Back With A Vengeance

As always, I get very unproductive over the summer and winter months (painting-wise, anyway), and rather lax about logging my hobby activities (which, in retrospect, was my main hope in starting this blog!), but the Spring is here, and I'm full of the joys.

That said, I've not been completely inactive...

I've been playing (and editing!) a bit of Frostgrave, with some demo games for the Osprey office:

It was good to get some actual gameplay in, and most fun was the fact that we actually managed to teach the rules to two complete wargaming novices (admittedly, one is a D&D player, however) and play a full game to conclusion in just a little over an hour.

Both gangs were my kitbashed creations - the 'Blues' and the 'Browns', while Maugor got his first run-out as a rather under-dressed Snow Troll. He mauled some henchmen then died and had his treasure stolen. C'est la vie.

Treasure features quite heavily in Frostgrave and I was more than a little jealous of the treasure tokens the author, Joe, had produced and determined to produce my own.

Joe's were beautiful little elements - treasure chests, piles of scrolls and the incredible little illuminated manuscript seen here (not that my photo does it justice - that's a sketch of a dragon in the bottom right corner), so I had my work cut out for me to find items of similar quality!

Fortunately, I'm a hoarder, and managed to find some really quite fun bits and pieces from a number of GW sprues - Empire Flagellants and Wizards, Skaven, Bretonnians etc. - and the Ark of the Covenant from a Wargods of Aegyptus pack.

Once again, these, like so many projects, sat half-finished on my desk for a really long time. What's most annoying is that it only took me about 2 hours to paint them all up once the basecoat had dried! In game, I'll probably only need 3 or 4 of these, but it's always good to have spares.

I didn't attempt a manuscript-style treatment on the open book - my freehand is pretty ropey. I'm particularly fond of the little triptych in the centre, though I kind of wish I'd painted the candles as candles and not just as gold...

Having read through the 80 spells in more detail, and having seen the bestiary section, I came to the conclusion that any warband I run in Frostgrave will probably have to muck around with demon summoning at some point or another. They're just cool.

This beefy thing represents the top end of demon possibilities - a Major Demon. In the game, demons are defined as any creature from another plane of existence, but I went with a pretty classic D&D-style Hezrou. Like most of my larger models, it's a repainted plastic pre-paint, this time from Paizo's Pathfinder range. There are two other classes of demon - Imps and Minor demons - and I've got options for them lined up too. The human figure is included to give a sense of just how big the model is - he makes the chunky Maugor look positively svelte!