Do you have time…

…to talk about our Lord and Saviour Tiamat?

So, I was off last week for Half Term, and so powered through painting some bits that I need for the next encounter in the family D&D game, some cultists of Tiamat:

In my canon, low level cultists wear rough spun plain brown robes, of a sackclothish material, but they decorate the hoods with triangles representing the different colour of chromatic dragon, with the positioning of the coloured triangles representing which type of dragon they hold in highest esteem, which you can probably just make out if you really zoom in.

This was also handy, as them being dressed in plain robes made for a pretty quick paint job! 

The more eagle eyed of you may well notice that the chap on the far right is armed with a very distinctive weapon - this is sadly the result of a picture frame falling on my desk and snapping off the scimitar (of which there are a sadly limited number per box, and I’m hoping future models from h to is box will all have), and so disheartened I decided to leave it as is looking like some sort of diminutive handaxe rather than trying to either fix it or replace it entirely.

As the next encounter is attacking a dragon in their lair while they are being courted by members of the Cult of the Dragon, I also needed some piles of treasure:

Apologies for the awful picture, it was very sunny when I took it and I assure you the piles of coins look to have more depth in hand than they do in this picture!

Which leads me to my last picture, pretty much what the party are going to see when they rush into the ruined tower - plus a green dragon languidly looking down on them…

After all that rushing to get them done, we didn’t end up having time to play D&D all week, but at least they are ready to go whenever we are now!

Painting these cultists brings the Tally to:

14 vs 206 = -192

What’s next? Well, I’ve been watching a lot of (classic) Doctor Who recently, but on the other hand we need to pack up and move house again, so if you don’t see me post for a while that will be why… 

I is for…

 …Intellect Devourers!

I forget why I painted these, as I don’t think I have a pressing need for them in the family D&D campaign, but it may well be because the scene in the D&D movies where the NPC warns the party that intellect devourers will attack whoever is smartest, only for them to then completely ignore the party, is classic D&D humour (and yet another reason it’s such a shame that we’re unlikely to see a sequel to that film).

You might not be able to tell from the picture, but these are absolutely tiny - that’s a 20mm base they’re on! Add some prominent mould lines, and me having to repaint the brain after I went too heavy handed highlighting it and it ended up far too light, to give a paint job that was surprisingly taxing considering it’s so small, but done is better than perfect, as I think the saying goes…

This brings the Monstrous Alphabet project up to:

A is for
B is for Bullywug
C is for Carrion Crawler
D is for
E is for Elemental (More than one)
F is for Flameskull
G is for Goblin
H is for
I is for Intellect Devourer
J is for
K is for
L is for Lich
M is for Mind Flayer, Myconid, Mummy, Manticore
N is for
O is for Owlbear, Ooze
P is for Purple Worm
Q is for
R is for Rust Monster
S is for Shambling Mound, Scarecrow, Skeleton
T is for Thri-Kreen
U is for
V is for
W is for Wraith
X is for
Y is for
Z is for Zombie

Although they’ve released a new Monster Manual since I started this project, which may affect some of the letters (I’m fairly certain I have twice as many options for ‘Q’ if I update it to the new MM, for example).

Speaking of the family D&D game, we’ve managed to continue playing intermittently. Highlights include learning that encounter balance is tricky, like thinking siccing a second Shambling Mound on three level fours sounds like a good idea only for my wife (and main damage dealer in the party) to then suddenly fail to hit anything, ever, leading to some scary times:

Luckily their new friend that is a manticore was there to take some of the heat, otherwise we’d have been starting fb a whole new campaign…

Unpainted Dreamblade minis stood in for Ankhegs in the next session, where the party found out getting grappled and covered in acid sucks, but they were much better equipped to visit murder on these bugs than the Shambling Mounds:

Given the amount of time that has passed since my last blogpost, despite the fact that it’s almost Salute and I usually save my spending money for that, I’ve had a couple of deliveries. First of all, a package from Northstar:

While I may not have been painting much, I’ve been thinking about projects a lot, and I’m keen to make some headway on my Alamo miniatures. As I got a nice Mexican Command Group sent over from the States by my brother in law for Christmas, I thought I’d prep them and paint the alongside the conversions I’d made from Perry plastics. The banner bearer needed a pole, so I dutifully ordered some brass spears (and I’m looking forward to trying out making a flag from tomato purse packaging), and while I was there also treated myself to a discounted Wargames Illustrated (because it came with a free sprite of greatcoat wearing French, which will get converted into Mexicans most likely), and also an ACW miniature from the Giants in Miniature range that was also on sale, because logically seeing as the Alamo led into the Mexican American War and then the American Civil War it’s surely only a matter of time before I start a project like that too.

