A wizard and his warband

 

Ahead of some games of Frostgrave this weekend, I painted up this wizard and his entourage for a friend: bold colours and some heavy if unfashionable blacklining with acrylic ink. 

Undead and a construct for Frostgrave

 I've got some games of Frostgrave scheduled for the later summer and autumn. We also has a domestic run-through of the second-edition rules on Saturday night - lots of fun and our first Frostgrave game for about 10 years.

For the upcoming games, we're switching from Mordheim, with which we've had lots of fun over the last 18 months, and Song of Blades, which has given us some great recent games too. The main reason for this is just to try something new - and I think the others will enjoy the warband-building strategy aspects (I'm more one for just throwing together miniatures that look interesting!). 

A nice aspect of Frostgrave is the freeform figure selection: as troop types are categorised by armament rather than anything else, there's lots of scope for creativity and kitbashing. And the bestiary, with its constructs and demons of various sorts, creates terrific opportunities for using odd miniatures - as with the robot above (from some boardgame, I think).

I've been sorting through boxes and repurposing various kitbashes and half-painted miniatures for this project. For example, half of the undead above were based up, half-painted and ready to go; the others were easy to bring up to speed with a 'Dogme-style' speed-painting approach (one base colour - burnt umber for everything - and two highlights only). 

Along the way, I've uncovered lots of suitable demons, and a lot of Mordheim mutants and beastmen will serve well in this role too: all of these guys, for example.

There's also another nice aspect to consider: what might a wizard's underlings look like? Orcs and half-orcs are obvious henchthings for an evil wizard, but you could create an evocative warband with a bunch of dwarves and a halfling (or four halflings, a dwarf, an elf and some humans ...). But there are so many other possibilities. 

One thing I'm planning for our campaign is to start with liveried or otherwise group-identified warbands and then draw on a large pool of assorted hirelings to replace casualties. I've found lots of suitable miniatures for the pool - watch this space ...

 

Zebra People in a hurry!

 Here are some very hastily painted Zebra People (Pavis Survivors) for this weekend's Big Rubble game.

The horses don't look much like zebras, but if I recall correctly, the Praxian zebra riders are supposed to ride horses that have been transformed into zebras. So they'll do!

I did a lot of the main colour layers with acrylic marker/brush pens - the zebras and the saddles especially. Acrylic markers are handy for light colours; the great problem with them is that they tend to be lighter than they should be, so it's difficult to build layers from a dark base. But they're good for yellows, light greens and off-whites. 

I used acrylic ink and a thin brush for the stripes; next time, I'll probably stick less slavishly to real-world stripe density and make them more impressionistic zebras!

Broos for the Big Rubble

Hot on the heels of today's Zorak Zorani trolls, here are a couple of broos.

Trolls for the Big Rubble

 

Here are some kitbashed Mantic orcs to be used as Zorak Zorani dark-troll berserkers in some Big Rubble skirmish games. 

These guys are suitably sized and fierce-looking, I think.

I think the goofy top hat isn't out of place with the whimsy that sometimes creeps into Glorantha.

I originally used this guy as a 15mm giant about a decade ago. 

The nice thing about Glorantha is that it provides you with specific runes to use for worshippers of any given god: here, disorder, darkness and death.

Dark trolls and trollkin for the Big Rubble

Here are some speed-painted stand-in trollkin for this weekend's Gloranthan skirmish game. 

I've long thought that a quest for perfect miniatures for Glorantha's peculiar inhabitants is a bit of a lost cause. Yes, there are a few excellent Uz (troll) miniatures available (though of widely differing sizes), but if you want to run some wargames or miniature-based RPGs in the Big Rubble, you need lots of trolls and trollkin. Far better, it seems to me, to paint some broadly similar creatures in a Gloranthan manner than fret about the exact length of troll snout

For me, the old Citadel Fantasy Tribe orcs are a decent match for Gloranthan dark trolls, at least as far as broad-brush description goes: about 7' tall if they stood up straight; snouts and prominent tusks; pot bellies and a hungry look.

The Grenadier orcs (as on the left above) are perhaps an even better fit, muzzle-wise, but the Citadel figures are possibly better in terms of stature and stance. And they work well enough together.

Trollkin, meanwhile, are meant to be of variable and somewhat neotenic appearance. The Oathmark goblin slaves do the trick for me - and, handily, they can be assembled with slings. I have some snoutier trollkin in the form of Grenadier goblins and Ral Partha RQ miniatures, but they'll all work fine together. 

These guys were speed-painted on Saturday; the clothing was just drybrushing stained with washes, so they were very quick. 

A dragonewt for RuneQuest

 Here's a slightly converted Lancer lizardman who's going to be acting as a dragonewt in some forthcoming Big Rubble skirmish games. I originally gave him a green-stuff beak and tail ending so that he could be a Shén in Tekumel. But he never made it to the painting table, and so he's now a beaked (second-stage) dragonewt for Glorantha. 

The photos aren't great; I think there's something wrong with my phone camera. But I'm quite pleased with how he looks in real life.

A nice thing about painting dragonewts is that no metallics need be involved; the creatures are supposed to rely on bone, stone and glass for their weapons and armour. 

The other nice thing about dragonewts is that they aren't supposed to look terribly similar to each other - so there's free rein for a wide variety of model types and colour schemes as the warband grows.