From KeithS: Dwarves, Wererats, and Assorted Hangers-on (315 points)

Having missed finishing anything for last week, that means I have a huge point dump for this week!  So, without further adieu, we turn first to the Dwarves.


Over the past year, I've focused pretty heavily on acquiring and painting adventurers in 25mm for use in playing AD&D (the old school kind, not that fancy new fangled kind).  Anyway, I've ended up with a fair number and decided to start off with finishing off some Dwarves, 22 to be precise.  These are from all sorts of manufacturers - Games Workshop, Ral Partha, VikingForge/Asgard, Grenadier, and who knows what else.  They're an eclectic lot, to be sure.  The scales range from 25mm to something closer to 28mm.

I believe these are Grenadier - plastic ones, probably late 80s, early 90s for their miniatures wargames.  They're a bit soft on features but nice enough.

These fancy dandies are GW.  A bit wide in the girth and really decked out in quite a lot of finery.

These are Asgard/Viking Forge, and I really like the sculpts.  They're metal, very detailed, have oodles of personality, and so on.  I love them!

This is a bit closer on some of the other ones -- not sure on the makers, as I said.  I based them all for dungeons (on steel washers with built-up wood filler carved to look like flagstones).  The downside of that is I cover up all the manufacturer's marks and my memory is too sucky to keep track of which was from which company.  Whatever...they work in a game just fine!

These two chaps were mixed in with them.  Tghey are too short to be normal humans so I was thinking they are a dwarf wizard and a dwarf shaman.  Maybe, maybe not.  But I like them!

Shield Wall!  I did several shields by hand just for drill.  I particularly like how the kite shield guy (5th from left) turned out.

 Turning now to the dark side, my next batch was 31 Wererats.  Why?  because my current D&D campaign is plagued by the dirty buggers!  I figured I should have gobs to play with.  The first groups are Caesar's Ratmen in 1/72 scale, close enough to 25mm for my purposes.  I painted two dozen or so of them, roughly half with brown fur and half with grey.  This will allow me to have multiple tribes of them, if I like, or just mix them up for variety.  The Caesar ones are ok - they are cheap though they have annoying mold lines that are harder to eliminate from the soft plastic.  I did them all dark with dingy colors and rusty weapons, as befits Rat people!

Some of the brown fur dudes.

And grey fur guys.  I liked the triangular shields - not practical, maybe, but something a bit different.

I also had a bunch of metal wererats which were of really good quality and larger than the others, pushing 28mm, I think (again, I forget who made them -- I need to get better at that!).  I did them all with grey fur except a pair I did with white, just to mix it up a bit.  Painting in white is not very forgiving!  I much prefer the darker, and easier, colors.

Up close -- a few had shields of wood.  Rather than just leave wood tones, I painted them with dull colors to make them a bit more interesting, but still trashy like I picture wererats.  Oh, and these guys had BIG blades!

Some of the non-wood shields, and a guy with a really big crossbow.

As I was prepping the figs, I noticed one "wererat" was really big, 33mm or so -- upon closer inspection I determined it was a heavily-armored wereboar.  Not sure where he came from, but I painted him up anyway.

 Wereboar flip side.

I'm in the Facebook group "Old School Miniatures" which is doing a mini painting challenge of its own -- they provided a pair of Ral Partha wizards for painting.  I decided to do mine in classic Gandalfian style, though with one based for dungeons and one based for outside.  I actually have one already painted just like the guy on the right but based for dungeons.

And the back.  The dude on the left is washed with blue ink, the one on the right with black.

Last up today (so far), I finished off a half-dozen Wights I've collected over the past year or two.  They're all quite a happy lot, despite having uniform bad hair days.  I decided to paint their clothing with a cold, weird blue as I've seen that done a lot for things like Forstgrave and Barrow Wights.  It turned out ok, though not quite as surreal as I'd hoped.

They're an ugly lot!

From the back.

That's it for now.  I count 62 figures for a cool 310 points (I wanted to break 400 total, but the day is still youngish here in Virginia so maybe...).  I'm not likely to drop a point bomb like this again, though you never know.  Next up for me:  a set of old Heritage Orcs based on Bakshi's Lord of the Rings from 1978, a bunch of Heritage Hobgoblins from the late 70s, and whatever else jumps out at me from my ginormous pile of prepped stuff!

My Minion shift starts with a points bomb, and looks like it will end with a points bomb too! Seems like that was a week off very well spent, but you'll have to get in lots of adventuring to get all of these on the tabletop.  The collection of classic dwarf sculpts work well alongside each other, and fitting to refer to those the more modern GW ones as dandies! Agree entirely that the best of the bunch are the Asgard/Viking Forge though, they look like some doughty hearthguard in all that heavy armour. Really nice shield desisngs too, thanks for the close-up. I particularly like the blue serpent on black - does that design occur a few times for a reason?  

Very fitting paintwork on the were-rats too, they're really nice sculpts for Caesar plastics. I worried I might have to tweak the points total when you described them as 1:76, but those sculpts look pretty much like skinny 25-28mms to me. Anyway, let's hope Curt agrees, or at least spares the whip if I am in error.  

315 towards your points total, with a few Bonus points on top for the funky shield designs.

Phil