The other parcel that turned up is nothing to do with any current projects:

As occasionally happens, I was reminiscing on how good the Warmachine lore is, and trying to work out how far I’d got on reading my way through it. I dug out some books, and had an idle search on eBay looking for the Retribution book (which I should have bought when it was £3 on eBay rather than putting it off!), and ended up stumbling on this lot - the pics were blurry (and occasionally of the seller’s floor) but I saw some gun mages (which I already have, but are always cool) and a storm tower type thing that I didn’t own, so figured I’d stick a couple of quid on just on the off chance, and ended up winning. I was even more pleased when they turned up, as it looks like the Warjack in the lot is actually the Character Jack Thorn, owned by Lieutenant Haley, who has been in my painting queue for quite some time!

All in all, the Tally now stands at:

3 vs 23 = -20

So already slipping further into the red, and with Salute just around the corner! I suspect it’s going to get worse before it gets better, as the Perrys have previewed two boxes of plastic Napoleonic Spanish, and between currently reading Sharpe’s Eagle and the Alamo project I can see myself getting a couple of boxes…

HO HO, ER… HO

Happy Hogswatch Christmas everyone!

After having missed last year due to a house move, I’ve resumed the tradition of the festive miniature - this year we have Discworld’s Death as the Hogfather, which was actually a Christmas present last year:

 

Resin, rather than the metals I had previously had from this range, but quite lovely all the same.

Given how overcast it was the morning I took these pictures, they came out a bit gloomy, but the picture of the back is a better indication of the colour of his red clothes:

I was tempted to add a little snow to the base, but given how busy Christmas week has been that decision was largely taken out of my hands! Easy enough to go back and add though if the fancy takes me…

The Tally has taken hits in both directions this week though, as popping into our FLGS after work to grab some last minute bits I spotted that a D&D miniature I’d asked them to order in over the summer had finally hit the shelves - there was only one on the shelf, so it would have been foolish to leave without grabbing it:

The family fought their first Mimic last week, so Intellect Devourers seem like an acceptable escalation. 

This leaves the Tally at:

62 vs 195 = -133

Speaking of the family D&D game, after not managing to play for a few weeks, we managed to squeeze in a session the Sunday before last, which I shoehorned some festive cheer into having them fight a giant animated gingerbread man that had been taken over by an evil animated hand that the party had previously let escape. The gingerbread golem lumbered around battering people with his massive fists and vomiting tainted icing (full of black flecks and fingernails) over people - Christmassy!

Like dogs, only scaly, and bitier…

And so finally we come to the end of the Travelodge minis:

A pair of… drakes? I think one is an ambush drake, the other I’m not sure about. 

The family D&D game may well swing into Tyranny of Dragons once we finish the mash up of the various starter set adventures I’m running for them currently, so I figured a pair of tiny dragons would probably come in handy as they start smashing up the operations of the Cult of the Dragon:

As ever, they’re surprisingly nice sculpts for pre-paints. Not so nice that I’d pay the shipping costs on more of them though…

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

47 vs 198 = -151

As for what’s next, your guess is as good as mine! The orcs that I was previously painting have already been used half-painted a couple of times in D&D, plus I’ve been overcome with a sudden urge to paint some superheroes of the mutant persuasion…

Man’s best friend

So, a couple of weeks back I had the rarest of things - a free evening. My daughter was away at camp, my son was soundly sleeping, and so I dug out my Frostgrave stuff with the full intention of continuing the adventures of Tim the Necromancer. Perusing my Wizard Sheet, I remembered that I’d earned enough money to add a dog to his warband, which was probably quite sensible considering they’re planning on venturing into a ruined potion shop for sniffing out treasures. So I dug out this mini:

He’s the cultist hound, and I think he’s perfect for Tim because he has a fancy little gold armband that you can’t really see in these pictures.

