Fimir

Games Workshop’s unique and problematic Warhammer monster the Fimir has been pretty thoroughly documented here, so I don’t have much to add. I occasionally wish I’d picked up a few more of the metal ones, and when I bought some Viking Forge recasts of some Asgard stuff, I decided the Many-Armed Skulker would be a passable addition to their ranks. I painted the metal one (a noble/hero) many years ago and he’s seen little or no use on the table, but this week I decided to finally paint the three plastic ones I got in the HeroQuest game, and the Skulker, to finally complete a squad. At some point I might make some conversions to the three plastics for variety but they look OK. Point of trivia, the Skulker is actually the first Asgard sculpt I’ve painted. I had a few barbarians long ago that someone else painted well enough I never considered stripping them to repaint, and then lost them with a bunch of others that friend’s wife accidentally tossed in the trash. Not that I hold a grudge. 😉

Anyway here are some pics:

Lots of bronze, since they’re swamp dwellers and iron would rust.

The noble has some iron though. Probly makes the plebes polish it.

 

Miscellaneous dungeon dressing

At some point I really will finish painting up all the furniture and whatnot that I have for D&D. Most recently I did a weapons rack from the Heroquest boardgame and a small nautilus shell (or ram’s horn?) on a stand, which I am not sure the origins of — I think I got it from someone discarding their collection of lead? It is probably something that came in a Grenadier boxed set.  They often threw in interesting accessories like that.

Nest to the Heroquest elf for scale — those are BIG weapons!

A close-up of the horn or nautilus shell.  The stand is decorated with frog feet on the “legs” and clam shells holding the horn/shell in place.

Again for scale, here it is next to a Heritage knight.

Lastly here’s a bigger piece of scenery from a Warhammer Fantasy Battles boxed set.  It had a ton of goblins and dwarves, and some other nice scenery, so although I haven’t played WFB in years and years, it seemed like a good buy.  This is apparently some kind of fence or boundary marker made by dwarves.

 

One of the nice little touches is that someone left their stuff leaning against it, probably a sentry.  There is a pipe & pouch, stein, and an axe and shield — the last suggesting the sentry either left in haste or was killed unawares.

 

 

The same set came with a troll who is throwing a section of this boundary.  I should paint him some time too.

Devils, demons, and the mushroom king

This weekend I finished up some guys I’d been working on intermittently.  I have just a few demons and devils left to paint now!

So first, a plastic miniature.  This was made by Wiz Kids for the MageKnight line, and is a copy of a Ral Partha sculpt.  Apparently Wiz Kids got a number of Ral Partha sculpts into its line, which I suppose was a consequence of RP going “out of business” after FASA bought them.

Left, a Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figure (he’ll be several of these pictures for scale).  Center, the Wiz Kids figure, and right, an original Ral Partha demon in lead.  He came in a set of three devils and you could choose from four heads for them.  The head he got seems like the most obvious choice (the others were much smaller horned heads and a goat-head).   Apart from having no integral base of his own, the plastic guy is a little smaller and his left hand is in a different position.  It’s harder to see here but their knees and legs are in slightly different positions too.  I’m not sure if there was actually a variant RP sculpt or if Wiz Kids just needed to alter him a little to fit into a mold (lead and metal figures are cast in soft rubber molds and can have a more complicated shape; plastic is usually cast from metal molds so the figure has to have no contours that would get caught in the mold).

The next guy is a really old Heritage devil, which was sold in a boxed set (as well as in blister, I think, in the Knights & Magick line).  I got mine second hand somewhere.

I like the armor, which was uncommon in older devils, and the integral fire on his base.

Next up, a Ral Partha demon.  This guy was sculpted by Tom Meier, and released as a “Ral Partha Import” in the USA and as a Citadel miniature in the UK. With the whip and sword, he’s obviously referencing Tolkien’s Moria balrog.

Here he is next to a Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figure, for scale.

I have two of this casting.  One I bought ages ago; the other was given to me along with a bunch of other old lead and pewter minis, and is the one the one I finally painted here.

I kind of like the contrast here; sort of positive and negative.

