Space gnolls!

 Kitbashing Frostgrave gnolls into sci-fi versions is something I've been doing since the kit came out. These guys are the picking up of a project I was working on about a year ago. Happily, the kitbashes I made then work as a unit of "jackal" trackers for Grimdark Future plus a couple of heroes (one very big - a converted Wizkids gnoll).

I painted these figures very quickly, chiefly through drybrushing, with a few select layering-and-highlights areas (the black hyena-like features and the red weapons and armour). Drybrushing can look quite rough, but I reckon it's appropriate for dusty scavengers on some desert planet.

A kitbashed chaos warrior

 

Here's a quickly kitbashed chaos warrior with a similarly rapid paintjob (lots of wetbrushing all over with a reddish brown to start with). I put a few of these rogues together the other night to use up various bits and pieces from the bits box. 

I much prefer Citadel's original chaos warriors, with their weird variety and Moorcockian vibe, to the later almost uniform armoured behemoths. So this fellow's a bit of a callback to that sort of thing.

Some starter warbands: orcs and dwarves

One thing I've done a fair bit of over the years is paint up some 'starter sets' for friends' kids - often by painting up a few extras when painting stuff for use with my own kids or other gaming friends. These little warbands are the seventh batch of this sort I've done, I think, using the same paint scheme as the eighth, which is a Hordes of the Things set for the Battle of the Five Armies.

I put together these warbands for use with Echidna Games' Fantasy Forces. In the past, I've accompanied rules with Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes, but this time, I went for something simpler (Song of Blades would be the natural progression).

The dwarves are from EM4, with a leader converted with some Oathmark and Frostgrave parts.

These, and their Nick Lund metal counterparts, are my favourite dwarf miniatures - especially (barring the crossbows) for Middle-earth.

Anyway, Merry Christmas!

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.

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!

Caravan guards

 My first completed miniatures of the new year - some sci-fi caravan guards for a desert scenario. Kitbashed from Victrix Napoleonics and Oathmark goblins and orcs.

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!

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 ...

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.

Speed-painted giant orc

 Here's a boardgame figure (from Massive Darkness, I think) speed-painted to act as some sort of giant orc or undernourished ogre in my 25mm megadungeon project. He was painted using contrast paints initially, which is why he's a bit glossy in the recesses. A coat of matt varnish should fix that. 

Speed-painted Stargrave troopers

 

These are some grunts for our sci-fi skirmish games. For speed-painting, the holy grail is a miniature that can be very quickly painted up in one or two colours with a few details added to create the illusion that more care has been taken. These fit that bill. After undercoating them black, I drybrushed them in two shades of turquoise, then slopped some black contrast paint over the guns. All that was needed then was to pick out the visors and add some markings. 

This technique depends on just ignoring differences in materials. So belts, armour, clothing and pouches all get treated the same, and hands are assumed to be gloved. But it's reasonably effective - and very quick. 

They had a suitably ruthless first outing in a game of Mutants and Death Ray Guns, in which they managed to dispatch all of their mutant and robot foes without so much as a scratch.

Speed-painted goblins

I painted these goblins for a friend's children. They were done with great haste: black gesso undercoat, drybrushed grey then white, contrast paints, details and done!

Contrast paint over a black undercoat is now my go-to method for speed painting. So long as the subject matter is suitably murky and the drybrushing is done thoroughly, it gives reasonable results for very little time and effort.

Another scratch-built beastie

 

I'm increasingly fond of scratch-building big monsters for RPG encounters. This fellow - Gurakeel, Lord of Manticores and deposed king of the Seventh Hell (since you ask) - took a couple of hours to build from tinfoil, Fimo and greenstuff and maybe another couple of hours to paint. 

He was the result of a Friday-night decision after that evening's online session ended with an unknown monster crawling up the side of the ruin in which the party were sheltering. Some post-dinner fiddling with tin foil and Fimo produced the base. After baking him, I added some green stuff to the face and then finished off the feet and fur in the morning. Once he was dry, a suitably swift paintjob finished him off.

My son obliged by constructing the ruins in the morning, so we had a suitable stage for an epic slice of action.

The great thing about scratch-built and - frankly - rushed monsters like this is that there's no need to take much time with the painting. Base colours, a wash, some impressionistic highlights, stripes with a Posca pen and then a tiny bit of care with the eyes, and he was done. And he produced the requisite gasps on his debut - more than I'd have got by taking hours and hours over an expensive miniature.

Another beastman

 

Here's the second beastman for the cult. Two down, just another 22 needed for a full complement of insurgents for The Battlefield.

A quick kitbashed beastman and The Battlefield

 

I very much liked the look of Hekatoncheires' inventive beastman warband, and it inspired me to do a bit of kitbashing. I've kitbashed lots of beastmen before, but I thought I'd do some with a science-fantasy slant to got with our current tabletop wargaming. And I thought I'd take a tip from Hek in employing a similar colour scheme for a diverse band of creatures. 

We've played a few garden games of Brent Spivey's The Battlefield recently, and it's great. All of Brent's games are brilliant - Rogue Planet, Mayhem and Havoc are the others we've played - and they're all brimming with inventive mechanics. 

The reason we haven't played them more is that 'time to table' can be a bit daunting. Because the rules are so fresh and innovative, they tend to need a full read-through if you haven't played for a while. There are lots of acronyms and initialisms (RAT, MAD, CQ, etc.), and I wonder if the rulebooks might be more user-friendly if those were just 'Shooting', 'Melee', etc. And because Rogue Planet and Mayhem are 'create your own profile' games, there's a bit of extra time involved that can weigh against getting a family game going on a whim. 

The Battlefield, however, avoids the last of these problems as troops fall into set categories, over which a layer of customisation ('loadouts') can be applied. (Havoc is similar, but suffers from an overlong and roughly edited rulebook - a shame, as the game itself is terrific. If ever a ruleset demanded a second edition ...)

Now, the thing about all of the Spivey stable is that when you actually get the games on the table, they play intuitively and fluidly. They're full of tactical decision-making, drama and fun. Perfect games, in other words. So perhaps the trick is just to keep playing them, so that you don't forget the rules in the interim! 

One of the troop categories in The Battlefield is 'insurgents'. Perfect for a warp cult or Red Redemptionists or something similar. I'll need four lots of six, eventually: this fellow is the first.

Scratch-built Zargon

As the party got deeper into the Lost City (or at least its above-and-below pyramid), I had to get Zargon ready for them. I knocked this fellow up from Fimo and tinfoil during Saturday's rugby, before adding a bit of Milliput and greenstuff in the evening. I then speed-painted him on Sunday morning while keeping the kids at bay. He made his surprise debut tonight - and we'll find out how the PCs handle him tomorrow ...

(He's also based as a god element for Hordes of the Things.)

 

Essex goblins and Reaper beasties

Here are a few more miniatures based up for D&D and 'square-base' wargames like Oathmark, Chaos Wars and Chainmail. First up are some antiquated Essex goblins, which I rather like. They remind me of The Princess and the Goblin - from which Tolkien derived his orcs (minus the toeless and sensitive feet). This range clearly owes a debt to Down in the Dungeon.

Next are a couple of Reaper Bones beasties: a werewolf and a yeti. These will serve as a wulver and buggane in Oathmark, and I fancy that our RPG sessions may eventually feature lycanthropes and giant subterranean apes.