I was originally just going to paint him as a black dog, but decided to instead take inspiration from the studio paint job to avoid it ending up looking too much like something else in the painting queue.

The next half dozen miniatures you’ll see on the blog were mostly painted in a Travelodge in Ilford, as I found myself staying away for work, and figured I’d use it as an opportunity it’s to get some painting done.

Obviously I forgot some vital paints, so they ended up getting finished when I got home…

As well as finishing this mini, I’ve also acquired some more. I found a bricks and mortar board game cafe two doors down from a surviving comic book shop while in Southend for work, and came away with these:

I also ordered myself a couple of sprues of Oathmark orcs, since my family are likely to come across some sooner rather than later in the family D&D game, and weirdly I don’t have any in my collection…

Speaking of work, I also came away with three sprues of space dwarfs, that my colleague saved from the bin for me:

All in, the Tally now stands at:

42 vs 196 = -154

As has been alluded to, there are more finished miniatures on the way. I mean, not enough to pull the Tally back into the black, but enough to nudge the needle a fraction…

Oozes sah

 Faaasahnds of ‘em!

So, after previously making some oozes, I was reading the adventure that I needed them for and realised that I actually needed two Ochre Jellies, so set about making another (complete with smaller and smaller versions, in case they get to use their splitting power):

Honestly, if you haven’t tried making ooze minis out of hot glue I heartily recommend giving it a go, the mild burns you’ll sustain are more than made up for by how satisfying a goopy mini you get at the end.

As I’d had so much fun before, I figured I could also make a different sort of ooze, a Black Pudding:

Same method of construction as before, but instead of getting glazed so that it was still transparent, they got a couple of coats of thinned Corvus Black (which is pretty much a very, very dark grey), then washed with Dark Tone, and then given a gloss varnish coat to make them look extra slimy.

I also selected the glue models that were extra ‘tentacle-y’ for the Black Pudding, as in the official art it looks like it’s especially grasping:

Finally, as I was making my plans, I figured that with just a couple more slimes I could use these in place of vapour snakes for Frostgrave, and so prepped two more medium and two more small bases, which would give me eight of each when I was one, which I assumed would be enough. But what to paint them as? I was tempted to paint them grey to hit another Monster Manual entry, and considered green or blue to make them look a bit manically or acidic, but then I thought ‘wait, what’s the best way I could mess with my family during D&D’, and realised that it was probably having pools of blood animate and attack them:

There were stippled with a couple of coats of Blood for the Blood God, as I wants it to look like flakes or drops of blood suspended in a slime. I could probably have gone a little darker, but worried that if I did it wouldn’t really read as ‘liquid’ any more, so this is how they’ll stay.

Finally, here’s a posed shot of my daughter’s Druid character getting menaced by a number of slimy foes:

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

38 vs 152 = -114

What next? I ordered myself a sculpting tool a that I could see about green stuffing some more Mexicans, but unfortunately it got delivered to our old address, which took a week to get sorted (as our old landlord apparently took the parcel to her house, and then forgot to bring it over after saying she’d drop it off…). Hopefully my enthusiasm is still as high when I finally get a chance to use it as it was a week ago…

Handy is as handy does

Several weeks ago, like many people we watched the Fallout TV show, and it made me want to revisit my Fallout project, so I dig out a Brother Vinni robot that had been sat unbuilt in his baggie for far too long. After putting together so many tiny fiddly bits, it looks real nice, and several applications of dirt grime and rust over a shiny chrome basecoat later looks like this:

The flying stand is slightly wonky, but let’s be friends and pretend that was intentional to create the illusion of movement.

