Dwarvember Week 4

Ah, well, here we are. Week 4 of Dwarvember is upon us, and against all odds and reason, I have managed to finish the Challenge. Not only did I manage to complete an entire Dwarf project in one month, but I also managed to create a second Warband for Frostgrave in the process. This one was not easy... I didn't even join this Challenge until the middle of Week 3, so I had some catching up to do.

^ First up for this week we have three Dwarf Infantryman. They were originally Miners from The Battle For Skull Pass boxed set from Games Workshop, but I wasn't a big fan of the candles on the helmets. So I clipped them off and added some stray parts from Ye Olde Bitz Box. I also managed to get the problem in painting the purplish skin sorted out from last week. I may need to revisit those riflemen...

^ The Barbarian. Barbarians are supposed to have a 2-handed weapon, but this guy has two hand weapons. I am sure my opponents will allow this slight variation to slide on by. Right, guys?

^Finally, the Dwarf Witch-Lord. This started out as the cannon swabber from the aforementioned Skull Pass set, but I modified him just a little. The helmet is a Beastmen standard from the first plastic Beastmen boxed set that GW released long ago. The cape is from GW Wood elves, the sword in the sword pommel in the sheath is from GW High Elves, and the staff is a Hunnic standard from Essex miniatures. I have had it kicking around for about 22 years now, I remember buying it in San Diego a couple of years before I moved to Las Vegas Sin City USA.

^ And now, the whole Warband. Clearly the Dwarf Witch-Lord is going to be a Witch in Frostgrave game terms, but I haven't quite figured out the details yet.

So there it is. A Dwarf Warband for Frostgrave, from start to finish in roughly a week and a half. Viewers might notice a wholesale lack of anyone resembling an Apprentice. This is deliberate on my part, I want to try a variety of different playing styles in Frostgrave, and The Wizard With No Apprentice is a part of that. Wish me luck.

Please check out this week's Mo'vember entry as well.

Mo'vember Week 4

OK, so this is it. I finished the Mo'vember challenge! I created an entire Warband for Frostgrave, and I had one moustachio'd (well, bearded anyways) miniature for each week of the month.

^ So first up, we have the requisite Beard guy, a Thug in Frostgrave terms. He just has a little beard, but he has awesomely long hair in the back to make up for it.

^ Next up we have two Men At Arms. Like the Archers from last week, they have black footwear, white pants, black tunics, and white crests on their helmets. The red shields complete the tricolor for the core of the Warband. Astute viewers will note that these two guys take the total number of members to 11... due to some brain damage, I can't always math quite right, and my initial addition allowed the second Man At Arms. In practice he will be replaced by the Dog shown last week, until such time as I can afford to hire the extra Man At Arms.

^ Here we have Antigone, the Apprentice of the Warband. Red dress, white apron, black hair... clearly a Warband member! I couldn't resist this figure, not when I first bought her when Reaper Bones was released, and not now that I have a use for her. Look at all those healing potions she is holding!

^ Finally, we have the Wizard herself. Callista isn't completely deccked out in Warband colors, but she's the boss and gets to make the rules! Another of the Reaper Bones figures I bought a couple of years ago, she was fun to paint in a fairly minimalist style. There was enough detail to really go to town with, but this is a gaming piece, not a contest entry (wait, isn't this part of Mo'vember?) so I wanted her to look good on the table, not close up.

^ And this is the whole Warband, ready to play. I haven't quite sorted out the details of Callista as an Elemental Wizard yet, but hopefully I will have the details soon.

Don't miss checking out my other project this month, the Dwarvember Challenge.

Wednesday Night Musings II

Scenery? Scenery!

OK, so last week I was speculating about scenery, and since then I have made some cardstock ruins and snow patches/drifts for my game board. Rather than rambling on about it all, I will let the pictures do the talking:

The snow patches are just rounded shapes cut out of foamcore board with the cheap christmas village tree decorations glued down onto them. On a few, I also used some plastic scenery from one of the Lord of the Rings games from Games Workshop. I even used the foamcore to add a little snow to one of the ruined buildings.

R.I.P. Favorite Paints
While I was finishing up my Mo'vember and Dwarvember entries for this week I finally saw the bottom of the bottle of a few of my favorite Delta Ceramcoat craft paints.

Brown Iron Oxide
Second Lightest Lavender
White
Favorite Gold

We salute you! I already had a bottle of white ready to replace the dying one, but the rest I will need to make a pilgrimage to Joann's Fabrics to obtain replacements. And some more black, because I know my black is running low.

