Saturday 27 December 2014

I love mushroom men, this I know...


I love Myconids, as I think I may have alluded to in previous blog posts. I mean, this is the shirt that my wife got me for Christmas that I wore today whilst painting these miniatures:



As the Tally getting back into the black isn't unreachably far away, I thought it would be nice to finish off the dozen mushroomy fellas that I had half painted on the TV unit for a little while. Well, I say a little while, I literally had to dust them off with a large soft brush before I could continue painting them...

My encounter group of myconids is broken into three groups of four models each:



The first group is Hasslefree's Agarix miniatures, lovely little sculpts that will do for generic Myconid types. I would say warriors, but really they're peaceful mushroom farmers who are minding their own business until adventuring parties come trampling through their domains and start attacking them because they're different looking...



The next group are from Ral Partha, and are 25mm rather than 28mm. I don't mind this though, variety is the spice of life after all eh? I converted one to be a wizard or cleric type (or a Rotpriest, if we're running these in 4e) with the addition of a mushroom staff, and added a mushroom piece from an old Games Workshop Night Goblin sprue to another with an outstretched arm to make a farmer type - is he sheltering then with his arm, or perhaps summoning them? Depends on the needs of the encounter! And yes, I am a big nerd, and colour coordinated the mushrooms to the Nintendo standard (green for life, 1up style etc)!



The last group are Myconid gas spores, mildly converted with a little cutting, scraping and bending from GW Tyranid spore mines from the old Battle for Macragge 40k starter set. I imagine that they grow out of the ground like any other mushroom, on several stalks, held up by their buoyant head, until the day that they are mature enough to pull themselves out of the ground and become mobile, still trailing their stalks beneath them...



I picture these as somewhat like guard dogs for a Myconid colony, probably floating aimlessly about near the entrance , acting almost as an early warning system for the arrival of bands of roving adventurers looking for loot and seeing these peaceful ambulatory mushroom chaos as nothing more than sacks of XP (the horror!). 



The gas spores seem to be fairly large in the reference imagery I could find, but a little handwaveium deals with that (I mean yes, if you try to apply physics to a fantasy setting they'd probably need to be bigger in order to contain enough gas to float, but worlds of magic, that's why).

So, having finished these dozen miniatures brings the tally to:

78 vs 80 = -2

which would have put me back into the black if it weren't for the second round of Christmas presents... (Not wanting to sound ungrateful, don't get me wrong!)




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