A beardy lad with a big hammer…

Finished last week around the same time as the pair of werewolves from my previous post but only getting posted now is a converted Sapper for my Silver Bayonet Unit:

A beardy lad with a big hammer indeed. I imagine he’s a no-nonsense Scot who survived a vampire attack with the unit’s leader, and ever since has been seconded to him to open doors, as it were.

Terrible photos again due to the lack of natural light, but you get the gist.

He’s made of mostly Perry bits, with a Napoleonic British Command body combined with the hammer wielding arms of an Agincourt archer, a Frostgrave beardy head (as Sappers were apparently allowed to have beards, so I figured that mine should too). The musket on his pack had a hand shaved off of it so that it could be stowed, and although I had originally planned to turn the hammer into an axe (which seems to be the default equipment for most sappers) the idea of a chap wading into a fight with a vampire swinging a massive hammer was too funny to ignore. I haven’t yet selected his special equipment, maybe the hammer is silver, and so good for bashing in monsters but less useful at being used as a… well, a hammer.

For his apron (essential fashion for every Sapper, practical and stylish) I’d originally planned to copy the detail of an existing sculpt, so as to give some nice folds and whatnot without having to rely on my hamfisted attempts at sculpting, but that came out looking terrible every time so I gave up and just stuck a bit of green stuff on and went at it with clay shapers until I had something that vaguely approximated an apron, and it looks… fine, I guess.

Painting him brings the Tally to:

4 vs 14 = -10

Those numbers are a little different to last week, I hear you cry? That’s because I nipped into GW and built a free ghoul:

I was never entirely sold on the ‘new-style’ GW ghouls (‘new-style’ in this case actually meaning ‘released in the last twenty years’ I believe), but in hand they’re actually quite nice, and I might like some more of them at some point…

I also spotted that Arcane Models and Scenery are having a closing down sale (as the owner is retiring), and despite my usual ‘no purchases between Salute and Christmas to save up all my hobby funds for one big splurge’ rule I couldn’t help but treat myself to a few heavily discounted packs of Artizan Alamo minis:

The Alamo obsession seemingly continues unabated, but more on that in a future post…

I also got my copy of the new Frostgrave book Mortal Enemies this week, and set about rolling up a mortal enemy for Tim the Necromancer, which has been interesting, and set me scrabbling through my drawers of unopened miniature blisters when I realised I had the perfect miniature for what I had rolled…

Other than that, I’ve been prepping some VSF minis for an upcoming Alien Safari rule set designed by Titus Painting on instagram, we’ve ordered the minis for the children to paint for their D&D characters (next session this afternoon hopefully, not at my suggestion I might add), and even finished my next Silver Bayonet conversion:

So surprisingly busy on the miniatures front! Now I just need to paint some more! And prep some more. And convert some weird aliens out of kinder egg toys and my bits box…

Were-wolf? There-wolf!

My evening panting sessions have seen me finish another two miniatures, a pair of werewolves primarily for the first co-op Silver Bayonet scenario:

They’re sculpts from North Star, for the game Dracula’s America, and they’re nicely scaled and proportioned. They’d been sat undercoated for far too long, and the promise of being able to actually play my first home Silver Bayonet game if I finished them proved too much to resist.

Alas, I didn’t get to take pictures using natural light, so we’ll have to make do with these slightly washed out ones. 

I also decided to paint them different colours just in case I ever get round to playing the Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario Blood Moon, as I vaguely remember one of the clues in that game being finding some red hairs, hence one werewolf being a redhead.

Finishing them takes the 2024 Tally to:

3 vs 4 = -1

We also played our second session of family D&D on Mother’s Day:

The party made their way to the sea caves by boat to find out why the previously peaceful mushroom man farmers were acting up, and after fighting a fungal octopus made their way inside to get ambushed by the world’s slowest moving mushrooms, much the the dismay of the mushroom farmers. 

I’m quite enjoying running a pre written adventure, as it means we can play with minimal effort and stress, which also leaves more time (and brain space!) for trying to make it fun. We had some cool moments, like my youngest’s character getting gripped by the octopus when he got knocked out, causing a panic when it was killed and started to sink and dragged him down with it. My wife’s immediate reaction was to tie a rope around him, only to find herself getting dragged down too! My eldest also rolled her first crit too, which I was as excited as she was about!

Goblin’ my Hob

I mean I’m sure there were worse puns to use as a title, but they’d be hard to come by…

Excitingly, I’ve finished my first miniature of the year:

A Mage Knight mini originally, he’s going to be my hobgoblin for games of Silver Bayonet.

In The Silver Bayonet, Hobgoblins are humans that have been twisted and changed by dark magic, and I felt like his wildly uneven stature (not to mention rows of stitches) fit that theme quite nicely. It’s hard to see in these pictures, but a good dousing of crimson wash around the stitches makes them look pretty raw and uncomfortable.

If I was to do it again, I’d probably not leave the model unconverted - swapping out that big armoured shoulder pad for an epaulette, maybe. But I didn’t, so we can only assume the tricksy fae slapped it on him before using him in some nefarious gladiator battles before they got bored of him and released him back out into the world… I tried to make the shoulder pad looked weird and patina’d, for a little visual interest as much as anything else:

Painting him brings the Tally to:

1 vs 4 = -3

In other news, I introduced my family to Dungeons and Dragons at the weekend:

I helped them make characters and then ran them through the first couple of hours of the adventure in the latest starter box, and let me tell you D&D with children (4 and 9) is a very different beast to what you’re used to. I’m grateful that my wife also tried the game for the first time, so there was at least one player desperately trying to follow what was going on and drive the narrative in between one character constantly offering to play viol for everyone they met, and the other exploiting their entire backstory to everyone they met! If they want to carry on, we’ll have to see about getting them some proper miniatures for their characters…