Satyrday
This coming Satyrday (or maybe even Friday) will see the poting of my final entries for both the Mo'vember and Dwarvember painting challenges. Everything is finished, I just need to take some pictures and write up some blog!

Mo'vember Week 3

Ah, here we are, in week three of Mo'vember and I am all caught up on my painting. I finished more of my first Frostgrave warband this week, but I didn't take any WIP pics (bad monkey! bad! bad!.) I also made some scenery to add a little snowy mystique to my board. And... I got distracted by Dwarvember, another monthly painting challenge running concurrently to Mo'vember.

 A sudden flash of insight reveals that no one came here for dwarfs or scenery...

Right. So here we have it. A bearded Thug whose moustache is hidden under his helmet. A couple of Archers in matching outfits and darker skin, showing their professional status and southerly origin. And a Dog, because I realized I didn't have enough gold for another member of the warband I had originally planned to include, but Dogs are cheap.

Give the pictures already...

 Fine, fine. Two archers, a thug, and a dog walk into a bar...

And now for all of them, from the whole month.

Next week, the final installment of Mo'vember, featuring the Wizard, the Barmaid... err, Apprentice, and the Man-at-Arms

Dwarvember Weeks 1, 2, and 3

I haven't been painting much in the last couple of years. I certainly haven't joined any challenges or contests. So when Mo'vember neatly coincided with my introduction to Frostgrave and the start of a warband for it, I found it a bit of a daunting commitment to try and paint the whole warband by the end of the month AND create posts about it. Further, I had started a week late and had to do some catching up. So when I saw the Dwarvember painting challenge, and realized I would not be even starting on it until the third week, I knew well enough to stay away.

Riiiight... we all know the truth to that, because otherwise there would be no blog post about this so-called Dwarvember. The immediate problem for me was that I am already doing another painting challenge, and adding another eight to ten models to be finished before the end of the month might be setting myself up for failure. Further, my dwarf models were all in Storage, so realistically I wouldn't even be joining the challenge until the third week. Two weeks to complete an entire dwarf warband as well as my other warband in progress? NO PROBLEM!

#goals

I actually made the pilgrimage to Storage on Wednesday, and brought some plastic GW dwarfs from (I believe) the Battle For Skull Pass starter set. I got them from a friend when the boxed set was released, he only wanted the orcs so he just handed the dwarfs and goblins off to me. Or something like that. The goblins will make an appearance as a Frostgrave warband at some point too, I am sure. Anyways, it was a long time ago and the end result is a bunch of unpainted plastic dwarfs I have had laying about for literally years.

fact: dwarfs and goblins are natural enemies, much like cats and dogs, or Republicans and Democrats

I have been wanting to do a dwarf force for a game, any game, since I was a teenager. It never really fell into place for me. I have painted, and then lost or sold, plenty of dwarfs in the last 30 years. So I wanted to do something new, something different, something edgy with these dwarfs. And as I was looking at the models, I saw one of the cannon crew. And a picture of a wicked conversion grew in my mind... evil dwarfs! discolored skin! dark clothing! minions of the Dwarf Witch-Lord! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Stop rambling already!

But this week, we just have the three musketeers (one for each week of the challenge so far.) They will count as crossbowmen in Frostgrave. I am not too happy with how the pale skin on the arms turned out, but I think I was hitting my stride with it by the last figure. The rest will be much better in next week's installment, which will be the rest of the warband and the Witch-Lord.

I took a lot of pictures of these guys... only three turned out well, and were all essentially similar. So after all that rambling, we only have one picture of the Evil Dwarfs.

More next week!

Wednesday Night Musings

Just some random thoughts about Frostgrave that have been brewing in my mind this week...

How Much is Too Much?
I've jumped fully into Frostgrave. I haven't even played a game yet, and I have plans for six or eight warbands. I may not ever even play six or eight games! It's as if every time I see an idea, I want to Frostgrave it. I had a couple of warbands from my abortive attempt to play Brink of Battle, both of them are being written up for Frostgrave (the unfinished flamingoes, however, are not.) Then there is the warband I am currently painting, as shown in my last installment. And I read about Dwarvember and, you guessed it, I felt the compulsion to start a Dwarf warband for this new project. Add to that the goblins I painted but never based for D&D, some leftover figures from both of my daughter's Elf projects, and an unassembled box of Orcs, and I am already set for the next several months of building and painting. Did I mention I still haven't played a game yet? Did I mention leftover Kroot? Oh, and what about those Egyptian and Libyan groups I did for Song of Blades and Heroes that are gathering dust?

Somewhere, something sinister and powerful is laughing at me. I can feel it...

