Now that I have self-sculpted miniatures in acceptable quality, I also want to play with them! In Frostgrave, the golem can be used as a construct, and the treeman as a giant, so I can check off one of my main systems. And in the other one, Oathmark, they certainly can be used as subtitutes for some monsters from the official rulebook, like an Eachy and a Giant for example. But that would bleach out their individual character a bit… So home-brew rules are needed!
Warning! This post can be disturbingly long!
Without a long an meaningless introduction, I just start here: A little after I started painting miniatures, I felt the need to try out sculpting. But as it looks way harder than painting (at least if the result should be more or less acceptable), I had to find something, that’s easy to do. Human figures are obviously not that, because the body proportions has to be correct, the face has to look good, and there are a lot of small details… So actually it’s maybe the worst thing to start with. But I you find the worst case, you just have to invert it, to find the best! So what’s the inverse here? It has to be big, faceless, and with arbitrary proportions. Basically a formless blub… Okay, it would be easy for sure, but I wanted maybe a bit more refined thing… Something humanoid, with hands and legs, but without undefined proportions (and face). Actually an earth elemental (or rock golem) is quite a good start, because its simply some kind of humanoid form, with rocky surface! Like this one (from DevianArt):
Im not planning to make a news channel out of this blog, but now, I have to make an exception. Because there are great news for every Oathmark fan! Joe McCullough announced on his blog, that halflings arrived to the Marches!
Oathmark setting is in technological terms like european early medieval: there are no crossbows (which I wont accept, because dwarves have to have crossbows, so I made house rules for them), not to mention black power weapons. But what if… What if once somebody would invent a magical powder, which explodes if ignited? And what if somebody puts that powder in a tube, and throws a rock on before igniting it? What if the kingdoms of the Marches would get primitive black powder weapons? Maybe it doesn’t fit the initial idea of Oathmark, but as its just a house rule and not a must, I don’t see big problems here (if You want to use house rules, just agree it with your opponent, if not, You can use your miniatures as archers and catapults after all).
Let’s continue last week’s project with building the more complicated parts!
The tower: I made it 1 floor high, and a floor is for 28mm miniatures approximately 50mm. So, for the walls, 100 and 110mm long sticks are needed (50-60mm as for the walls plus 50mm for the floor). But there has to be doors and windows! Placing the doors for the best versatility is according to this example (and sketch):
Back in business! After a short break, last weekend I got back, and finally started doing something. I decided, that I will work through my open projects (hopefully all of them...). The first step was not painting (at least for now), but building terrain. A little time ago I started to build a modular wooden fortress. I had two reasons for it. The first one was that I started to write siege rules for Oathmark, and I need to have something to try them out. The other one was, as I saw a youtube video on the TWS channel, which show a very quick way to build wooden fortifications. I basically built the same with some modifications.
First step was planning (as always), I had to decide the main dimensions. My insulation foam (XPS, extruded polystyrene, but it can be made of the cheaper EPS, expanded polystyrene also) is 30mm thick, so the embankment, where the miniatures will stand, will have that height (by the way, in my siege rules, there will be different walls, depending on their height, material, and number of ranks, that has place on them). The battlement is an additional 20mm and (because of the serrated form) 30mm higher. The width and depth was also not a big question. It will be a pretty small wall (the smallest one according to my rules), so it is enough if a single row of Oathmark unit has place on it. The width is at least 5x25mm, so I went with 130mm to have a bit space.
In tabletop world, there is a giant company, unavoidable sprawling in the middle of the whole industry. Some of the gamers hate them, some of them love them, and some, like I, have mixed feelings about them. This is the company, who done a lot, to make the tabletop universe, what it is today. It could be a microscopic genre of nerds without them. They soaked me into this universe of fun, and many others like me. But they are also, who are exploiting the wallets of our kind with their insane price politics, constantly updating rulesets, and breaking games into more and more must buy pieces. And they slain the Old World... Unforgivable.
Once upon a time, I was in my local gaming store, just buying my regular, pseudo-necessary stuff, and there was a sale. As You might know, the sales in the local gaming stores are one of the greatest powers on earth. There were such stuff, I never know I needed, but suddenly it was irresistible…
It was a sale of Avatars of War miniatures. They make beautiful metal and resin miniatures in the best WFHB aesthetics. They are a bit on the more expensive end of the market (12-13€/human sized miniatures), but they are really lovely especially with nostalgic googles. I always adored these minis, but as they were so expensive, and they didn’t really fit to my other miniatures (they are bigger, with more heroic proportions, and they dwarves are twice the size of an Oathmark dwarf). But now! For the price, I bought almost everything what they got (and Im still angry about the stuff I left there...). Lets take a look on them one by one.
I already wrote a post about the (at the time new) Frostgrave Knight plastic set. I loved it, my only problem was the low number of miniatures in the box. I wanted more (more, more)! And as I saw the last piece in my local gaming shop, I couldn’t withstand the temptation… And was as amazed, as the first time: this set is superb! I was thinking about building and kitbashing possibilities since the last time, so we (because I bought it with my sons) could build it pretty fast this time. Before the results, lets take a quick look of the former, (mostly, because some of them got additional equipment) unchanged miniatures, 2 knights, 2 templars and 4 captains (1 from every family member):
