Perfunctory Stab At Zomtober, or "I Want A Ghoul Just Like The Ghoul That Harried Dear Old Dad..."

While it was still Zomtober, I thought I should make an effort and do my bit for the month's festivities. I decided to try my hand at some crypt creepers for Frostgrave.

Here are two sample Ghouls I'm working on;

Yes, I know they're not Zombies, or technically even Undead, but every Necromancer or Lich has to start somewhere, and it's so hard to reanimate good help these days...! I'm trying a couple of different manufacturers' figures, along with some different basing ideas to see which combo works best.

Our first ghoul is a Warhammer plastic. Although the fluff for these suggests that they are a degenerate sub-species of human, this guy has clearly fallen more than a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder before tumbling through the door marked 'Mutant' and tripping over the huge number of skulls and random spiky bits which litter the floor at GW HQ.

Wow, that's some... creative piercing...

He's on a resin 'Bone Fields' themed base from Secret Weapon. No, it wasn't because of the legal requirement for any GW product to be surrounded by a minimum number of Skullz (TM), it was because I think that a charnel house concept works so much better for necrophages than my usual heather tufts.

Honestly, I'm not sure that the whole design ethos of these late model GW ghouls really works for Frostgrave, as it looks like their designers have ramped everything up to 11 with a side of 'extra spiky'. What happened to the gaunt, club-wielding brutes we saw in the Mordheim range all those years ago?

I would have liked to have given a similar base to our next ghoul-in-progress, this fine fellow from Mantic Games (packaged with some skellies and zombies as part of the Frostgrave Undead Encounter pack), but alas, he comes with his feet already attached to a moulded base. I dare say that some deft work with a pair of clippers and a sharp knife could free him without doing too much damage, but I have a limited number of these fellows to experiment with and so decided to play it safe.

Anyone else getting a 'The Hills Have Eyes' vibe from this guy?

He's a lot more humanoid than his GW counterpart, and looks a bit more plausible as a member of a degenerate and inbred cannibal community trapped in an icebound city for centuries, assuming that a fantasy skirmish game needs to consider such things as 'plausibility'.

The only real problem encountered when assembling him was with the fingers; while the pieces are excellently sculpted and extremely detailed, the open hands and long fingers are quite fragile, so care is needed when clipping the arms away from the sprue. I actually had to replace his right hand with the closed weapon hand you see here thanks to my clumsiness.

The Renedra plastic base has been built up with Vallejo White Pumice and a spare Skull (TM). Snow will be piled around the bases of both figures once they've been painted and I'll decide then which style to go with.

Stay tuned!

Ev