A Song of Frost and Gravy - Chapter 6, "The Millsy Imperative"

My friend and blolleague Millsy emailed me a while back about our progress (or lack of) with Frostgrave;

Now, as we picked up Frostgrave back in 2015, and the second edition has just been released, that was an uncomfortable assessment. A pretty poor show on my part!

So what to do? All very well for me to faff about with terrain, but if we never play a game, what's it all for?

Remember these guys?

This is the warband as it had been for many a long year; Vaino the Enchanter, Ilmar the Apprentice, a Ranger, an Infantryman, and Doctor Lividus de Bruse, Apothecary-at-Large to the Court of Duke Delius of Marchmont (deceased).

Well, they have some new friends;

A Crossbowman, two Thugs, and an Archer; while this brings the numbers up to a more playable level, the limited funds for a starting warband mean that the Apothecary will need to be sidelined until after we accumulate a few extra spondulicks.

But in the meantime, the new missile capability will hopefully give the warband a chance of survival in the snow-bound ruins of Felstad.

And for heavy lifting and general expendability, the two Thugs; not by any means elegant, but they come cheap.

Finally, a complete warband, and it only took five years! Truly, all good things come to those who wait, but poor Millsy has had to wait longer than most...

What now? Stay tuned...

Ev

Old Dog Learns New (Terrain) Tricks - A Minor Detour

Remember when I said I'd be getting more of those excellent textured rollers from Green Stuff World?

They got here last week! Yay! Together with the round cutters I ordered earlier, I have sorted my pre-industrial urban figure basing needs.

Naturally, I couldn't resist a road test at the earliest opportunity, so I rolled out some DAS and gave them a shot. I can definitely say they do what it says on the tin.

That's a Warbases 40mm MDF base at the left, and the results of the test are to the right. Clockwise from the top left, Cobblestone, Small Cobblestone, the Brick roller (as used on my ruined tower piece from the last post), and Flagstone. No buyer's remorse here!

Of course, that now means that I have to get back to work on my Frostgrave warband, which had kind of stalled at the 'wizards plus two other guys' stage when last we looked...

So six more figures and I'll have a functioning warband. Only taken nearly four years...

What's up next then? Stay tuned!

Ev

Fantasy Skirmish Warband

I know right? Rumours of my demise and all that but hey, I've actually gone and posted something!

Despite the near deafening silence hereabouts things have been happening. Admittedly mostly spending money and going places but some work has been going on as is evidenced by the following.

These chaps are my new fantasy skirmish warband, good for Frostgrave, Mordheim or whatever. Mostly GW plastic orcs, upgraded with some Mordheim, Savage Orc, Space Ork and Empire bits.

The night goblin shaman is a metal fig, undergoing his apprenticeship in all things tribal magic from his larger (and substantially thicker) mentor.

Now if only Ev will finish his warband we could get some games in :-)

Hopefully things will pick up around here now. I've got some very nearly finished Epic Imperial Guard Sentinels on the painting desk so they should appear on the weekend.

Cheers,
Millsy

Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge VII - Day 49 (or is it 52?), or The Hot Zone

Day 49 (OK Tamsin, Day 52, thank you so very much) of the Challenge, and I'm sorry to say that I'm not exactly setting the world on fire. But that's OK, because the weather is doing a splendid job of that on its own here in Sydney. We've had a succession of heatwaves, and we're gearing up for another one this weekend.

So painting has been a slow grind. Productivity hasn't been all it might be, but I have managed to put a couple of pieces together to gradually build my points total.

First up was this chappie;

A Scibor Miniatures Orc Chieftain, a superb sculpt which repays the effort to paint it. I wanted to go for a colder colour scheme than the usual Goblin Green, as the figure is so imposing and really calls for a darker, less warm tone. Wet palette work came in handy for the blending of the skin hues up from the dark blue-green base through to the turquoise final highlights.

Next up was another figure for Frostgrave, a repurposed Plague Apothecary from Foundry's Casting Room Miniatures.

He's been given the sickly shades of an old bruise, with a mask the colour of bone. He strikes me as a creepy and morally ambiguous medical practitioner, as ready to kill as to cure.

Last of all was my entry in the terrain Bonus Round, 'Home', a scratch-built mausoleum for Frostgrave. And yes, it's 'Home' for assorted zombies and ghouls, so it counts!

