After the brief interlude of articles on dungeon aesthetics, I am slowly getting back to what I want to do with Frostgrave. I have begun digging through my unpainted backlog and came up with some fitting adversaries for Balthazar and his gang of ne'er-do-wells. As mentioned previously, I seem to have many more historical and human miniatures than I do monster stuff. I will see to remedying that by looking through the rulebooks to see what I have lying around that can be used and maybe look into purchasing some additional minis to bolster the numbers.
After the "mundane" (i.e. not supernatural) encounters on the way to Felstad have been overcome (more on Balthazar's adventures to come over the next few weeks), the first taste of the supernatural makes itself known as the frozen city gets closer. The overspill of magic from eons past causes more supernatural beings to spring into being and this will come as a shock to our intrepid party when they are first encountered.
I was able to dig out a couple of blisters of Otherworld Miniatures' Skeletons. I bought these many moons ago at a Salute show I went to and never got around to doing anything with them. I decided it was high time I got them out of the blisters, glued up and ready for some paint.
Here they are glued up as per the designs/images on the website. I may buy another few packs (they also do armoured skeletons) to make up the numbers (and provide more unique poses by swapping around the weapon and shield arms) as they are quite an easy adversary in Frostgrave (only 1 hit point each) and will come in handy for many other games.
I wasn't too enamoured by the shields that came with them, so they went into my bits box. The shields in themselves are OK, but the two different blisters contained different styles and I wanted them all to match as if they came from the same burial mound/crypt and/or era. So, I looked around in my bits box and found some alternatives from Conquest Games that fitted my vision better - plus I have more spares of the same, so if I do get more skeletons, then they can all be armed (shielded) in the same way.
I will try to get these undercoated in the next couple of days, but I will need to wait for a break in the weather if I want to use my usual spray can. I do have plenty of normal black paint, so I may just water that down a bit and brush it on.
This brings me onto the next bunch of miniatures that I sorted out; a few dragons and some trolls. The trolls are the three cave trolls and Burdhur, the hill troll chieftain that I have in my Lord of the Rings collection (I will do a separate post for these when I get around to painting them). I got out the greenstuff putty and filled the gaps around the joins between the arms and body, but I had some left over; what to do with it?
Luckily I had a couple of very old Ral Partha dragons (a blue dragon and some kind of Chinese style dragon - again, a later post will detail these) and a large plastic model from a magazine I bought the first issue of many years ago.
Now, I cannot remember what the magazine was called as I no longer have a copy of it, but I do recall that all the models that came with it were of differing scales, and that the dragon above was the only one worth collecting. I had peviously base coated it and stuck it onto a CD as a base, but where the undercoat spray missed, there was still a lot of the original colouring of the model showing through. I touched this up with watered down paint and used the remainder of the greenstuff to attach the wings more securely. This also allowed me to blend the wings to the body a little more (there were fairly large gaps).
I actually really like this miniature, so I will try to give it a good paint job whenever I get around to it. As to colour scheme, I am not entirely sure which way to go. The original colour was red, but I find that too cliched. Maybe I will go for some kind of green/brown mix, so it looks like it could be some long-lost antediluvian fire-breathing lizard with wings. Who knows? I will also take a fair bit of care and give the base a bit more attention than my usual sand, flock and tufts. Maybe I will have it guarding some treasure as well as its egg?
Hopefully next post I will have some of these at least partially painted.