I’d long ignored the Modiphius Fallout game, as the minis for it are on the larger side and so wouldn’t match anything that I’d previously painted for the project, but thinking about it I could just use the rules with my own minis, which a timely Humble Bundle furnished me with. I’ll probably pick up the two player starter at some point in the future too, as I figure Super Mutant miniatures looking over my survivors would look less out of place than a survivor being head and shoulders taller than is companions.

Although…

Speaking of looming head and shoulders over a survivor, here’s our handy robot chum next to a vault dweller to give you an idea of scale:

The Tally has also take a couple of bits in the opposite direction.

I popped into GW before picking my son up from Squirrels during the week to grab a pot of paint, and also grabbed the latest mini of the month:

As there’s always space for a lady barbarian in my life, and doubly so if she’s free.

Also, it’s Father’s Day today, and so I was gifted with this:

A kit with a miniature, a couple of brushes, and some little pots of Vallejo paint, which was nice. Funny story, my wife asked if there were any particular miniatures that I wanted that she could point the kids towards, so I explained about the Monstrous Alphabet project, and told her that I’d actually made a list recently of what monsters I still needed to do, explaining that the ones in brackets were the ones that I didn’t actually own yet. She had it backwards though, and thought that the ones in brackets were the ones I didn’t own, so I should probably dig out all of the other Yuan Ti minis I already own so that he can have some friends on the painting tile!

All in all, the Tally now stands at:

23 vs 149 = -126

Next - something that’s been alluded to a few times in previous posts…

Oozy like Sunday morning…

Once again necessity for the family D&D game has steered my output, with the possibility of needing an Ochre Jelly in the near future:

Having seen how much it would cost to buy an official mini, I set out to make my own. Especially since if an Ochre Jelly suffers slashing or light ing damage, it splits into two smaller jellies (and theoretically if it gets hit again could then split into even smaller jellies!), so I’d need multiple miniatures. Years back, I’d planned to make a gelatinous cube using a hot glue gun, and a few YouTube videos seemed to suggest that this was a viable plan. So, I dug out my trusty glue gun, and traced around the various bases that I wanted slimes for to use as a template:

Then it was a case of gooping an appropriately sized glob of hot glue onto the template, and then desperately flipping it round to let gravity pull it into various shapes to look like it was reaching out an oozy tendril towards a hapless adventurer:

I had a ramekin of cold water on hand so that I could quickly set any results that I found particularly pleasing. With a lot of trial and error (and managing to burn the palm of my hand as I reflexively caught a blob of hot glue that I had allowed to drip too much towards the kitchen counter), and in some cases additional layers of glue, I had my five ooze miniatures. 

I made them on greaseproof paper rather than straight onto a base to give myself some room for error, and figured that I’d be able to glue them, with their nice flat bottoms, straight onto a painted base:

Obviously that looked awful, so I bit the bullet and applied a generous dose of hot glue to the bottom of each of them and smooshed it onto the painted base, so they actually looked like they were on it. The first attempt I was a bit timid, and ended up ripping a chunk of painted sand, but even more hot glue fixed that and you wouldn’t actually be able to tell if I hadn’t told you now, so I’d consider that a roaring success.

Then, it was time to paint them. Worrying that it might not take paint well, and I might ruin what I’d achieved so far, I quickly knocked up another mini slime to test out paint on:

And it came out looking like this, which I was very pleased with!

That’s a coat of the old GW Casandora Shade, and came out looking great - it’s definitively yellow, but still remains translucent and so looks nicely oozy.

Here’s a family picture of all of them, which due to their relatively low profiles are fairly hard to get a good picture of:

The biggest one is on a 50mm base, with the medium on a 25 and the smallest on a 20. 

Here they are from side on, to try and show their oozy lunging:

And from above, just because:

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

22 vs 147 = -125

And also updates the Monstrous Alphabet:

A is for
B is for Bullywug
C is for Carrion Crawler
D is for
E is for Elemental (More than one)
F is for Flameskull
G is for Goblin
H is for
I is for
J is for
K is for
L is for Lich
M is for Mind Flayer, Myconid, Mummy, Manticore
N is for
O is for Owlbear
P is for Purple Worm
Q is for
R is for Rust Monster
S is for Shambling Mound, Scarecrow, Skeleton
T is for Thri-Kreen
U is for
V is for
W is for Wraith
X is for
Y is for
Z is for Zombie

I’m also tempted to make some more in different colours that can also double as vapour snakes for Frostgrave. Not an original idea I know, but I’ve really come around on it now…

Back at work this week (and working further afield than usual, so deathly tired by the evening), so this is the end of this current streak of productivity!