I was very happy with how this one turned out, especially as I was trying out some marbled paint effects for the first time, and the decaying stucco exposing the brickwork beneath turned out pretty well too. It's colourful for a mausoleum, but if you've ever seen the exuberantly-painted Etruscan tombs, you'll understand the effect I was going for.

That's all for now - probably going to be a quiet weekend for the paint bench, since the weather is a great demotivator, but there's always more prep and assembly to do.

Stay tuned!

Ev

A Song of Frost and Gravy, Part the Fifth - Warband in Progress!

Well, who'd have thought it? I've actually managed a semblance of momentum on the Frostgrave project!

Here is the warband so far; our two Enchanters, an Infantryman and a Ranger.

"Enchanters Assemble!!!' 
"Shut up, Ilmar."

And here are the new recruits, still in the preliminary stages. First up, an Archer and a Crossbowman to add to the mix; this will add some more much-needed ranged support.

"Riiight, now stay calm, finish painting us, and nobody gets hurt..."

Then we have four Thugs - stout fellows all, expendable and cheap. That's maxed out the numbers to the ten members allowed. Spot the conversion!

"Wait up, didn't you used to work in Mordheim?"
"Nah mate, you must be thinkin' o' someone else."

If our Wizards play their cards right, they might be able to afford to swap out for a Mercenary Captain to whip their motley crew into shape, or some more muscle in the form of a Barbarian. In any event, they'll need all the help they can get to fight off competitors and the assorted monsters, both mundane and magical, which roam the ruins of Frostgrave.

And speaking of which, here's the current state of play with the bad guys;

Hmmm... I think we'll need a few more than this lot. Better get prepping...

No, no, no! Paint the warband then you can prep more monsters! Finish what's in front of you!

Ye gods, I'm sounding like my Mum...

That's all for now, stay tuned!

Ev

A Song of Frost and Gravy, Part 4 - The Compleat Enchanters

Surprise, surprise! My Enchanters for Frostgrave are now complete!

Vaino the Enchanter and his determined young Apprentice Ilmar are now ready to venture into the ruins of Felstad in search of treasure and glory.

Here's Vaino, the brains of the outfit;

and here's Ilmar, the muscle. A diligent enough student, though far from the sharpest tool in the forge.

Of course, only a fool would go into Frostgrave alone, and Vaino will have to haggle with the assorted mercenaries and ne'er-do-wells who have made their way to the camps and shantytowns which have sprouted like mushrooms as the glaciers retreat.

Who will be the first to join their warband? We shall see...

That's all for now -stay tuned!

Ev

A Song of Frost and Gravy, Part the Third; Glacial Painting and Works in Progress (of a sort)

The thing about glaciers is that they move very slowly.

So you'll have to forgive me for emulating their progress when painting a subject as wintry as the ruins of Felstad... But Millsy has kept the blog fires burning admirably over winter!

Remember the Reaper Bones Ice Spider? Well, he's all based up and ready to go.

The usual baking soda and PVA snow mix, given a little shading here and there with some diluted blue ink, completes the basing. Can't play Frostgrave without monsters, so he'll join the Ice Toad, the Snow Leopard and the Golem in the menagerie of menace.

But what about adventurers? I have an Infantryman and a Ranger both finished, but without wizards to boss them around, they're not really doing anything much at all. So I bit the bullet and made a start on an Enchanter and his Apprentice last weekend. I've roughed in the main colour areas, but the detail still has to be finished off, so they really are works in progress (at last!).

Here's the Enchanter, Vaino,

and his determined young assistant, Ilmar.

Character names courtesy of the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, after the magician-heroes Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen; it's an homage to two of the great enchanters of legend. And what could be more appropriate for these two than a snowy landscape in which to perform their daring deeds?

The North Star Frostgrave figs are decked with a wealth of detail, and if your eyesight is a little hazy in the close-up department (like yours truly), you might miss a strap or bottle or whatever, but they certainly repay the effort.

I hope to have these lads completed next weekend, and then it'll be on to some more hirelings to bulk up the warband. Plus there's the prepping for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge - cleaning and undercoating in advance this time!

That's all for now - stay tuned!

Ev

A Song of Frost & Gravy, Part The Second, or The Winter's Tale

Is it that time already...?

