Monuments And Treasures

Basti Warband
This is the other warband I had created for Brink of Battle early last year. The basic warband is the Wizard, the Apprentice, two treasure hunter, a man-at-arms, and an archer. I have had the miniatures painted for literally years, but I had to re-base the Wizard and Apprentice. My various Wargods of Aegyptus miniatures continue to provide a veritable treasure trove (pun intended, see below) of usefulness for Frostgrave! This is just the beginning, I have a few thugs that I would like to paint up to accompany this group...

The Basti Cat Girls and Guy are back in action!

Zombies
I saw somewhere that some of the new scenarios and campaigns that have been published require more zombies... these two have been knocking about in various boxes since 1993, I think they started out as Vampire: The Masquerade miniatures from Ral Partha. The paint was pretty beat up, so I did some highlighting to fix it and based them to match the rest of the Frostgrave collection. I have located about another ten zombies to paint up as well.

You can never have too many zombies, right?

Monuments
One of the basic Frostgrave scenarios requires six statues. I decided to buy a bag of knights and some pill containers at the dollar store. After about an hour and a half of work, I wound up with these. I tried a couple of different ways of doing marble work, and I went with classic greek and roman techniques and made the weapons, shields, and crests bronze.

Statues. BIG statues!

Treasures
I used some of the odds and ends from my Wargods collection to make dedicated treasure tokens for Frostgrave. The rules call for five tokens, four regular and one special in a normal two player game. Since we may have three players on the board, I did a total of seven.

Treasure! Lots of treasure...

Adding It All Up
And here is a comparison picture to show how the treaure tokens and statues compare to a noral-sized miniature.

Insert amusing comment here

Wednesday Night Musings V

Stupid Wind!
Really, all I wanted was to be able to Dullcote my WizarDecember Week 2 entry... 25 mile per hour winds,with gusts up to 35 mph since last Friday has kept me from being able to do so until this afternoon. I haven't had time to do any pictures yet, but since I finished my Week 3 entry today I expect to be doing pictures tomorrow.

Glorantha Again
Last week, I posted a bit about Glorantha and my Ducks and my plans and all that good jazz. As I was looking through my various Warbands, I noticed that first one I did last month would work well as a Gloranthan Warband. It really does have "Lunar" written all over it, doesn't it? Greek helmets, red shields, spears... and a perfect first opponent for my Ducks. Hmmm... now I need to actually finish my Ducks! Really, only a Wizard and Apprentice, but still...

Also, I have started conversion work on my Morokanth Wizard, for painting next week as my WizarDecember entry.

Scenery
How much scenery is too much? I have enough to cover my 2'x2' board twice over, and still have plenty left over to build. I've been a bit busy this week, so no new terrain this week. But here is what's in the cardstock queue...

Not only a LOT of cardstock projects, but arranged in an attractive pattern.

Best Wife Ever
A few years back, I painted up a semi-historical New Kingdom Egyptian warband statted for Song of Blades and Heroes as a gift to my wife, with the cunning plan that she would actually play the game with me. As it turned out, she wanted to put them on display with the rest of her Egyptian display items, and forbade them from being used for gaming. Since we have moved to our smaller home, these miniatures have been living in a box in the closet due to lack of shelf space. In any event, I recently pulled them out and asked her if she would like to try playing a game of Frostgrave with them. She quickly agreed, but did not want me to touch up any of the chipped paint nor re-base the one model that had been for D&D. I want her to have a little more in the way of Warband options than is currently finished, so I have a few more models to finish for her and we will be playing a game!

She and I also  recently did some re-arranging of furniture and re-organizing of the bedroom. In her infinite wisdom and general goodness, she designated a shelving unit to be solely for my hobby stuff. I don't have too many finished miniatures here at the house, so the top shelf is currently DBA and Frostgrave forces, the next two shelves are scenery (at least until I need the shelf space for finished miniatures,) and finally books on the bottom shelf. You can also see some of my model airplanes hanging from the ceiling (another one of her suggestions.)

Best. Wife. Ever.

Future Plans
I've got four Warbands for Frostgrave finished, four more in the works, and I am still rolling hot on wanting to get them done. But I know I am going to want a change of pace soon. I have been feeling the urge to start painting my DBA Persians again, and a local gaming group has invited me to play VSF Colonials with them. So, while this blog will remain Tumbhelada de Punkrabbitt, in January I will be posting occasional forays into other genres. You have been warned!

Wednesday Night Musings III

Wizardecember
A painting challenge for Wizard miniatures, you say? And me needing to paint up some Wizards to add to existing groups of figures to create yet more Frostgrave warbands? How can I not be a part of this Wizardecember? 4 weeks. 4 Wizards. YES!

Punkrabbitt
Every time I start a new game and/or genre, I get around to a setting-specific Punkrabbitt figure eventually. So far, there has been Space Pirate Punkrabbitt (for Vor: The Maelstrom), Steampunk Pirate Punkrabbitt (for Warmachine,) Post-Apocalyptic Punkrabbitt (for Dark Age,) and War Of Spanish Succession Punkrabbitt (yes, really!) Now that I am into this whole fantasy/Frostgrave thing, my mind has turned to figuring out how to create a Punkrabbitt model with a difference.

Four Punkrabbitts: the poorly Photoshopped comparison edition

My Punkrabbitts have always been warriors of one sort or another, armed with a formidable melee weapon in one hand and a ranged weapon in the other. Short or tall, thin or plump, they have always exuded the masculinity of their genre. In Frostgrave, the character types are Wizards (generally without guns or tricorns) or Apprentices. And Punkrabbitt is not anyone's Apprentice! So, clearly a Wizard is in order. And while we are at it, let's make him a her, just to switch things things up a little. Is it an affront to my masculinity to have my personal icon in the game be female? No, of course not. Almost all of my World of Warcraft characters are female, and if I recall, most of my D&D characters back in the day were female, so why not have Punkrabbitt be female?

As I look at the four Punkrabbitt incarnations so far, one thing strikes me: they are all so nicely dressed, almost like they are a part of the "polite" society of whichever genre they represent. If I am doing the Opposite Day version, it calls for something savage, something feral, something vulgar, something cast out from civilization... and I know just the miniature to use as the basis of my conversion. This is going to be awesome!

Hopefully for Week 3 of Wizardecember...

More Scenery
I have not been idle in the scenery department. Behold!

^ I made a 2'x2' game board for playing games on. It is 2" thick white insulation foam, painted with Folk Art "Coffee Bean." I will be adding flecks of lighter and darker colors at some point.

^ Archways... excellent for making a mess of the board.

^ Another crypt, this time with better interior walls, a recessed floor, and more snow.

^ A small obelisk... there is a large obelisk coming soon. There is a piece that goes between this obelisk and it's base to make it much taller.

^ This is the other piece of the obelisk, in this case it is serving as a fallen something, with some adjacent snow. Gotta love the snow.

^ The ruined tower... the second and third floors are removable, so it can handle some interior action.

Okay, so that's all I have for musing upon this Wednesday night. Check back Satyrday for my first Wizardecember entry.

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!

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.