Musings of a Wandering Game Mage
I love Groot! His miniature from Marvel Crisis Protocol is pretty sweet, but alas, I don’t have a personal aircraft hangar to store MCP figs, so I’ll have to do with these Marvel Zombies figs from Zombicide.
It’s a pretty solid sculpt, with plenty of room to play with tints and really break away from the monotony of painting a guy made of wood.
Here he is with Drax, the galaxy’s greatest saxaphone player!
When I was a kid I thought Boromir was the biggest idiot in The Lord of the Rings. Then, the Ralph Bakshi animated movie came out when I was 8, and I was convinced that I was right that entire time the second he walked on screen.
That helmet. That beard. His stupid, hairy, stupidness. But, even though I had read the books during an ill-advised flirtation with viral bronchitis, I wasn’t ready for the bad-assery that Bakshi unleashed with Boromir’s death scene!
He really took a liking to those arrows! Flash forward a few decades, and I was a solid Boromir fan. And then Sean Bean Sean Beaned his way into our collective hearts with a solid performance as Gondor’s favorite-not-perfect-son… what more could we ask for? Miniatures? DID SOMEONE SAY MINIATURES?
Games Workshop blundered its way into the Lord of the Rings license and somehow managed a hat trick that kept in it business long enough to become the champion of miniature game design and fair pricing that we know today! But I didn’t care at the time, being a new dad and too busy painting a billion points of Tau.
But now? Now I’m playing catch-up. And I’m going to do it with the original Fellowship figures, which are in no way showing their age. Actually, I jest. They’re definitely showing their age, but they’re still pretty sweet!
Somehow the little dude even looks like my favorite walking quiver!
I really wish there was another miniature of Boromir in this costume, there are some fantastic alt sculpts of the rest of the Fellowship out there, but Boromir Arrowshirt only got enough screen time to warrant this one figure. And, well, a Captain of Gondor fig, too, but I want this costume!
Here he is with the rest of the painted figs in the Fellowship:
Hopefully, Gimli will get that plane landed before the Balrog comes!
More progress has been made on my 15mm fantasy project, with a couple of thick-skulled gents ready to join my slowly growing horde of greenskins!
For games like Warmaster and Kings of War, these lumbering beauties can be fielded in groups of 3, but for skirmishers like Mordheim one will do!
I’m really impressed with the quality of the sculpts from Forest Dragon miniatures. They still look pretty great scaled up 50%, and I’m getting really excited to see where this army collection is going!
Next up I’m going to have to work on some more character models, and then terrain. Yeah. I need a metric ton of terrain!
My strategy for finishing up Moonstone miniatures is starting to pay off! It feels good to get an actual set of minis knocked out, now I have one less to paint! Here’s Claudia Duvel from the Masquerade box set:
She’s a fun character, I feel like she’s the muscle that backs up the menace and machinations of the Duchess and Creep!
In the Moonstone lore, Claudia is a highwaywoman, but with a heart of gold. She’s known to be a genteel conversationalist, and won’t take riches from her prey at a level that would leave them desitute!
She also refuses to take money or possessions of the working class, which I love. In the lore entry I found on Claudia, she even went so far as to dance with a gentleman who’s wife had been unable to do so since she was suffering from gout!
I absolutely love what a little bit of established lore and fluff can do to make a game setting feel more lived in! With that, The Masquerade is a wrap! On to a farting dog and a quick trip to goblin town!
I’ve had to institute a “catch and release” program to keep the massive collection of miniatures that I’m amassing in my studio from overwhelming my house, so I’ll be keeping a keeper warband from each game I like, and setting the others free via Ebay. Don’t shed a tear for me, though, the painting is almost 100% of what I love about this hobby, so being able to paint a group, capture it on film, and then move on to the next without stressing out about storage is pretty liberating!
This December crew has some older models from Wyrd, but I love the overall vibe of the crew! This Rasputina in particular is pretty spiffy, and captures a lot of that mid-2000-teens steampunk energy that Wyrd was leaning in to!
The rest of the crew is December Acolytes and monsters!
The Ice Gaimin are transparent blue plastic, so they look pretty neat when the light hits them right. As is the giant ice golem!
Snow Storm is one of my favorite models out there, it just screams menace and intrigue!
I’ll be sharing quite a bit of Malifaux over the months to come! It’s probably my favorite game IP, and I’ve been painting a literal metric ton of these amazing models!
I was just going through some old projects that I had started a while back and never got back into, and came across this Turnip 28 trooper that I put together about two years ago, and maaaan, I need to do more! This was really fun, I hope you enjoy checking it out as much as I enjoyed stumbling across it!
The first step was finding an old figure that could be the base, and this old 3D printed zombie fit the bill. It’s from about 2020, and the detail wasn’t great, but it’s a good base to start with!
I sketched up some ideas, I want him to have a pseudo plague doctor look to him, and a flaming turnip for a sigil on his shield.
I cut out some rings from a styrene rod to be lenses on his mask, and a larger ring to be bent into shape for the base of his beak. The beak started out as a cone of Epoxy Sculpt that was fit into place:
Then it was just a matter of sculpting in the details on the mask:
I also sculpted in some tubers growing out of the back of the mask to make him look freshly sprouted:
The shield was next up, and I wanted to keep it simple but still have some fun with it!
