Dem bones dem bones…

 …dem surprisingly well armoured bones:

Way, way back in the shrouded mists of the past known as March 2022, my family all had COVID, which wasn’t ideal, but on the other hand having a week off work did give me the opportunity to start playing some solo Frostgrave. Having made my way through the three scenarios of Dark Alchemy, I decided that the next thing I wanted to do was hire a Captain, and the solo scenario ‘Alone in the Crypt’ from Spellcaster issue 1 seemed like the perfect way narratively to introduce a Captain to my warband.

Scanning down the encounter table for the scenario to see what monsters I didn’t already have in my collection, I saw that I’d need some armoured skeletons. Most conversions that I’ve seen tend to be in full plate, transplanting skeleton heads into Perry medieval knight bodies (which was my initial plan), but digging through my backlog of kits one day I came across a box of plastic Vikings that realistically I’m never going to use for anything, and figured I’d give them a go as a base for some chain mail wearing skeletons:

Each miniature is a mashup of Viking (from Gripping Beast) and leftover Mantic skeleton bits (that I’m fairly certain I was gifted years ago by Infovore.Tim). As the shield arms are generally single piece with the skeleton bodies, this often involves a lot of careful cutting, scraping and filing to get everything to fit together.

I thought I’d taken more WIP pics than this, but apparently not, so we’ll jump straight to this shot of my four converted boys:

I figured four was enough, as the most you’re likely to encounter per roll on the encounter table is 2, and anyway I’ll be smashing these to pieces so quick they’re unlikely to spend much time on the table (oh sweet hubris…). I gave them a variety of different weapons to make them look less like a uniform unit, but conversely made sure three of the four had matching helmets so that they would have that visual detail to link them. What can I say, I’m a walking contradiction.

Whilst painting them, I fancied giving them all a cheesy skeleton logo on their shields, so dug out an old Chaos Space Marine transfer sheet. I know, it’s a bit silly (did they have skull themed insignia when they were alive? Did they repaint it after they were reanimated?) but some things are just classic:

And here they are after the rest of the paint job was done, suitably weathered:

Top tip for anyone using the verdigris effect paint from GW: make sure the lid is firmly on when holding the pot directly above your finished models! There was an… incident, that involved frantically trying to dilute bright blue paint and mop it off of the models before it dried, and a few touch ups. I think they only place you might still be able to see it is on their bases, but I can always pretend that’s an intentional effect, representing the magic leaking from these walking corpses and leaching into the ground…

And just to complete the set of images, here’s the back of them:

Painting these brings the Tally to:

48 vs 46 = +2

Back in the positive, and also so close to hitting the ‘miniature a week’ yearly average of 52 miniatures painted with 5 months still to go on the year!

What’s next? Back to the main project of Skaven, of course, but for the next non-Skaven miniatures I still need some ghouls and a vampire before I’m able to play that Frostgrave scenario…