An expanded Cult of the Possessed

 A while back, I painted up a 'minimalist' Cult of the Possessed for Mordheim. The minimalism took the form of a black undercoat with a couple of drybrushes with heads painted in a few layers of red (with yellow ink highlights) and weapons and some other accoutrements painted in green (with white ink highlights). 

Last year, I added a few more figures to the warband, including an old Citadel chaos sorcerer, a Citadel orc, a Ral Partha hillman, some GW film-tie-in Hobbit goblins and some Shieldwolf forest goblins. I also finished off a tyranid kitbash to serve as a medium-sized demon. So here they are, with the originals.

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 ...

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 ...

 

A Dark Troll for RuneQuest, etc.

 RuneQuest was the first RPG I ever got into, as quite a small child. I got the 2nd edition for my ninth or tenth birthday, I think. Recently, I ran quite a bit of it after our D&D adventurers found themselves transported to Glorantha. We switched systems and spent perhaps a year of real time playing through classic modules like Pavis and the Big Rubble and Borderlands - all of which were marvellous.

The Big Rubble is a superb concept for adventure games: a vast ruined city full of monsters and alien races (sometime indistinguishable), as well as plenty of loot. I've always thought it would make a great setting for a tabletop skirmish campaign. As I have plenty of broos miniatures, along with Citadel's Griselda and Wolfhead, a few baboons and access to plenty of historical miniatures, it seems a no-brainer. But trolls have always been a bit of a problem. Glorantha's snouted trolls aren't terribly like anything else, though I've pondered converting various gnolls and the like (possibly just 'converting by paint'). 

A while back, however, I bought the old Grenadier "Orcs of the Severed Hand" boxed set. I also picked up a couple of individual duplicates and a few each of the matching blistered trio, some of which I'd also retained since childhood. They make very good dark trolls, I think: appropriately snouted and tusked, and with quite sophisticated-looking equipment. 

This is the test piece: he's on a 25mm base, so quite large relative to humans. And if he deigned to stand up straight, he'd be a good 7' to scale with a huge head and arms, which is perfect. I'm also using some Asgard half-trolls and some of the old Citadel Gloranthan trolls. Those are based on Luise Perrin's illustrations for Borderlands, which have a much more traditional Scandinavian-folkloric appearance than the later (Trollpak on?) RuneQuest troll illustrations. But I'm happy mixing them together and uniting them by paint scheme. I also have a couple of Ral Partha RQ dark trolls to add to the mix; they work surprisingly well together.

Happily, there are matching goblins for the Grenadier orcs, which make perfect (if unusually well-equipped) trollkin. And I'm going to add in the two Ral Partha trollkin and some de-horned and de-tailed kobolds to bulk out the enlo hordes.

Edit: and here's a quick scale comparison with some WIP Gloranthan adventurers. I was trying to find some figures that would fit, size-wise, with old Citadel RuneQuest figures (represented here by Griselda and Wolfhead). The Frostgrave barbarian on the left strikes me as a perfect fit; the kitbashed Immortals/Warlord hoplite (perhaps with a Victrix head?) and Fireforge Russian work OK for me too.

The Cult of the Possessed returns!

 

My favourite gaming project of 2024 was my minimalist Cult of the Possessed for Mordheim (and other skirmish games). They're among the quickest miniatures I've ever painted, with speed achieved principally through a complete abandonment of realism. The figures are quickly drybrushed a couple of shades, then their heads are painted red and their weapons and eyes green. The final highlights are added in yellow and white acrylic ink. 

Around the time I put the first warband together, I started kitbashing and painting others - chiefly beastmen. My aim was to put together an allied warband of beastmen that could support the Cult in multiplayer games. Yesterday and today, I finished a few of those off. I also have another Possessed to add, who needs only his yellow-ink highlights. And I have more kitbashed beastmen and mutants to paint up in 2025, to which I'll add a minotaur and centaur.