Models With Two Weapons
I originally posted a topic about this on TMP; one of my dwarfs will be my Barbarian, but he is using two axes instead of a two-handed axe. While the general consensus is that it is just fine as long as everyone playing knows that two axes = two-handed axe, this is driving me crazy. I started serious miniatures gaming with Warhammer 40,000, and I am firmly indoctrinated in the "What You See Is What You Get" mentality. Granted, this rule was later replaced by the "Counts As" rule, but my roots go way back. So, I will be running this guy as a "Counts As" in regards to the axes, but at some point I may feel the urge to replace him with a different naked dwarf with a single big axe.

It stalk me in my dreams, whispering gluttonous thoughts, too much is never enough...

Scenery
I am heavily invested in cardstock scenery. I have a lot of it. And by a lot, I mean it in capitals. I have a LOT. So my first thought for Frostgrave were to forget about the winter theme, and just use the rules, but for a more temperate gaming environment. But, when I went to my storage to dig out the big bin o' generic fantasy scenery, I discovered some small Christmas Village trees I had bought a few years back, and an unused sheet of white foamcore board (as well as a few other scenic odds and ends.) So, we are back to winter. Or at least defrosting winter. I am in the process of building some scatter terrain pieces on the white foamboard to be snowy patches still intact on my otherwise brown and green gaming board. With a fair selection of cardstock houses and other accessories. I *think* I have a selection of ruined buildings, if not I will have to make some more.

No, of course you don't have to worry if there is enough room in the house for it all...

Sorry about the lack of fancy pictures tonight, I will have posts up with pictures for both Mo'vember and Dwarvember as we close in on the weekend.

Mo'vember Weeks 1 And 2

"But wait!" I hear the unwashed masses cry out, "isn't it cheating to skip the first week?"

Well, no. In this case, I became aware of Mo'vember in the second week, and started getting stuff painted the very next day. And now, here we are, two days after that, and I have stuff finished and ready to show already. Not a LOT to show, granted, but I have only had a few hours to get these guys looking good.

If you recall, in my last installment I had put together a little backstory about my warband. But I forgot a little bit of information. Those drunk, untrained, unemployed thugs Our Heroes had hired? They had to be equipped by Our Heroes as well, which is why they have the same spears and helmets. Now that we have that little piece of bookkeeping taken care of, we can move on.

"And loud huzzahs were heard in the distance..."

^ Here we have the first work in progress picture. Not much, but you can see the basics of blocking color, and I am focusing on the two left-hand thugs for my Week 1 and Week 2 entries. Everyone else is getting a little paint as I go along.

^ And this is right before I give it all a dark wash to shade them and pick out the details.

^ They look yucky after the wash, and I usually feel a lot of despair at this point. "They will never look pretty ever again..."

^ ...but then they turn out beautiful, my little caterpillar thugs have become butterflies after all!

Frostgrave! Or, A Bold New Direction v2.0

My next blog post was supposed to be about my Persian DBA army. Which I am still painting. But there's this new fantasy skirmish game called Frostgrave, you see. And I saw a lot about Frostgrave when it was being developed and when it first came out; really my impression was, "thank you but not for me."

And then I met another local gamer (Bashytubits from TMP.) He invited me to a WWII naval game, which was so much fun we did it again a few weeks later, and at the second game he brought the Frostgrave book and a few spare plastic miniatures for me to work with. And I was hooked. Here, we had a game that only used 10 miniatures a side, and the warbands could be built of literally anything. My ducks and flamingos are coming out of storage, I have started a warband from the donated plastics, and my head is literally spinning from the possibilities. So I had to start a whole new blog (no, really, there was no other choice.) So, without further nonsense, here is my initial Frostgrave work.

Without bothering to read the rules, I hastily assembled some models, giving them greek helmets and shields just for fun. And for good measure, I made some cavalry for them too.

After reading the rules, I realized that six guys with spears and shields would take me over my Gold budget for a starting warband. And there is no cavalry in the game. So four guys got re-armed. And since I decided to participate in Mo'vember as well, they also got some beards sticking out from under their helmets.

Beards. Now that is just strange for me. I almost always have clean-shaven models. So, now this is Punkrabbitt's very own story time theater:

"Once upon a time, there was a wizard and apprentice from the southerly climes. They had travelled northward to plunder plunder a fabled ruined city. They brought some professional soldiers with them, but also hired local help when they arrived in the north. Pale, bearded local help. Untrained, drunk, and formerly unemployed local help. In a kinder, gentler future, they would be easily identified as 'Thugs.' And so the wizard and his warband entered the city..."

I still have no idea about what miniature I am going to use for the wizard and apprentice. I must make a pilgrimage to Storage and explore my options...