Happy Halloween!

All the kids' own work this year!

Tin Soldier orcs

 Here's a small band of orcs from the Tin Soldier. They must be around the cheapest 28mm fantasy miniatures around, at a quid a pop. The company also offers staggeringly good customer service. I got mine the next working day after ordering them, with postage coming in at £3. The Tin Soldier hydra is a brilliant old-school miniature and costs all of £4. The orcs are really nice figures that fit in quite well with Citadel's Fantasy Tribe range.

I've got another seven to paint up, which completes this particular range; Tin Soldier also offers some other orcs done in a very different style. I picked up some of the goblins, which match that style, and will finish them off soon. 

To me, these are just about perfect as D&D-style orcs: nasty-looking, but also scrawny (and hungry?), and just right for one-hit-die creatures. The fellow with the mace and the snakes would make a good tribal cleric. 

Rather charmingly, the chap in the horned helmet (above, centre) has a leather knapsack - for carrying off plunder and small morsels, presumably. The faces remind me of the troll in Jim Henson's The Storyteller. 

I'm painting up a lot of the Fantasy Tribe orcs in a similar style, and these will mix in nicely. 

Kitbashed goblins

 

The GW "goblin regiment" kit isn't a triumph of the miniature-maker's art. The figures are oddly proportioned (even for goblins) and look awkward (even in the official website photos). But as I'd picked up bits and pieces of the set second hand, I thought I'd kitbash a few goblins to make a small warband.

These fellows have arms from Skaven and gnolls and gretchin and gnoblar heads. Oddly enough, I was inspired to make them by the prospect of playing some swashbuckling skirmish rules - All for One (Eureka) or Flashing Steel (Ganesha Games). Goblins might seem an odd choice for that, but I thought fairytale goblins might work quite well as adversaries for seventeenth-century musketeers or the like. 

I can see these little fiends as being responsible for all sorts of villainy of the kind that takes swashbucklers to sort out. 

I'm also thinking of using them for those skirmish games that have (or can have) highly differentiated individual roles: Havoc, Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes, Battlesworn, Frostgrave and the like. So the chap with the two swords could be a duellist in Havoc, a treasure hunter in Frostgrave and a combat master in ASoBH. Similarly, the fellow with the polearm would be a spearman in Havoc, an infantryman in Frostgrave and a long-reach fighter in ASoBH.

They need strength in numbers, of course, so I'm putting together a few more - some kitbashed like these and others just built as they come. I'm aiming for arquebusiers, archers, crossbowmen, some heavily armoured fighters, at least one wizard and some boar-mounted cavalry.

Foil and Fimo demons

 

As the party's sojourn in Hell continued, these scratch-built demons made their debut today. All three were very quickly built from tin foil, Fimo and green stuff. 

The larger two are based on HotT 60mm bases so that they can be roped in as behemoths or gods for that game when required. 

As with my other scratch-build efforts, there's no finesse involved in these. But while they're crude, they were very quick to make and paint.

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.