Orcs in Frostgrave: some old roots replanted

 I needed a Frostgrave warband in a hurry for Friday night, so I rapidly repainted bases of these old orcs to match the earthy tones on my current skirmish stuff. I also matt-varnished over their ageing gloss and touched up the odd thing here or there. The chap with the two cleavers made for a rather militant necromancer, with the whip-wielding hobgoblin as his ferocious apprentice. A couple of Descent undead dog-things filled out the ranks as war hounds. 

They looked the part, I thought, but proved rather less than fearsome on the table (aside from killing one of the other players' apprentices. As a result of a total wipeout and a failure to gain any treasure, they'll be taking to the field in round 2 with neither wizard nor apprentice, both of whom are badly wounded, and neither of the dogs, who are dead. So I'm looking through their decade-old pallid kin to procure some suitably low-rent thugs and thieves ...

C14 Lesser Goblins as a 15mm warband

 

Here are some Citadel lesser goblins painted up for use in 15mm skirmish games. These six will form the basis of a Frostgrave warband: wizard and two thugs at the front; apprentice and two thieves at the back.

Citadel produced two kinds of lesser goblin: these fellows and their ilk, who were lesser versions of the great goblins (or gnolls); and the hooded lesser night goblins. Both types work fine in 15mm as large goblin-types (hobgoblins or man-sized trolls or whatever). The 'great' breed are especially good for Frostgrave, as most of them have either a large one-handed mace (good for thugs) or a short club (fine for thieves in Frostgrave). 

An ugly old Fantasy Tribes orc

 

Here's a particularly nasty-looking Fantasy Tribes orc from the early 80s. I've got loads of these fellows based up; they make nice little palate-cleansers between sections of larger projects.

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.