From HerrRobert (Robert H): Iolas Paxina and the Hall of Traps (25 points)

As you may or may not know, when not creating stunning miniatures, my day job is a public health epidemiologist and disaster response guy. So while many of you have spent much of the last year chained to the painting tables in lockdown and quarantine, my year was spent fighting a real live war against a ruthless and deadly enemy, who neither gives nor asks quarter, for a less than grateful public.

It has, without question, absolutely sapped my ability or desire to paint. While I tried my best to contribute to the Isolation/Quarantine Challenge, my mojo died mid June, and pretty much everything but the buying of miniatures stopped. 

So, the threat of the cull has finally seen the first paint on brushes in a good seven months or so.

With that, I descend into the first chamber for Challenge XI: The Hall of Traps:  

A figure or unit which is trapped, stuck in a trap, snared, or lying in wait.  Watch your step, Challengers!

They rounded the corner and entered a chamber illuminated by a light, silvery glow. There insolently lounged an elf, a smirk upon his face. Faerie fire rose from his right hand, his left hand poised on his left hip, right behind his dagger. His long, blond hair was drawn back in a pony-tail, tucked around a scroll strapped to his turquoise open vest. Tight pink breeches, loud yellow boots, green bracers of defense and a silver ring at his belly button finished the ensemble. He was, without a doubt, the most foppish, the most outlandish elf they had ever seen.

 

 "Iolas Paxina?"

"But of course. Con su permiso, mon capitán? The hall is rented, the orchestra engaged. It's now time to see if we can dance."

My first entry is a 30mm custom miniature from Heroforge for the Hall of Traps. HeroForge has a pretty sweet, if expensive, custom miniature generator. I like playing with it for D&D characters, because the right miniature can really bring into focus what you want to do with the character. And Iolas Paxina is a great example.

 

Most fantasy settings have elves as unbelievably stuffy and stuck up, at least according to other races (cough, dwarves, cough!). I often like having my fantasy worlds play against type at times, so not everything is as cut and dried as many a rulebook will have them be. Playing with the miniatures generator, I quickly ended up with a smug, if not absolutely lascivious, elf. Clearly a fun-loving, all work and no play makes Iolas a dull boy kind of guy. 

The insouciant, devil-may-care pose and the smirk was absolutely perfect for the Hall of Traps, though whether he's laying in wait for the adventurers, an assignation or just a barmaid with the next round is yet to be determined. 

While I'm usually the DM, I prefer to play illusionists when I play mages. Blasters are boring, and while so many people see illusion as underpowered, they lack sufficient imagination. Given a good DM, illusion can be as powerful, or more powerful, than a good fireball, but without all the fuss and bother of all that destruction.

Illusionists tend to be flamboyant (my AD&D 2e Wizard's Handbook is packed up, so I can't quote the relevant paragraph), so I needed a suitably flashy color scheme. Lacking inspiration, I hit up the Austrian Hussars, and decided to go with sky blue for the vest, and pink for the breeches. Yellow boots were mandatory.

At 5 points for a 25-30mm figure, and 20 for the Hall of Traps, I'm on the board and avoiding the cull with a grand total of 25 points. 

So, there we go. One elf illusionist, ready to throw down in the Chambers of Challenge or carouse through all the bars, pubs, brothels and manor houses of your city of choice. Or both!

From Barks: Forgotten archers in the Oubliette (80 points)

I am spoilt for choice in my Oubliette... I chose these Conquest Dark Age archers which have been floating around for many Challenges. It is one of those times where you have to go to a forgotten way of painting to match your legacy style!

This grizzled guy is their de facto leader

Quite nice sculpts

12x 28mm: 60 points

Oubliette: 20 points

From Henry: 15mm Soviet Armor+entry payment (80 pts)

Well, this is about as close as it comes..the lack of postings does not bely a lack of brushwork. With an upcoming Flames of War Stalingrad campaign, the pressure is on to crank out soviet units, so behold: a T-34 company, and a KV-1 company. The six T-34s pictured represent less than one quarter of the needed T-34s for the campaign, so more will certainly appear. Savvy viewers will note the KV-5 amongst the other KV tanks. The KV-5 was an experimental heavy tank that never saw frontline combat, as the project was uprooted and moved east towards the Urals as the German armies advanced into the Soviet Union

In Flames of War the KV-1s are formidable, but the KV-5 is a horse of a different color. With a long naval gun and heavier armor, it is a tough nut to crack for mid-war german armor. 

