pose, but Reaper Bones models are fairly cheap which I judged to be a more important quality.

The cultist box is great and comes with a wide variety of weapons and other parts. They also include a few skeleton heads and arms so you can build a few undead models. Those should be showing up here soon!

Thanks for visiting.