Skeleton Warband

A quick update on some more of the work I have been doing over the last couple of days on the undead warband I am slowly bringing together. I have now managed to complete a grand total of 20 skeleton/undead warrior types from the lead pile. I also have some other undead (4 foot and 4 mounted wights) painted by someone else that I may amend to fit in with my vision. Here's what I have achieved so far in their pre-wash/varnish glory (most have been seen before, so bear with me in my indulgence)...

First up is the command group. A set of three very old Citadel or Ral Partha (not sure which) pre-slotta figures...

Then we have a bunch of (five) undead riders that I completed yesterday. I am not happy with the results of the verdigris; I still need a little more practice to get it right. It sometimes works but mostly it doesn't. I blame my dodgy eyes as I cannot focus on the figures themselves, so have to guess where the brush is going and hope for the best. I then try to amend any mistakes afterwards if I am able...

Finally here is the bulk of the foot troops; a dozen skeleton warriors with an assortment of weapons...

Unfortunately, these miniatures are very fragile, and, ironically, I have already broken one of the arms off whilst putting it away into a protective foam carry case. I will need to repair it, and hope that the gloss varnish coat, when applied, also creates a stronger bind for the arm.

To complete this warband, I am looking at rounding out the numbers to create units for Dragon Rampant. I already know that I want to get a big horde of 30-40 zombies, 6 Otherworld Armoured Skeletons (same as the foot ones above but with armour), some missile armed skeletons, a champion of sorts, and some kind of giant construct. I am not sure on the points/unit values yet, but I will calculate that nearer the time. Then I have to decide who to put them up against. The quickest win will most likely be one of my Lord of the Rings armies - probably Rohan.

Skeletons Update

It has been quite a while since I last posted on the blog. Real life has a habit of getting in the way of what we enjoy, and these past three months have been no different. Nothing bad (well, I did cop Covid for the first time a few weeks back despite the vaccinations), but time was not something I had much spare of.

That said, I managed to complete some more 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics reading and finally saw the eighth season of Game of Thrones. I wasn't as disappointed as almost everyone else I have heard mentioned; yes, the pacing was a little out, perhaps one or two more episodes would have resolved this, but the ending itself made sense to me and I liked the denouement for several of the main protagonists. Maybe my several year hiatus between being caught up in the hype and watching them in the cold light of day helped in this?

In addition, I did manage to get a few things done hobby wise, but didn't have the time to post my achievements. This post is a catch up of the little bits of painting and hobbying I managed to partake in since April.

Goblin Town goblin in my son's own style... 

Yep, a bright yellow goblin, painted when he was but 2 or 3 years old. He reapplied some paint a few months back and I tidied up the face and pustules, then washed it in readiness for varnishing (which still needs to be done).

More skeletons...

The second batch of skeletons from Otherworld Miniatures. As mentioned in a previous post, I mixed up the weapon arms a little to provide a few more variants. These, as well as the previous batch, have been completed all bar a wash and matt varnish. I will get around to that in a few weeks' time when I have more miniatures to finish.

The whole undead crew so far (not all finished just yet and more to order)...

The first picture above shows the command group (painted several years ago) with the inital six foot skeletons and the five mounted undead (as yet unpainted).

The second picture shows both sets of foot skeletons, and how far I have got with the mounted undead. These will still be a while in the finishing as they all still need a few more colours on them as well as a wash and matt varnish.

This little force is coming along nicely now though; I just need to finish painting the above, sort out a few more undead that I have in my lead mountain, and then add to the force with one more set of Otherworld armoured skeletons (basically the same foot figures with armour on) and a few one-offs to round it out. I am also looking at getting some zombies to add to these - a horde of 30-40 would be pretty neat, but with my glacial pace of painting I may be waiting until the year 3000 before I get them finished.

The latest haul from my first ever Kickstarter...

This is a kind of female Fellowship of the Ring plus Gollum, so we have a couple of female humans and an elf in there too.

These next two packs are the actual Kickstarter's main theme - several packs of dwarf, gnome and halfling female adventurers. The first packs are 7 of the 8 on offer (I was not over-enamoured by the halfling bar maids if I am honest, so decided not to bid for those), whilst the second picture shows the stretchgoals - the freebies.

These figures are from Bronze Age Miniatures' Half-pint Heroines range. I was after some female Dwarf, Gnome and Halfling miniatures to round out my GW and fantasy forces to enable some more gender balanced RPG and skirmish gaming. I have plenty of male adventurers/soldiers but very few female. I am hoping that this will even up the numbers a little and perhaps persuade my daughters to see that dad's games are not just for boys - I did try to convert them to the dark side with some painting lessons a fair few years back but they lost interest very quickly.

