Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge XIV #4 - Easterling Warriors and Command

For one of the special challenges of AHPC XIV I painted a group of twenty-two 25mm Games Workshop Easterlings consisting of a captain, a banner, four spear and shield, eight sword and shield, and eight archers. These were in the queue for the previous year's challenge, but the clock ran out before I could get to them. 

The miniatures were second-hand that needed some cleanup and repair to get them ready to paint. They got an overnight soak in rubbing alcohol (2-propanol), followed by a scrub with a stiff toothbrush to remove the previous paint job. Two of the archers had the upper half of their bows missing, and these were repaired with pieces of florist wire. A few of the spearmen and swordsmen had been assembled with their shields upside down, but I didn't think it was worth going through the effort to remove and re-attach them. After being primed with matt black, all the figures were painted using Vallejo acrylics, followed by a wash of Citadel Seraphim Sepia on all the armour, shields, boots, and gloves. Finally I went in with some 'Old Gold' to highlight the raised areas of the armour and shields.

 

A Shadow in the East

Complete group of 22 Easterling Warriors

Command and Spears

Archers (Can you spot the repaired bows?)

Swordsmen

At some point I think I will have to supplement this force with some Easterling Kataphrakts and a few faction heroes, but that is a project for the distant future. Thanks for reading.

End of Summer Update

 While still blessed with some warm summer weather this last week, we are rolling through fall into inevitably into winter here in Manitoba. I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been both painting and building models. Last I left off, I was painting fantasy miniatures for Frostgrave and Forbidden Psalm. Here’s the rest of the fantasy stuff I painted since then:

Corpse Collector 3d print with Reaper vampire for scale.

Reaper ghost, golem, vampire. Armoured skeletons are from Diehard miniatures.

Giant frogs from Reaper Bones

Skeletons from Oathmark. These are super light so I strongly recommend a metal base to give them some heft.

That’s it for Fantasy for now, though I hope to do more this winter.

Skull & Crown Killer Rabbits

Well you can file this under "models I may never use in a game but painted because they are super-cool."  They're "Killer Rabbits" from Skull & Crown. Once the subject of a popular Kickstarter campaign, the range is based on some pretty freaky medieval manuscript illustrations.

Here's a cavalryrabbit mounted on a lion (!)

The set I bought came with a couple of lapine musicians (piper and hornist) a leader-type with a stick, and a rabbit I converted into a standard-bearer, with handpainted flag, naturally.

There are a few sword-armed rabbits too, including one with a wicked zweihander. I painted the middle rabbit's shield with their carrot heraldry. 

The other has a bronze buckler.

There are some bow- and crossbow-armed rabbits too. How they manage to wield these weapons without opposable thumbs must be known only to the medieval monk artists.

The last bunch have clubs and spears.

These models are just so cool and were pretty fun to paint, even if it did take some time. The challenge will be finding a game to use them in. Fantasy skirmish of some kind, most likely - Otherworld Miniature Skirmish? Or maybe even Forbidden Psalm - but these little guys seem altogether too wholesome for that!

Forbidden Psalm Game! Plus Skull & Crown Skeletons!

WARNING: POST CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF SELF-HARM, HORROR, DEATH, GORE, COARSE LANGUAGE, NUDITY, SOME OF THE OLD ULTRA-VIOLENCE, AND SMOKING. 

So on Thursday Conscript Mike F. and some of the lads came over for our first crack at Forbidden Psalm, the super-grim tabletop game inspired by the Swedish RPG Mork Borg. Mike's been painting like a madman and I was really looking forward to getting a game on the table. We played the first scenario from the book - "Corpse Scavenging." Six corpses were laid out on the table and the two opposing warbands had to search them for treasure and "black fungus", a particular goodie that the Mad Wizard Vriprix would pay handsomely for. Above is Humfrid about to search a corpse. Mike had painted them and they were... horrifying.

Here's two members of Mike's warband trying to search another corpse. This one resisted all attempts to search it - seearchers had to make a Treasure Roll to successfully search, and these guys failed A LOT. Worse still, a model takes 1hp damage when they fail a search roll!

On turn 2 the Disembowelled Ghouls start to appear - these are pretty tough monsters and did for two of my warband. In the background you can see my erstwhile leader, Ulfnar, and great axe-man Karl (RIP).

Ulfnar and Mike's leader put each other out of action - we each used the Omen card that allowed maximum damage from one attack. Wow!

Karl here about to get put out of action by a skeleton summoned by Mike's scroll-user. He'd summoned him to menace my scroll-user, Astrid, but she used her own scroll to immunize herself from attacks by monsters.

This combat went on awhile - my rogue, Nils (second from right) snuck into Mike's deployment zone to mess things up. Unfortunately a Disembowelled Ghoul followed. (They are controlled by an AI formula).

Games run for six turns at most and at the end, I had three men down (one was killed) and I think Mike lost one. I got more fungus so a few more gold pieces from the Wizard. It was a fun game but took longer to play through than I'd anticipated - I felt bad that Frederick, Hugh, John and Dave didn't get to play also, but I think they had a good time kibbitzing. In any case maybe we'll play the four-player variant next time.

I'd painted this horror for Forbidden Psalm - it's the cover model for the game book - the Corpse Collector. Absolutely repulsive.

This model is a 3D print I got on Etsy, I think it came from Greece (!). This was before Mike tipped me to the guy in Quebec that's printing this stuff.

This'll give you an idea of the size of the model. In retrospect I probably should have gotten the next bigger one!

These bony dudes came in a recent order from Skull & Crown. They're super-cool obviously.

Dude carrying a brazier, he'll be the standard bearer if I ever build a unit of these guys.

The unit champion here, of course.

Skelly blowing a trumpet. Not sure how this works exactly but meh, fantasy.

I love this dude toting a huge basket of skulls and bones! Skull & Crown make some superb models and you'll see some more on the blog soon.

Well that's it for now, I hope you weren't too scarred by the Forbidden Psalm stuff :-)

Froztgrave Warband

 Progress has slowed down a bit during the summer, as it usually does. I finally finished a warband for Frostgrave to compete against the evil one I finished a few months ago. This group of miniatures is from a few different companies including, Die Hard Miniatures, North Star, Reaper, Otherworld and Hasslefree Miniatures. 

Avoid hasslefree! They were once a dependable company, but they’ve recently collapsed due to ongoing illness and an inability to carry out the day to day business. 

A wizard and his apprentice 

Expendable warriors

Barbarian, Khajiit, Dwarf and Knight

Reaper

Hasslefree

Reaper

Otherworld 

Die Hard

Hasslefree

Reaper

That’s it for now. Thanks for visiting!