Of the new lot, my favourite is the beastman chieftain, who's based on a RGD satyr. The RGD satyr kit is great apart from one thing: the satyrs - satyrs! - appear to lack any genitalia (not a mistake Tom Meier would ever have made at Ral Partha ...). With this fellow, I put that right by drawing on medieval and Renaissance depictions of demons, using a spare GW beastman head:

The shaman is a mix of parts from GW beastmen, Wargames Atlantic ogres and Frostgrave snakemen. Why are the severed heads red too? Just because ...

The third new beastman is a snakeman with a RGD satyr head. He's more unassuming than the other two, perhaps, but I rather like him.

Here are the three new boys:

Have a great Hogmanay and a very happy new year!

Celtic Miniatures orc boar rider

 This chap's a 3D-printed miniature from Celtic Miniatures. I've painted very few 3D-printed figures, but this orc was an absolute pleasure to paint and - especially - prepare (almost no clean-up was needed).

The Cult grows futher ...

 The Cult of the Possessed has achieved starting-warband status: a magister with two daggers, a Possessed with the Scorpion Tail mutation, a mutant with Great Claw and club, and a brace of beastmen with heavy armour and two-handed weapons, for exactly 500 crowns. The darksouls with flail and two-handed weapon are waiting in the wings.

The Cult grows ...

 Two new recruits for the Cult of the Possessed: another beastman and a Possessed with the Scorpion Tail and (possibly) Spines mutations.

Minimalism in miniature: the start of a Cult of the Possessed

I've long been interested in speed-painting miniatures and finding ways to achieve striking effects with minimal effort. Recently, I've been inspired by the Instagram accounts of Standingforms, 1988chewit and Gardens of Hecate. In very different ways, all three achieve spectacular effects with judicious and consistent use of colour.

As I've been playing quite a bit of Mordheim recently with friends and my kids, I wanted to get some quick warbands to introduce some of that game's more characteristic factions: in particular, the Cult of the Possessed. I decided to go with figures that were swiftly and minimally drybrushed in near monochrome, apart from two colourful areas: their weapons and their heads.

This minimalist scheme has two key functions: it allows me to get the miniatures done quickly; and it should make them entirely distinctive on the tabletop. We'll be playing some multiplayer games in the coming months, so I want this particular cult to be umistakeable.

The scheme involves abandoning realism entirely. There's no reason for the weapons to be green (apart from perhaps a hint of verdigris over bronze - but that wouldn't explain the hafts), and there's no diagetic logic behind the red heads and headgear. But besides creating coherence, the abandonment of realism helps, perhaps, to suggest that this warband inhabits - as Cormac McCarthy put it - "regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools".

Oh my god, said the witch hunter ...

Undead warband for Mordheim

 I recently painted up this undead Mordheim warband for a friend: quick paintjobs in time for a mini-tournament that we played out a couple of weeks ago. 

For some reason, four (!) coats of matt varnish have failed to quell the shine from the initial coat of Vallejo gloss. I've suggested to the friend that he try a fifth coat in a week or two. We shall see ...

Ogre for Mordheim

 I painted this ogre for a friend's Mordheim undead warband. He was probably the most valuable fighter for the undead in the five games we played last weekend, although my pit fighter managed to take him out at one point. He dwarfs my old Golgfag's ogres to such an extent that I'm repurposing them as black orcs in Mordheim.

Orc archers for Mordheim

 Here are a brace of orc archers; both featured in my Mordheim warband at the weekend, with the blueish chap promoted to shaman. He proved a better shot than a sorcerer. 

These are glorious old C15 orc by Kev Adams - from the first orc range he did for Citadel. 

A kitbashed orc hero for Mordheim

 

Hot on the heels of the last post, I decided to come up with a much bigger orc hero for the Morheim warband. This guy's massive, but I quite fancy pairing him up with the little Marauder guy as a little'n'large pair of 'big uns': one sly and skilful and the other a lumbering galoot.