I am hoping to get some more prep work done on my Frostgrave Nickstarter figures from a couple of years back, as well as the Rangers of Shadowdeep starter figures. I am looking at sorting out some more aspects of the basing prior to undercoating. Due to work etc. this may not be for a couple of weeks yet, so watch this space.

Painted Skeletons

The blog has been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks. This is not because of a waning interest, but because nothing has been available to be published. A lot has been going on in the background, and there are a fair number of miniatures approaching the completed (or nearly completed) stage.

Today saw me finish the painting and most of the basing on the first six Otherworld Skeleton warriors. They still need to be varnished for protection. These have been painted to represent an ancient (Bronze Age equivalent) barrow or tomb that has been naively opened by a band of adventurers and the denizens set to guard the treasures contained within have risen from their slumbers...

And here they are all lined up...

These figures are some of the best skeleton warriors (in my opinion anyway) I have seen but they are a little fiddly to put together and are thus quite fragile, so extra care will need to be taken when in use on the tabletop. As mentioned previously, I am aiming to amass a force of around 30 skeletons (I will probably do something similar for an undead horde: zombies, ghouls, ghasts, wraiths and so on), which should be more than enough to play Frostgrave and any fantasy RPGs I will play in the future, and may also be enough for a small force under the command of a necromancer or a lich for tabletop battle games like Lord of the Rings (I will need to work out stats for them) or Dragon Rampant.

I am not sure how to finish the basing. The basing material has overlapped the edges of the bases a little in some places, so that has prompted me to paint the base edges. But, what colour? I don't want them too bright so that the bases then won't blend into the tabletop a little better, but not too dull so that the miniatures get toned down and become a little washed out as there is not a lot of colour on these skeletons to start with.

Over the weekend, I bit the bullet and ordered up two more packs of these skeletons. I do not have a lot of spare cash at the moment due to yet another bout of unemployment (two redundancies in the space of three years is rather demoralising), but I am hoping a £20 per month budget should cover most of what I require going forwards to make up not only this skeleton horde but also fill any other gaps in my collection to allow me to begin playing more games.

I have also had a very interesting email conversation with my long-time gaming buddy Colin. We had a bit of a chat about skeletons and undead in general, and how they are not represented properly on the tabletop in both RPGs and battle games. I may put together what we discussed into another one of my ideas style posts.

Skeletons

Today I was able to spend a little time prepping some very old (1985 according to the base tabs) Games Workshop mounted skeletons. This is a small force of five mounted skeleton warriors armed with an array of weapons on a varied set of undead horses.

Unfortunately, the ravages of time, and possibly some miscasting, had led to a few of the legs on the horses becoming damaged or to go missing. I glued and bent them into the best shapes possible and mounted them on 40mm round bases, one of which I managed to screw up, but I will fill the gap when it comes to basing the miniature. I will need to find the mounted skeletons some suitable shields too as the plastic ones that came with them are long lost; I will also need to remove a bit from the tabs on their arms that would have housed their original push-on shields. I will try to find some more of the same shields I used on the foot skeleton warriors.

I also dug out some old painted models that I had completed (iirc, the first two were originally painted by my friend Colin, but I have tidied them up a little to more match my own style) when I was on a roll back around the early 2010s. These will form a kind of command group for the skeleton warriors on foot, or maybe a variety of lich and/or undead lords/champions for Frostgrave or fantasy RPGs.

These will be added to the six Otherworld skeletons I have begun to paint over the last couple of days.

I am hoping to get a small undead force together from these and probably a small order from Otherworld to make up their numbers when I have some spare cash. Here's the undead band so far...

If I can get another half-a-dozen of the unarmoured variety of skeleton warrior and the six armoured versions of the same, that will give me a force of 3 command, 12 unarmoured, 6 armoured and 5 mounted skeletons. I can't imagine I will need more than a couple of dozen or so skeletons for the gaming I intend to run, but if I do, I will go down the plastic route, as it will work out a lot cheaper per miniature. There are several manufacturers out there from which I could build a significant force if I should want to put my mind to it.

What with the figures I have been painting for my son, and now these ones I am currently working on for myself, I will need to sort out some kind of storage. All of my old storage has been utilised by my Lord of the Rings figures, so I would need to buy another storage box or two for the latest figures I am painting. The Really Useful boxes that have been used to store the unpainted ones would not be conducive to keeping the paint jobs in tip-top condition, so foam lined boxes will be a necessity. I will look at these too when I am a little more flush.

Skeletons and a Dragon

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.