In the last post, I showed some solutions for storing and organizing ideas for complicated (dices, tokens, cards, tiles, miniatures, other thingies) board games, especially for Descent (Journeys in the dark second, and so on...). Since then, I received a lot of requests, to show my painted miniatures... Actually not, but I will show them anyway.
As I mentioned in my introduction, my first ever tabletop game I played was Frostgrave (because my love for Warhammer before was only platonic), and I just had boardgames before. But there is a missing link... A game which lures board gaming people to tabletop games, I think that the proper terminus technicus is "gateway game". A game in a fantasy world with stories, heroes, monsters, villains and, the most important miniatures: Descent (Journeys in the dark second edition).
Now comes just a short, but important topic about the eyes (Go for the eyes Boo, go for the eyes!).
If you imagine a view of a tabletop wargame, what do you see? I bet, that the first two things, what you think of, are the painted miniatures, and the terrain. Obviously, these are the most important. But what is the third thing? Thats a harder question... At first, but after thinking a while my answer is pretty clear: banners!
As I already wrote in my post about future of Oathmark, there should come chariots for all races in the upcoming Bane of King. These are especially great news for orcs and goblins, as they have no heavy cavalry, and even more for dwarves, as they have no cavalry at all (but humans and elves don’t need them that much, as they are very similar to their heavier cavalry units). As my sons have these armies, my brain immediately started to rev up!
As my sons got 2 boxes of Frostgrave for Christmas (Gnolls and Snake-men), it was urgent to build them. But building without planning gets not 100% usage of the possibilities... Making a Frostgrave warband from 20 miniatures is not a big deal, but what else is possible? Using them in Oathmark is a pretty obvious offer. But how? First step of this planning is to set the limitations:
I stated a lot of times how much I Oathmark like (just take a look on the title of my blog). Although, after more then dozen various battles (unfortunately we dont have the time to play that much), I think, there are some small parts of the ruleset, which could use a little polishing. So I did it (all of the following is a correction according to my mindset and experience). These are only small changes of the existing rules, there are no new rules, and there shouldn’t be a significant impact on the game balance. The only exception are the army building limitations, but this is only an option for some battles, and if used, it should serve a better balance, not a worse one.
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):