It's been over three months since my last blog post on the tail end of the Sixth Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, and it seems that I've barely had time to scratch myself, let alone get anything hobby-related decently begun. Plus, this winter's head cold is a bloody pain in the proverbials, pardon my French.

Besides, the estimable Mr Mills has been left to do all the heavy lifting on C&G while I've been otherwise engaged, so I'd better put in some effort to try and hold up my end of the rope.

So I've decided to get back on the hobby horse and see if I can't get some momentum going. I'm resuming work on some more monsters for Frostgrave, since it's all very well to have a warband, but every scenario needs random encounters and adversaries.

First up is this little chap, a Reaper Bones Giant Spider. Cheap as chips, he'll be appearing in the well-loved role of the Ice Spider, the galloping predator of the ruins of Felstad.

He'll need a suitable base of course; he's not terribly imposing sitting there with all eight legs on the ground. So a chunk of pine bark, a few quartz chips, some white pumice paste on a 40mm Renedra round base, and a pin to secure Mr Spider to his perch, and voilà!

Painted to a suitable standard;

...and with the painted Ice Spider given a preliminary placement, it's not looking too bad given that I've not been within shouting distance of a paintbrush for longer than I care to remember!

He'll need the regulation snowdrifts as set dressing, but we'll get on to that soon enough - this is just a WIP post!

More later - stay tuned!

Ev

The Challenge; A Quick Round Up (and then it's back to Frostgrave!)

The 6th Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, where bloggers and painters from the four corners of the circular globe line up to show off their figlimning and modelling skills, has at last come to an end for another year.

While my blolleague Millsy is an old hand at this event, it was my first entry into the lists (thanks to the encouragement of painting blog luminaries such as Anne, Michael, Paul, and Dave, as well as Millsy), so I set myself a modest target of 200 points.

Well, I wasn't going to set the world on fire on my first outing, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I ended up with 241 points. The key here seems to be the bonus rounds, and my word, didn't the Challengers pull out all the stops for those!

C&G's own Millsy was one of the leaders in this field, with a podium finish in each of the bonus rounds, and a well-deserved win in the 'Defensive Terrain' category for his insanely detailed motte-and-bailey castle.

Trust me, anyone bloody-minded enough to sharpen nearly two hundred individual twigs gathered from the backyard to make a palisade is not a person to be trifled with.

My own showing in the bonus rounds was modest, as befits a debutant. I did score an honourable mention in the 'Nautical' category, which was more than I had dared expect - old Thadrak Krakenbane is possibly the silliest figure I've ever painted, but he generated a backstory which went from silly to sad in a most unexpected manner.

Towards the end of the Challenge, it was as though Millsy and I remembered that we had a bunch of unpainted figs for something called Frostgrave (as did a good many other Challengers - it was almost uncanny!), and there was a bit of a (snow) flurry as we all swung into action. I rustled up a couple of beasties and two soldiers, while Millsy went for some superbly-rendered Wights and Constructs.

I'm glad we're getting some traction on Frostgrave again (after all, we did buy the ruleset for a reason), and I've been inspired to carry on in the wake of the Challenge. Better late than never for the painting mojo to kick in - though three months ago would have been nice!

So here's the latest from the Drummoyne workbench; two golems (or constructs, in Frostgrave parlance), one Stone, one Flesh. They're impulse buys from my FLGS, Reaper Bones figs, and I'm surprised at how easily they painted up (though I'll leave it to you to make your own judgement on the final effect).

Here's the Stone Golem, based on a Renedra 40mm round with some rocks, some resin basing bits from an old GW basing set, and lots of white pumice to build up the area around the moulded base of the fig. It was finished with the 50/50 bicarb/PVA glue snow mix, given a wash in the recesses with the OOP GW Ice Blue.

I decided to go with something other than the bog standard GWSWGG colour scheme, working up instead from a base of the now-discontinued GW Foundation colour Orkhide Shade, a very dark green at the blue end of the spectrum. Successive layers of drybrushing went up from the old Dark Angels Green to the lighter grey-greens of the final edge highlights.

I was going for a greenstone/dark jade effect, and I think staying away from the warmer, yellower greens was the way to go. The fine cracks evident in the sculpt called for a lighter touch, and I think that lining in the lower edges of the flaws with the paler tones has helped me here. 

