4. Frostgarve wizards I.

Let’s see the first miniatures! It's pretty obvious, that the first ones should be the most important ones: wizards (and apprentices) for Frostgrave. All 25-28mm wizard miniatures can be used, but the simplest way to get them (if you don’t own already some) is the official Frostgrave wizards from Northstar (there are two of them, the second box contains female wizards). Just for the record, there is a well-priced metal wizard line from the same manufacturer, but I don’t own any of it. For -17€ You get 8 multipose, hard plastic figures, with lot (really tons!) of options. Not the cheapest plastic boxed set pro figure, but with all the small parts, the individualization is almost unlimited!

As this post shouldn’t be a full review (if you’re interested, just google it), but I can show, how I used them! I didn’t want to just go with my feelings and assemble cool looking wizards, because I wanted to get the best out of the box, so planning was needed. At first, what are the numbers? The box has 8 figures, and there are 10 different schools of magic (Elementalist, Summoner, Nercomancer, Witch, Thaumturge, Sigilist, Chronomancer, Soothsayer, Illusionist, Enchanter). I wanted to make the wizard-apprentice pairs visually uniform, and the different pairs accentual different, so they can be identified with just a look. That means that I was able to make 4 pairs. If I wanted to have the wizard-pairs cover all the schools of magic, I would needed 2,5 boxes. But my wallet didn’t want this. To cover everything, there are 2 options:

• Make generic wizards, who can be everything, but then I cant achieve the visual differentiation.
• Group the schools based upon something.

I choose the second one. Long story short, here are the groups, with the chosen main design color:

1. Elementalist, Summoner: the key word here is fire! Fire is obviously an element, and demons can be also fiery creatures. So the main colors here are red/orange/yellow.
2. Nercomancer, Witch: they are bad (to the bone), and black is a pretty evil color, so let them be dark/black.
3. Thaumturge, Sigilist: the opposite of group 2., these wizards are generally identified as good characters. So if the bad guys are dark/black, let the good ones be light/white.
4. Chronomancer, Soothsayer: Well… What is their similarity? That they see, what others can’t see. Not much help... Let’s try this on exclusionary basis. We already used red/yellow, dark/black, light/white, so if the groups should be very different there are two main colors to choose: green and blue. Which one fits them more? Let it be purple, because I bought a very nice purple paint recently, and I simply wanted to use it.

You maybe noticed, that these are only 8 schools of magic. Yes, Illusionist and Enchanter are out of these groups. Illusionist is a pretty generic magic, so I would say, any wizard could be used (because they can mask themselves with illusions, as they want). Enchanters in the world of Frostgrave are hammer wielding craftsmen, and that is unfortunately very different from all the other schools… But fortunately, its very dwarfy, and I wanted to make a complete dwarf warband anyway!

So, we have the main design guideline, but that needs to be refined. But how? Coming in the next post! Until then, a little teaser: