From ColeF - Devils, Demons, And Dervishes (45 Points)

 

I am  a man with a hearty backlog of miniatures. I'm sure absolutely no one here can understand. I'm sure none of you have mountains of unopened packages of grey plastic, sprues that haven't even been clipped or graced with the touch of glue, or entire armies that sit primed and unloved.

Okay, maybe that's all of us, but I'm trying to be better, which leads me to my first ever post!

I dug deep into my pit of unpainted shame and threw some paint till I felt nice.

First we have two minis from Dungeon Saga by Mantic Minis, from way back in 2014. I brushed off the dust and painted this demon guy, and this ghostly ghost guy. Do I know their proper names? NO. Have I ever even played a SINGLE game of Dungeon Saga, a game I so desperately needed to back with all of my heart and wallet almost a decade ago? Also no.

But the minis have great depth, simple details, with not a lot of excessive bits and bobs, and I enjoyed painting them. Is it worth the 2014 Kickstarter FOMO I bought into? Please stop asking these questions, they make me uncomfortable.

Second we have a Dervish for Battletech, printed in Resin. I mostly dipped a toe into Battletech because I missed painting Sci Fi miniatures, and I must say that the official Catalyst minis, as well as the numerous STLs available online are a treat to paint, plus I get to practice edge highlighting.

Last but not least is Oloch Iconic Warpriest from Reaper, from their Pathfinder line of minis. I've had him and several other Pathfinder Pewter minis sitting on my desk for close to a decade, and they're some of my favorite sculpts, literally ever. As a result, I've always felt nervous to paint it up, as I didn't think I'd do it justice. I feel like I'll come back to him in the future and add some extra details on his back banners, but I'm calling him done for now.

Thanks for having me in this challenge and encouraging me to slay my grey. Love seeing all the submissions every day.

Cole

Points Totals

3x 28mm Assorted = 15 Points
1x 54mm Demon =  10 Points
Overdues and Returns = 20 Points

Sylvain: Great first post Cole! The colors are rich and deep and you brought out lots of volume in your miniatures. You offer a great variety of figurines and I will be looking forward to see what comes up next from your paint station.

If you cold provide a map of your progress in the library, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

From TomG - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Guardroom - 34 points

Hello everyone! 

Once more we plough on through the Chambers of Challenge, and today that takes us to the Guardroom, where we find two trigger happy chappies, but what are they guarding? 

All of the elements used for this vignette are from Mantic Games, with the weapon rack from their Dungeon Saga game, the two guards are "Basilean" crossbow men and the chest are from their Vanguard skirmish game.

I struggled to get this mini to a point where I was happy with the colours, so I asked my wife for advice and she pointed out that I had no spot colour that would stand out. So she recommended red, and was totally right, as it brought the whole scene to life. 

And here we see the great booty that is being guarded, although with the amount of gold that has fallen out, I wonder if it's not the guards themselves that need... guarding. 

Points - 

2x 28mm Infantry = 10pts

Challenge Entry = 20pts

Total = 30pts

From: PaulS : Painting did occur after all... (104 points)

Given the lack of updates over the last few weeks, I was worried I wouldn't get anything done this week either (you can blame Lego Dimensions for that!), but it turns out I did manage to get a few bits completed after all!

To kick start things this week we have 4 new heroes from Dungeon Saga. Left to Right we have the enhanced version of the wizard, the enhanced version of the halfling thief, Valendor (a spirit of magic... or some such thing) and finally the standard version of the halfling thief.

From the group shot you can clearly see the size differences between the halflings. The standard version is almost a quarterling instead she's so small!

Next up we have a selection of cultists made using the Frostgrave cultists pack. I absolutely adore these plastics... cultists are always useful in many different settings. These guys have been painted up in the same colours as my pulp cultists (which I'll put into a group shot on my blog later in the week)

After the cultists, we have two creatures from Shadows of Brimstone. Handily, if you paint them white, they work nicely as some of the snow creatures in Frostgrave too. Here you can see them in scale with poor Helga, who is penned in by the giant spiders too (see further down!)

 

They have strange crystal growths coming out of their backs. No wonder they are cranky!

 

The spiders are from Mantic's dungeon critters set. Along with the rats and bats from last time, these are the nicest Mantic kit I've seen. Ever. Each spider is slightly different. some are black with red markings; others are furry brown

 

 

For a week that I thought was going to be pretty quiet, that turned into 10 28mm heroes/villains, two giant monsters and 8 giant spiders.  

It's posts like these that make me appreciate Curt's adjudication over the last few Challenges - deciding how to score "off-size" critters fairly is not an easy job. I think I'll score the two snow monsters as 40mm and count the spiders as 28mm. That comes to 104 points for this submission.

Nice painting on all of these Paul - especially the death's head on that spider :)

From PaulS - 28mm Critter Tuesday (85 points)

This week has mostly been spent painting critters to overwhelm heroic adventurers, whether they are deep in a dungeon, or stalking the ruins of a cold, ruined city.

The 9 rats and 6 bats came from the Dungeon Saga kickstarter and came with a selection of spiders as well, but those are still lurking on the painting table as we're both slightly arachnophobic ;)

The figures are all resin and, surprisingly, really nicely sculpted, with some great dynamic poses. The bats are insanely fragile though as the colonies of bats are only held together by the wings touching each other. I accidentally snapped two of these while painting them, they are that fragile. Thankfully, some superglue came to the rescue. I've added Sven the Viking as a scale point for these critters.

 

Speaking of scale... at the other end of the spectrum I also finally got round to painting Goliath. This is one of the end bosses from Shadows of Brimstone. Like most of the other monsters from SoB, the detail is soft and it needed a lot of filling and resculpting... but he looks pretty imposing now he's finished. That base he's on? That's 70mm... he's one biiiiig critter. Sven once again provides a scale reference.

So that is 9 rats, 6 bats and one Goliath to add to the totals. Only the giant rats count towards the Frostgrave totals sadly

Lovely work as always Paul. Hmmm, how to score these? Given that I've been scoring halflings as full 28mm foot figures, I think the rats and bats should be as well. As for Goliath, I'm going to score him as a 28mm mounted.

From PaulS - 28mm More Frosty Goodies (150 points)

This week has been catching up a bit on the core Dungeon Saga figures in order to try and finish that off in order to get one side challenge out of the way. One of the most interesting sets of figures in the Dungeon Saga set were the undead dwarf warriors... I'm not sure I've seen skeleton dwarves before. They, along with the three undead Basilean knights, can also be used as Armoured undead in Frostgrave. I just noticed that I forgot to do the glowing eyes... I'll have to go back and do those at some point!

After finishing those 6 skeletons, I figured it was about time for a few heroes and henchmen, so I started on some of the sneaky or different characters. First up is the assassin character from the Dungeon Saga KS. This is a once piece resin figure; nicely sculpted, but I think painting it with black armour was possibly a bad idea as you can't really see the detail in the photo. He'll also make a good thief henchman for Frostgrave.

Sticking to the thief theme for a second, I made one up for a cultist/necromancer style warband using the Frostgrave Cultist and Henchmen sets. These two plastic sets are great fun to play with and offer plenty of scope for swapping parts.

After the darker side of the henchmen list, I decided to go for some brighter souls. The smaller of the two is a halfling warrior from the Dungeon Saga kickstarter who is, I guess, supposed to be Tyrion Lannister.  He will make an interesting Templar. Next to him we have the warrior nun character from Zombicide: Black Plague. I tried to do some eyes on her, but failed... failed so badly. Unfortunately the face is quite open, so it really needed eyes as there wasn't enough depth for shadows to suffice. She will also be a templar option, or potentially one of the new Captains.

Finally is a massive flock of crows for Zombicide and Black Plague. They are a bit like Flock of Seagulls, but more goth. The plus side of finishing these off is that they can also be used as Blood Crows in Frostgrave. Technically the rules are for one crow, but it makes more sense for it to be a flock. One stand (in the photo somewhere) is converted as I stole one crow to make a Crow Master (which is in the painting queue). Painting these was a pain as crows are black with black and a bit more black...

This is 9 28mm figures, 1 28mm halfling and 20 flocks of crows. The flocks are about the size of a 28mm figure, but I will leave it up to Tamsin to decide how to score them.

Beautiful work Paul. With all those crows, you'd make Alfred Hitchcock envious (and give Tippi Hedren a  severe case of the vapours). I'm going to assume that the flocks are on the same size bases as the rest of the minis and score them as equivalent to a 28mm figure (maybe you could add a comparison pic at some point?). The halfling will also be scored as a 28mm figure as that seems to be the precedent. That gives you a handy 150 points for this entry.

From PaulS - I. Am. Groot! (12 points)

With the thawing of Frostgrave, spring starts to return to the city surroundings and with it come the forces of nature. These druids use the power of life to try and restore balance to the city ruins and find news of their elders who were in the city prior to the fall.

Only two figures this week sadly. These models are part of the Dungeon Saga campaign. The smaller model is the regular version of Groot Kapoka, a dryad shapeshifter who comes with one of the expansion sets (I forget which one). The larger figure is a Legendary, resin version of the character to use when he has levelled up a bit. Unfortunately one of the issues with DS is the odd scaling of the plastic characters that makes them really small compared to the monsters. The resin versions are larger and fit well with other fantasy ranges.

In some cases, this actually works nicely as he feels like an apprentice; making the pair some druids for Frostgrave. They would work nicely with some GW dryads as minions. I may have to investigate that as an option later...

Despite the plastic version of Kapoka being small, you can see he's supposed to be a BIG character as he still stands taller than a GW skeleton...

Nice idea about using them as low level and high level versions of the same character. I do like the colours on the tunics.As for the scoring, I'll do the smaller one as a 28mm figure and the larger as a 40mm figure - that seems about right, So, 12 points for these two.

From PaulS - 28mm Savage warriors from ancient sagas (148 points)

I last year's secret santa, some kind soul sent me a batch of Black Tree vikings so I could start a Saga force I'd been talking about doing. 12 months later and I can happily say that they are all painted, with a few of the Gripping Beast plastics thrown in to bulk out some of the stands. This can be fielded as 4 points of vikings, if necessary, but I'd like to add another set of warriors (these are in the painting queue). I may have to order some more Black Tree vikings instead of the plastics though as they are really nice models. Thank you, whoever you are :)

Historical accuracy with the shields is well out the window, but the fabric colours are all pretty accurate and were compared against a pile of naturally dyed wool in my wife's wool stash. That makes up for the shields, right?

The other thing to note is that unlike most of my models, I decided to actually put decorative basing on these guys as I really didn't want to spend weeks filing off the metal bases. The reason for the snow will become apparent later.

The warlord stand is three Gripping Beast plastics. You can't have your warlord going around unprotected now can you? The first bodyguard likes geometric, pacman style shapes for his design. The second bodyguard is obviously on some sort of mushrooms with the abstract design on his...

The main Heathguard unit is a mere 4 strong, but they look like the toughest of the tough. Worthy warriors to attend the Warlord.

We then have two more groups of Hearthguard that will go together into one larger group. They are here in multiple angles to show off their fancy shields. this group was bulked out with two plastic Gripping Beast models so that all of them, except Mad Karl and Slightly-less-mad Jorik, have chainmail. I think you can guess who Karl is...

These are accompanied by a group of 8 warriors. One of them is a bit camera shy as he wanted to show off his shield instead

I decided to use colour to signify the different groups. They might be family groups... they may just have a very picky boss who likes colour co-ordination... I'm not quite sure. When all 23 figures stand together, it makes a very satisfying sight

While I was planning these, I realised that (other than the warlord base) these are all perfect minions for Frostgrave, hence the snowy bases. The snow is made using ground glass fragments and water effects. It is not so obvious on these, but in person they catch the light and sparkle like real snow.

If I was to use these for Frostgrave as well, I needed a wizard and an apprentice that fitted with the theme. Red Box games came to the rescue with two really nice figures. The detail on these are stunning and they just seemed to paint themselves.

I can't believe I missed the wonky line on the headscarf. Too late to fix that now, but I will go back and tidy that up after the challenge. Probably... or maybe it is a loose thread that has popped loose during the fighting. Yes... that is it. It is on purpose... honest!

Although they are from two different factions, they seem to fit together nicely now they are painted up.

And here they are with all of the vikings, ready to raid Frostgrave (minus the Warlord, who isn't useful here)

While we're on the Frostgrave/fantasy theme, there are also three hellhounds from Dungeon Saga. these could be hellhouds of some sort, or maybe just warhounds for the cultists. These had to be painted twice as they were the casualties in last week's varnish-fail. One side of them went completely white, while the other side was perfectly varnished... very annoying indeed.

All in, that is 28 28mm figures, 25 of which count towards the Frostgrave challenge.

Superb work Paul and a great idea to make the Vikings do double duty for Frostgrave and Saga. That's definitely a loose thread on the apprentice's headscarf, not a painting mistake *grin*.
The snow effect on the bases is wonderful. I'll have to remember that mix.
28 x 28mm foot figures gives you 140 points, and I'll throw in some extras for the 16 freehand shields.