Mixing things up once again!
With my wife being immunocompromised and the hygiene standards (or lack thereof) I've seen at some of the local game stores, a lot of my wargaming has shifted to solo play since 2020, and one of the games most often seen on my table is "Majestic 13," from Snarling Badger Studios. While it hasn't gotten the same level of attention that their offerings "Deth Wizards" and "Space Station Zero" have, it's been a very enjoyable game for me.
You play as a team of five "Agents" in a covert war against alien invaders, represented in most games by one big gribbly monster that can absorb and deal out a lot of damage. Each game is capped at five turns and you'll usually have a secondary mission attached alongside the primary mission of "kill the monster." It's built for campaign play, with agents improving skills, requisitioning improved gear, as well as developing PTSD and dying and being returned to the battlefield as clones of varying quality.
I'm currently (as of this blogpost going live) four games into my current campaign, and have a small collection of painted monsters to use; the game offers stats for 26 monsters, each of which are described in the vaguest possible terms to allow you to use whatever figures feel most appropriate to the you. Most of mine are 3D prints from various designers, and here are two more newly painted for my collection. Both of these were purchased from TableTopTradesman on Etsy, who has been one of my go-to sources for these.
The first of these is a sort of generic "Cthulhu"-y humanoid figure with long arms ending in tentacled "hands" and a octopus-like head. I tend to keep my paint jobs on these monsters relatively simple, often with a main color and pops of contrast; they've also been good for me as practice for glazing and similar techniques. Here, I used a medium cool gray for a base-coat, washed it with some thinned down GW "Nighthaunt Gloom" contrast paint, and then drybrushed with a very pale blue-tinged gray, and a second drybrush using a 70/30 mix of white and that same pale blue-gray.
I then went over the "hands" with "Baal Red" contrast paint up to the wrists; once dried, I gave them a light drybrush of a red-orange color, and then used a lighter red to glaze over the orange and carried the glaze all the way up to the...second wrist? There's a lot of extra joints in its arms. Hopefully that reads as a shift in the creature's pigment, rather than it being wrist-deep in gore.
The second critter is marketed as a "Dire Bat," but those sure as heck ain't wings! The frills on the arms look more like fish fins to me, personally, but it was such an odd design choice that it drew me to this figure whereas I probably would have skipped over a more traditional "bat" design.
I kept the colors fairly simple, an all-over basecoat of a dark red-brown, drybrushed with a brighter version of the same, and a final drybrushing of a rusty red-brown along the edges of the fins and the mane down its neck. In hindsight, I probably should have painted him *before* gluing him to the base! He's on a 60mm round from Renedra, by the way, while his paler companion is on a 40mm base.
Since many of the monsters in Majestic 13 have energy-based ranged attacks, I painted the inside of the figure's gaping maw a strong golden yellow (3 coats), and then washed it with orange before going back over the middle with more yellow. Hopefully that sells the idea of it having a Godzilla-style breath weapon!
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| ZZZZAPPP!!! |
They're fairly large figures, but the paint jobs are not terribly complex, so I've been chewing over how best to score these. The gray monster is pretty close to 54mm in height, while the bat is probably not far off that in length. Here's a picture of them next to one of my Majestic 13 Agents for sale:
I'll leave it to Sylvain to make the final determination, but maybe treat them as 40mm figures to account for the simpler paint jobs, and call it 14 points for the two of them? I'm counting these as Modern Horror, so no new squirrel points for me.
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Sylvain: Those are some wicked monsters! Simple but effective game tools. Figurines are based on size, so you just completed two 54mm models. Extraordinaire!
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