The next one is almost a diametric opposite; the sharp edges of the first sculpt have no counterpart in the Reaper Bones Flesh Golem. I started with a purple basecoat, thinking to work it up to a pale mauve-grey, for a dead and sallow look. As I added paler layers, striping in the direction of the muscle, I found myself moving back towards the red end of the purple spectrum. As you can see, one thing led to another, with a pretty disturbing end result.

He's made of flesh, alright, but it's as though some careless magician neglected to give him skin. He looks like he's just stepped off the set of one of the Hellraiser films. I'm not entirely sure what happened there...

The bulging muscles of his back and shoulders really lent themselves to the 'anatomical model' style of painting, with the striation of the tissue picked out in purple, red and bone with a dark red wash. His base is the usual snow mix, with a rusty helmet from the Frostgrave Soldiers sprue thrown in for good measure. 

His bloody chest and hands have been given a splash of GW's 'Blood for the Blood God', from their technical paint range, with a few drops and bloody footprints in the snow as well. Ordinarily, I avoid such overly gory effects, but something about this sculpt brought out my inner B-movie horror impresario. All a bit Grand Guignol, really - I'd better not make too much of a habit of it...

That's all for now - stay tuned!

Ev

More Frostgrave Zombies, or A Song of Frost and Gravy

Some more work on the jaundiced ice-mummy zombies of Frostgrave. You'll remember how I did the skin tones on the test fig; well, here he is with his mates, suitably bloody and looking like they've been dragged through a glacier backwards.

Now all I have to do is get some snow on the bases, and complete another nine or ten zombies, and we should be right for a game...

Oh! And I'd better paint up a warband...!

Stay tuned...

Ev

Frostgrave Zombies - Skin Tones WIP

Here's the progress to date on my mighty undead horde for Frostgrave (all three of them).

I found myself on a bit of a roll, and decided to begin painting one of the Mantic Zombies while I was still feeling motivated.

For the test fig, I went for a base coat of mixed GW Nurgling Green and Bleached Bone, since the wonderful old 'Rotting Flesh' has been discontinued. More Bleached Bone was added to the mix for highlights, and the models were then given a wash of Agrax Earthshade to grubby them up and bring out the detail.

Open wounds were painted in GW Scab Red, and some more highlights picked out in pure Bleached Bone. I decided to go for a compromise skin tone, something suggesting corruption as well as mummification - sort of an 'Ötzi the Iceman with jaundice' look. And let's face it, Frostgrave zombies have been trapped inside a glacier for centuries, so they will look a little bit like our Tyrolean friend!

Hey, kids, it's everyone's favourite Chalcolithic Ice Mummy, Ötzi!

So, one quick coat of yellow glaze, followed by a wash of Reikland Flesh to give the skin a russet tone, and voilà!

Still have to get to work on the clothing, base, and facial details such as eyes and teeth, but I think this test figure is about right in the skin department.

More later, stay tuned!

Ev

Perfunctory Stab At Zomtober (Part the Second)

Remember this fellow?

That's the Reaper Bones Lich I painted up for Frostgrave. Well, I tried my hand at a spot of snowy basing, and I think he's come up OK - just mixed equal volumes PVA Glue and Bicarbonate of Soda, and piled it on to the base. I waited for it to set, then gave it an undercoat of GW Ice Blue before dry-brushing layers of white over the top and finishing with a couple of layers of gloss varnish. I think the Christmas Lich (aka Father Lichmas, Santa Claws, etc) now looks suitably wintry, and yet somehow festive...

Obviously, in view of the season, he'll need some suitably necrotic minions to assist him in his nefarious activities, so at last, here's my first proper go for Zomtober (Ghouls don't count!); actual zombie figs. Pity I only got around to assembling them just today...

And yes, I did what I said I probably wouldn't do; I cut away the bases of three of Mantic's excellent Kings of War Zombies, and stuck them onto the Secret Weapon 'Corpse Field' themed resin bases. They were such nice figs, I thought I'd give them a suitably icky base. While excising them from their bases, I managed to keep the damage fairly low, only destroying one set of zombie legs in the process, but the ones above turned out OK, even if I say so myself. They're certainly much more animated than GW's take on the zombie, and I will hopefully slap some paint on these bad boys this weekend just to muck about with colour schemes and see what works.

Stay tuned!

Ev

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