You might be thinking, “yeah, but why would you want two balrogs?”  You’re right, of course.  You’d really want four to give a party a good challenge!

Left to right, a Grenadier Type VI demon; the “gargoyle” from the HeroQuest Milton Bradley/Games Workshop game, and the two RP/Citadel demons.

The last two demons are from the Grenadier “Action Art” Fantasy Fiends set.  I had them painted sort of randomly before, with greenish fur on one and grey on the other they didn’t really look like demons so much as mutant bears or something.

I was lucky enough to get a third copy of this guy, heavily converted by Scottsz.  He added a tail, built up the nose and arms, and covered the weird ridge on its back with fur.  Here’s the backs:

These three should be the stuff of nightmares.  Those claws would be 2 feet long in scale.

Now moving on from the demons, here’s a banshee made by Rafm.

And finally, I’m pleased to say the mushroom men finally have a leader.  No more directionless wandering and disorganized assaults on villages.  Behold the mushroom king!

He’s a Reaper mini, and nicely made with a lot of little details.

Again for scale with a human.

And finally the grand procession of myconids:

An elf and I don’t know what

So here’s the elf from the Milton Bradley/GW Heroquest game.  I originally painted him a god ten or twelve years ago, but did his hair grey, which ended up looking very blue.  All that timehe’s been a bench-warmer.  No-one wanted use a blue haired elf as thier PC, and I really can’t blame them.  so finally I repainted his hair as blonde, and maybe someone will put him in, coach!

If I had another copy of this figure, I’d definitely give him a pointed cap, like Zelda.

The other thing I photographed is a column I made out of Sculpy a while back.  I keep buying bricks of Sculpy and thinking I’ll do a bunch of cool terrain or monsters and instead I let my daughter make koalas and stuff out of it.   But one time we both worked on projects and I decided to make a sun and moon idol.  I think I was definitely plagarizing John Blanche’s moon faces from his GW work.  I’m not quie sure what I’ll do with this; it could be an idol used by humanoids, or the ancients; it could equally well be some sort of magical trick or trap.

The sunny side

An angry moon

The nice thing about stuff like this is takes almost no time to paint.  Just a bunch of dry-brushing over black paint.

 

Reuse CDs as paint pallettes

If you’re a hoarder ecologically conscious like me, you feel bad about throwing away CDs that you don’t need and noone wants — AOL junkmail, old driver software for equipment you don’t use or even have any more, freebies from magazines, that sort of thing.  One way I get a lot of extra uses out old CDs is to use them paint palettes.

I paint mostly with craft paints and mix a lot when I’m doing minis so a small palette is great to have.  You could buy something to use as a palette, or use foil, wax paper, or other disposable things.  But I think you should use what you have and avoid creating waste that will go to a landfill.

Step 1. Have a CD you were going to throw away

Step 2. Turn it over and use as a palette.  Remove dry paint every few painting sessions by peeling or scraping off dry paint.  Once in a while a CD will be so heavily coated with paint and glue that I finally tossed it.  But I have found that CDs make good terrain bases too, since they will not warp from exposure to dampness or glue.

My daughter also uses CDs in craft projects.  This is one incorporates a quarter of a chestnut shell, a synthetic cork with an animal print on it, and a bunch of glass beads.

I could probably work this into D&D.  Ley node, alien monolith, something like that.

That dwarf is plastic; he’s from the Milton Bradley HeroQuest game.

I should do more outdoor adventures

A village built next to ruins on a 4x6' table

Since I’ve got six players in my D&D game and it was getting hard to fit around the table, I set up my 6’x4′ plywood sheet on top of the gaming table (an old dining room table) to increase the space. But minis abhor a vacuum so Saturday night I decided to set up my ground cloth and bunch of terrain just for kicks. I’d been thinking about using all my ent/treant/tree monster minis in part of a larger woods set up anyway and the end result is above and below.

The ruins are from the Games Workshop LotR games, as well as the first Heroscape set, and the ruined church is from a White Dwarf magazine. I wonder if they put free card stock terrain in the magazine these days.