In a swap a couple of years back, I'd picked up some GW orcs, a few of which had legs from old chaos warriors. I liked the upright stance and the hulking effect, so I added orc arms and a space-ork head. A bit of greenstuff to fill out his back and boots and cover the joins, and a skull from an Oathmark standard for an outlandish belt buckle or codpiece, and he was ready for paint.

I also found an old black orc that I'd started to paint up in a similar scheme to the last pair. So I added a hefty goblin bow and decided that - for now - he'll replace the C15 crossbowman as the gang's leader, with the latter relegated to the ranks or even the sidelines. With his outsized weaponry and fancy hat, this guy looks just intimidating enough to keep his hefty and doubtless uppity underling in check - for now, at least.

Orcs for Mordheim

 

These are the first figures for a Mordheim orc warband, for an all-day campaign next weekend. The crossbowman is the 'boss', an old Citadel C15 armoured orc tooled up with some extra armaments and a quiver of bolts for his crossbow. He's not the biggest or meanest of the C15 orcs, but he's one of the ugliest, which must count for something!

The smaller fellow is a Marauder orc. The first wave of Marauder orcs are pleasingly short and squat, which means that older Citadel orcs work well as leader types alongside them. Despite his short stature, this chap might see service as a 'big un', given his melee-focused gear and high-end armour. 

I'm painting this warband in a D&D or Gamorrean scheme: essentially the same thing. Citadel orcs were originally D&D orcs (and possibly even closer to Gary Gygax's vision than the Monster Manual illustration; Gygax said at one point that he'd envisaged upturned snouts rather than full-on pig heads), so it seems appropriate. I'm painting the orcs a variety of greens, greenish-blues and browns, with the pink snouts and ears the unifying constant. 

Skaven Rat Ogre

 

This hefty fellow has had an upgrade to paintwork begun by my daughter some years ago. He's already featured in one of our Mordheim games. He's a Reaper Bones giant wererat.

Kitbashed Skaven slingers

 

We've been playing a bit of Mordheim recently. Skaven slingers are handy in that game, and I had but one metal original painted up. So I've started converting some from Oathmark goblin slaves, using Plague Monk and Mordheim Skaven heads and greenstuff tails. 

I painted these guys up pretty quickly, relying on washes over a burnt umber/grey/ivory base for the most part, with a few bits treated with more care.

More Realms of Chaos warband members

 

And here are the next three kitbashes for the Realms of Chaos/Mordheim warband: two Skaven with prehensile tails and another human with a beweaponed limb.

The start of a Realms of Chaos (and Mordheim) warband

 

Why not use Realms of Chaos warbands in Mordheim? The thought struck me the other day, so I rolled up a warband using the tables in Slaves to Darkness. 

The result was a largeish warband by Mordheim standards, but not one that looked grossly unbalanced. I ended up with a normal human champion of chaos, blessed with four arms. His followers are 11 humans (with a dominant attribute of beweaponed extremities) and five Skaven (with a dominant attribute of prehensile tales and hatred of elves).

So that gives us 17 individuals, none of whom have exceptional stats except for the extra attacks from the extra arms, weapon-limbs and prehensile tails. The latter two are dominant attributes, so I gave half of each group the traits, rounding down for the Skaven and up for the humans. That leaves two Skaven with prehensile tails and six humans with beweaponed extremities (who'll work very nicely as mutants with the 'great claw' mutation in regular Mordheim). All regular Mordheim bands will have more powerful individuals and - often - better equipment, so I'm going to throw these chaps into a game and see how they do. 

I have to kitbash the rest of them first, of course ...

Black Orc hired sword for Mordheim

 This is an old Bob Olley orc originally produced for the Fantasy Warlord game. I got him from SHQ Miniatures, but I believe the range is on the move again. I'm planning to use him as the Black Orc hired sword in Mordheim. He's a big fellow (that's a 30mm base), so he's suitably imposing even next to chunky Mordheim-era plastic orcs.