On the family D&D front, we’ve now finished Dragons of Stormwreck Isle - they’ve killed their first dragon, and my youngest’s response was to ask if he could carve it’s heart out, so I guess he’s taken to the stereotype fairly well. They’ve had some quest hooks exposited to them, with the plan being to run a mash-up of Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver, but first they were bequeathed the deed to a keep, and need to clear it out so that they can claim their prize…

Additional gargoyles

As ever, I continue to hop from project to project as my fancy wanders to keep motivated. Looking way ahead, if I play through the Silver Bayonet expansion The Carpathians I’ll need four gargoyles, and handily years back I painted… three Mage Knight gargoyles. Handily I knew I had some more stashed somewhere, so dig them out and tried to match my decades old paint job:

If anything, they’ve come out a bit cleaner than my original paintjob, but it’s close enough I think.

Here they are all together:

I only need four, but I figured I might as well paint both the figs that I found just in case, especially as I’m finding running D&D that I often need multiples of the same type of miniature, so all these one off low level creatures like frogs and snakes I’ve painted in the past are less useful than you’d think… 

Interestingly, it seems the newer paintjobs are slightly different sculpts to the originals, having smaller wings, which is odd as I thought they were all the same Mage Knight Dungeons Gargoyles figure. Google suggests that the gargoyle does on fact have small wings, so I wonder if past me cut up a named character gargoyle? Eh, I needed gargoyles, and gargoyles I have, so it’s all good.

Finishing this pair brings the Tally to:

17 vs 147 = -130

Dem bones dem bones

 Dem huge bones:

I’ve been reading my children the D&D Dungeon Academy books on and off at bedtime, and one plot point involved the party fighting a necromancer who had a bunch of defeated skeletons reform and combine into a bigger threat and I thought you know what I’m stealing that, and so this Mage Knight figure that was in parts in a baggie got fast-tracked to the front of the painting queue:

Bam, a giant skeleton made of smaller skeletons, mostly drybrushed so very quick to get finished.

I own a couple of construct based mini campaigns for Frostgrave too, so it can also stand in for a large Construct if at some point in the future Tim the Necromancer learns how to make those…

Another mini painted, another gradual slide back towards being in the black for the Tally:

15 vs 147 = -132

Speaking of minis that are quick to get finished, I’ll leave you with a sneak peek of something else I’ve been experimenting with:

T is for…

 …Thri-Kreen!

Another pair of minis from Nolzur’s, again purchased ages ago but only just making their way to the front of the painting queue.

My painting light died, and so painting these by the dim glow of my living room light was less than pleasurable, as I was struggling to make out the details and regularly missing spots that I would have to go back and fix later. I’ve since borrowed my daughter’s lamp, and so was able to finish these semi-satisfactorily.

I forget where I got the idea, but some time ago I got it into my head that it would be an interesting encounter for a party to stumble on a pair of very lost Thri-Kreen and their pet Rust Monster (potentially tied on a bit of string) who would chitter incomprehensibly and then try to eat someone, and I think I’ve found somewhere to slot that into our family D&D game, so here’s to hoping!

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

13 vs 147 = -134

And brings the Monstrous Alphabet up to

A is for
B is for Bullywug
C is for Carrion Crawler
D is for
E is for Elemental (More than one)
F is for Flameskull
G is for Goblin
H is for
I is for
J is for
K is for
L is for Lich
M is for Mind Flayer, Myconid, Mummy, Manticore
N is for
O is for Owlbear
P is for Purple Worm
Q is for
R is for Rust Monster
S is for Shambling Mound, Scarecrow, Skeleton
T is for Thri-Kreen
U is for
V is for
W is for Wraith
X is for
Y is for
Z is for Zombie

In other news, this was my 500th post apparently, wild!