The fields were made for war gaming terrain, but are large enough to still represent a reasonable garden patch or the edge of a farm. The rows of fencing are also from “Battlemasters” and I use them to represent cultivated grape vines.

The graveyard (which really ought to be nearer the ruins and church) are a combination of things, including some lego-like castle blocks, Halloween village tombstones, and the sarcophagi and statues I posted last week.

Here’s a slightly better picture you can click to see more detail. (A few things are already out of place as my five year old was naturally fascinated with the whole thing.)

A shot from the side. Click to enlarge greatly.

The buildings are mostly from the old Games Workshop Warhammer set “Terror of the Lichemaster,” which was designed for a set of skirmishes leading to small battle for the town.

The haunted woods.

The woods contain all my treemen minis, as well as most of my pine trees and deciduous trees. My daughter really enjoyed searching for the “monster trees.”

The keep is constructed from parts of a toy castle and various bits of cardboard and plaster all attached to a tower from the Milton Bradley “Battlemasters” game.

The Donjon.

The gatehouse, lightly fortified.

The gatehouse to the village has no supporting walls, so I placed some stakes and mantlets nearby to suggest it has been hastily fortified. The buildings will have to serve as part of the defenses of the town.

My daughter Riley couldn’t wait to try out the set-up, but she told her mom that she was afraid she’d break my figures (I guess I really drilled into her how fragile they are). She brought one of her fairy action figures and we selected a number of plastic D&D figures to fill out the the complement of characters and monsters.

"Can I play?"

I set up a mine entrance on one of the hills and laid out a dungeon made of tiles and bits from the Heroscape set for doors, and we played various adventures for at least an hour and a half. She even helped pick up, and really enjoyed that because she got to examine everything more closely.

I took a bunch of pictures during the game but they are currently trapped on my new phone, which does not have an easy way to transfer files to a computer. Maybe I’ll post them later — by the time we were done, the board was covered with stuff.

Maybe next time we’ll use dice too.

A couple of chaos warriors

These guys are from the Heroquest game (published by Milton Bradley and with obvious influence or cooperation from Games Workshop).

A little too much flash again, so you can’t really see the horns on their helmets that support the little balls.

I’ve always liked GW figures, particularly from the late 1980s.  More recent stuff from GW has been a little over the top in terms of spikes, skulls, and that cartoony look, but there is no question their chaos warriors are bad dudes.

my Caverns of Doom figures

Sadly, most of the figures that came with Caverns of Doom were lost or broken over the years. So, when I recreated the CoD map and began playtesting it, I gathered the few that remained and chose some other figures that were from the same early 1980s vintage. Here are the my stalwart adventurers:

The thief is original. The knight is a Heritage paladin, the wizard and cleric are Grenadier AD&D figures, the barbarian is a TSR figure, and the elf is cast from a Prince August mold. I still have the original knight, wizard, and cleric, they just need a paint job, and the barbarian woman needs her legs & sword reconstructed. I’ll try to get to them some day.

The monsters similarly are a mixed bag. I don’t think my set (actually my brother’s — I got the Crypt, he got the Caverns that fateful Xmas) ever had the Hobgoblin figure, but it had two demon figures, one of which I converted to a Gollum figure by filing off the wings, tail, and horns, but that is now long gone.
The spider didn’t last long, with skinny legs and being made of soft lead.

The demon and skeleton with bow are original; the slime monster, vampire, and skeleton with axe are Grenadier figures from the Tomb of Spells set; the rats are plastic accessories from the Heroquest game (a fairly decent dungeon crawl game in its own right); the spider is a plastic toy from a bag of Halloween decorations.

The hobgoblin is a “Mon-ogre” from a manufacturer I forget — maybe Broadsword or Asgard? The dragon is another Grenadier, from an “Action Art” set.

I still have part of the original dragon — just the body. I tried making a new tail, head, and wings a while back but the head and tail really need to be redone before I’d be willing to let anyone see it!

Minifigs.com has a number of the Dungeon Dweller figures back in production and maybe some day I’ll try to replace more of the original set with their recasts (which are also in a sturdier tin, I believe.