And here he is all painted up:
This was a really fun project and only took a few hours, I’m going to dig back into the box of bodies and see what else I can scrounge up to base more Turnip 28 troopers off of!
Trying to catch up on my backlog, and I swear I would get through it if I would just stop buying more miniatures…
But we all know that isn’t happening, so I’m just going to put my nose to the grindstone and hope to at least make a dent!
I started the Fantastic Four figures from CMON’s Marvel Zombies version of Zombicide back in the spring of 2024, and it’s been slow progress, as shaky health and other, far more distracting miniatures jockey for favor with my attention span.
The Human Torch is next off the list, I’m not as happy with this outcome as I would like to be, fire is just tricky when it’s the whole damned figure. Still, it works, and I’m sure I’ll stop being as critical of it when I get more distance from the monotony of painting it.
He does look pretty sweet posed with the Thing, though! I’m not sure if it’s still canon with the Fantastic Four, but it was revealed in the early 2000’s that Ben’s nemesis, the Yancy Street Gang, was Johnny Storm just pulling pranks the whole time. I hope in my heart of hearts that is still the case!
I picked up a long-dormant project over the summer, when my now scattered game group decided to get together for a weekend of Age of Sigmar‘s pretty awesome Spearhead supplement. I had the better part of a Kruleboyz Spearhead already finished, so it was time to get the rest done, which I’ll share in a separate post.
Long story short, we had a blast. My health wasn’t the best, but I still managed to get a game in with my friend Jeff, and we both had an excellent time!
This lead to all of us deciding to work on a Path to Glory league together, with a full campaign and stories to tell about our armies. Our first task is going to be to flesh out those Spearheads to 1,000 points, and for that to work, we’re going to be needing bosses! Or at least I will. Sure, I could use the Spearhead boss, he’s cool enough, but this project deserves something custom!
That’s where Grakkskull, da’ King of Crows comes in! I had this amazing Warhammer Underworlds Kruleboy leader, and after figuring out how to get more crows on the figure Grakkskull was born!
First step was coming up with some extras to make him EXTRA. I had just finished putting some Kroot together, so I had some extra meat bits and hooks. Perfect. Also, that cage on this dude’s head gave me some ideas, and I found a crow from my Cursed City box set that set more ideas in motion. Also, that whip needs to be swapped out with something stabbier, so a cleaver from a Khorn jerk should come in handy!
The crow on the trident has a key in its beak, which is one of the motivations behind Grakkskull’s madness. He just wants to find that key and unlock the stupid cage on his head! In the meantime, he had a scare shield welded to the cage so that the gods couldn’t see his schemes and thwart him.
Paint basics have been laid in, next up is detailing and basing! Then his stabgrot, Bootlick, will be joining the mob! Stay tuned for more!
I’ve been trying to shake my latest bout of Tiny Miniature Madness, but it’s just not happening. On top of my Freakishly Small Fantasy Fever and Marvel Micro-Mini Mayhem, I’ve developed a horrible case of Spaaaaaace Maaaaaaadness. Yes, it’s time for tiny little spacemans.
Dammit. REALLY TINY SPACEMANS. These first two figs are (I think) from Khurasan Miniatures, and I really dig them a lot. I wish I had put them on smaller washers in hindsight, but live and learn, I guess.
15mm is great because there’s still a bunch of detail, but they take up a lot less space. This also means that a game of Stargrave or Five Parsecs from Home can be played on a 1′ x 1′ or 2′ x 2′ board pretty easily, and the terrain is pretty easy to make. Hell, it’s even pretty inexpensive to have printed if you don’t have your own printer!
The two figures on the right are scaled-down STL files I had printed up, but they are really fragile compared to the pewter figs on the left. I’m not sure if I’ll have more printed up, or just keep plowing on with the pewter minis. At about a buck a pop, it’s hard to justify the hassle of scaling the larger figures down and dealing with the resin!
This doesn’t mean I’m done with larger scale skirmish games by any means, though! I’ve been experimenting with Infinity miniatures for my other space games, and that’s just too cool a site to just walk away from!
Time for an update on my Moonstone back log, and perhaps the beginning of a fresh strategy to get these done!
In the past, I’ve just put together whatever I had in front of me, and set out painting that backlog without any real strategy. That has led me to feeling like I’ll never finish any of these collections, since there’s simply so many figures, and I’m doing a terrible job of not buying more!
So, I’ll be taking them on by boxed set, and since the last Moonstone mini I finished was the Creep from the Masquerade box, I figured I would follow up with Duchess, and eventually Claudia Duvel. That should at least help me feel like I’m making some progress as I check off each box completed!
The Duchess is a really fun mini, and challenged me to try some new approaches to color. I wanted to go super bright on everything, but she’s also pretty sinister, so I needed to go bright and sinister, which I’m hoping I pulled off!
Here she is with Creep, looking like they’re ready to poison some canape at the next Grand Ball! Claudia is already on the paint table, so I should have her up soon!
The Masquerade Troop box is available online directly here, but you could be a real champ and order it from your local game store!
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