The ubiquitous T-34. The soviets had a tendency to create new units rather than reequip depleted units, so my T-34's are meant to depict the start of a new tank formation, pushed into the fray with little formal training. Last but not least is my entry figure, a Warlord Games British rifleman from the Zulu wars. I suspect many challengees have the box this gent is from, but this range holds a special place in my mind. This is one of the first miniatures I purchased when I entered the hobby, and as a result the Zulu war brits will always remind me of my early days of cautious experimentation with painting miniatures.

From PaulSS: [The Orcs’ Pit] Enraged Orc (27pts)

My first fantasy figure  of the challenge is a Reaper Bones Orc for the Chambers of Challenge XI.

The Orcs’ Pit: In this scruffy, dirty and unpleasant chamber, you need to paint one or more orcs, kobolds, goblins, or troll-kin of any kind!

To keep up the Napoleonic theme I did initially toy with painting some grimy French peasantry, but instead picked up this chap from my LGS.

It was quite an easy paint job, but as this is the first Reaper Bones miniature I've painted I don't think I am that impressed, they seem to be molded out of jelly, the axe shaft especially, bent like a banana and wobbles like the set of a 60's Sci-fi classic.

I wanted to keep the chap quite muted so used a drab palette on him, for those interested the green of the flesh is from a basecoat of VMC Brown Violet.

Towering over my 28mm stuff, I'm going to claim this as a 40mm figure, so 7 points plus the location bonus for 27 points. 

From ScottC: Star wars Rogue One - Sarah The Sorceress Submission (160 points)

I have painted Jyn Erso from Star Wars Legion to submit to Sarah the Sorceress in order to facilitate my teleportation into the Tomb. I have of course, painted a retinue of Rebel Pathfinders and Cassian and K2S0 to aide her on her journey.

Jyn Erso Star Wars legion (32mm in scale). I went with a standard Jyn colour scheme with a basing scheme to match the rest of my star wars legion collection based on the forest of endor. 

Cassian Andor and K2S0 

Star Wars legion rebel pathfinders with 3 that I have converted from 3D printed alien heads and 1 malifaux figure (The gentlemen in the head wrap)

The infamous Pao and Bistan ready to charge into the fray.

8 of the Rebel Troopers upgrade pack units. These were a wicked addition to the rebels faction - as there have not been many alien releases prior to this set!

Lastly, 7 rebel troopers I had converted and never got around to painting until this big batch!

Overall it has been awesome getting back into the Star Wars vibe. I hope Sarah the Sorceress will accept my submission of Jyn Erso to help me along in the chamber of challenge and delve into the Tomb (Which I have an excellent terrain piece prepared for to match one of my previous submissions...)

That's all for now, stay tuned for more! 

Total points:

28 x 28mmish scaled infantry @ 5 pts each = 140 pts

Sorceress submission bonus = 20 pts

Total 160 pts

From Dallas: RAFM/Bob Murch Cthonian in the Oubliette (30? points)

For the Oubliette, we're supposed to post a forgotten figure or long-neglected project... not a problem for most of us. I have drawers full of them...

Anyway, here we have a Cthonian sculpted by Bob Murch for RAFM's Call of Cthulhu range. Can't remember when I bought this one but it was years and years ago, and I think I actually bought it for parts. I used the metal mouth tentacles on a couple of Chaos Spawn I built and painted to include in my Chaos army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. 

After that, the rest of the model languished in a drawer... I had converted the mouth and upper part of the model with greenstuff to use as a head for a Nurgle daemon prince, but that project went in another direction. When I found the "tail" again I clipped the greenstuff off the mouth part and stuck 'em together, but the mouth tentacles were still missing...

Fortunately, though, I had kept a couple sprues of spare parts from (you guessed it) another GW plastic Chaos Spawn kit, and on those sprues were a bunch of tentacles. So I restored the Cthonian using these GW parts, after using the Cthonian parts on a GW model... go figure.

Disapproving look from a matronly townsperson. I think the model turned out OK and should make a nice addition to a fantasy skirmish game... someday... how about 10 points for this large 28mm model, plus 20 for the Chamber bonus?

Stay safe everyone!

 

From MartinN: Matilda II (23 points)

I meant to get round to paint the plastic Matilda II's by Warlord Games for a while now. In actual fact I built it a while ago already but didn't get round to paint it as I wasn't able to get my hands on the appropriate colours first. Help finally came in the guise of the AK Real Colour range. They're easy to use with the airbrush and allegedly give you the exact colours as used on the actual vehicles. Well, if the latter is true I actually don't know but it looks good enough in my opinion. Unfortunately the range doesn't yet include the Dark Green No. 4 as used from mid 1939. It was to be painted on top of the base colour of Khaki Green No. 3 which was used from February 1939 onwards.

So the colour I used probably was a little too dark but the contrast works rather well I think.

About the plastic kit itself I'm in two minds really. On the one hand it's nice to finally get some more Early War vehicles in plastic, especially not as Shitaleri kit, but unfortunately the instructions provided are a little ambiguous at some places. It didn't help I managed to glue on the wrong set of tracks for the theater in question. That said I prefer the look of the lowered suspension anyway, so all in all not too much of a tragedy. The decal set provided with the kit doesn't compare well with those provided by Rubicon Models. It has only a few options and you're not able to reproduce a specific tank. So for example the war department numbers don't fit with the tank names. Neither in style nor the numbers themselves actually. So the tank Griffin, the name I settled on for my tank in the end, should have the number T6753 but the only number which would fit at least style wise was the T6761 which was apparently not a number used for Matildas in France.

While this probably is bordering on button counting I find it still annoying as it would have been just a minor thing for Warlord to provide the accurate war department numbers.

 Points wise I claim 23 points for a tank in 28mm with a half figure tank commander.

From DrQ: Ork Boss Zagstruk in the Oubliette (25 points)

For the Oubliette I present an ancient miniature by 2021 standards, Ork Boss Zagstruk. The tab on the metal bits of this model date to 1996, which probably makes it the oldest piece in my pile of shame. I found him at the bottom of the large box of ork hand-me-downs that will be the core of my 40k army.

Zagrstruk is a hefty boy on a 40mm base. I've gotten so used to the modern GW plastic kits it took a bit to clean and pin this older white metal kit. I still might glue a few coins under the base to make sure he doesn't tip over.

 

I painted him up with more or less a bare-metal and grime look. Lots of weathering with only a few checks on his shoulder pads and left knee to hint at a painted armour that has seen better days. Also I've decided that I love Citadel Technical Paint: Nihilakh Oxide. I used to make my own bronze patina washes, but this stuff is liquid magik. 

Zagstruk is a named boss associated with the Goff and dedicated to buffing Stormboyz, which means that he probably wouldn't have seen the light of day if not for this challenge, since I neither play Goffs nor run Stormboyz. So, cheers for the challenges! 

As for points, 5 points for the model and 20 for the oubliette challenge. From here we're heading to the Tomb (and our last room for level 2!)

From Dallas: Female Fighter for the Sorceress (25 points)

Here's one of the great female figures from the old Metal Magic range, now cast and sold by Midlam Miniatures. I love their female figures - they're the opposite of the chainmail bikini trope, just women dressed in no-nonsense armour and adventuring clothing. I think this figure resembles a young Lily Tomlin (!)

This model actually came out of the mold with two swords, but I thought that was a bit silly, so I swapped the other sword for a shield. The shield decoration is from a GW decal sheet.

So with this offering to the Sorceress, I'll take a teleport past the Shrine to the Oubliette. I've got a plan for the Shrine but the Oubliette model is already painted so I'll do that room first.

Stay safe all!