Hivewarden

This miniature is a "Hivewarden" from Reaper Miniatures. It came with the Bones 4 Kickstarter. I'm not sure if it's based on any particular monster from anything, but I thought it looked neat, so I painted it up. It's mounted on a 50mm (2x2) base, so it's a large monster, but it's really quite big, so I might use it as a huge creature (3x3). The mercenary hivewarden wranger is provided for scale.

I painted the brain to look... like a brain. The top of the monster is brighter colors, while the tentacles coming out the bottom are darker, cool colors. I can imagine that when this thing floats toward you in a dark cave, all you can see is a glowing eye and brain in the darkness. Then the tentacles reach out.

While this thing strikes me as an alien or abomination, in a pinch I think it could pass for a Beholder. It has the big central eye and various powers could come out of the tentacles (instead of additional eye-stalks). Reaper has more little brain-based-beasties available; This guy really screams "boss monster" and could probably do with a few brain minions.

Giant Frogs

Here are four "Giant Frogs" from Reaper Miniatures. They come in packs of two, and I got a pack with the Bones 4 Kickstarter. One of the models (the green one, see below) was missing a leg, so I emailed Reaper and, to my surprise and delight, they sent another set of two instead of just a replacement for the damaged one. Excellent customer service. So I ended up with a croaking quartet (Aristophanes?), and here they are.

I painted them all differently, inspired loosely by poison dart frogs, but mostly just one each of red, yellow, green, and blue. Maybe they're elemental guardians? I just wanted them to look nice and be able to tell them apart.

As you can see by the mercenary frog wrangler, these frogs are big fellas. They're on 50mm bases, so they're large size for D&D. There are giant toxic frogs in Stargrave as well, named Dedfurds, so there's another possible use.

As I mentioned, the model that needed replacing was missing a leg. There was a pretty deep hole for the leg to fit into, so I filled it in with putty and used the back end of a paintbrush to make little circle texture spots. I then painted it to look like not-necessarily-healed tissue. I used my X-acto knife to put a scar across his eye, then painted it up to be a pinkish-white blind eye. (You can see the healthy eye in the top picture.)

So, this is Old One-Eye, a dangerous, long-lived Giant Frog. "My grand-pappy died fighting him, but he managed to take his eye and his arm before the beast got him!"

Alternatively, he could be used as a zombie giant frog, should that needlessly specific scenario arise.

Beastmen

Beastmen! These are Reaper Bones "Minitaurs (4)," and I got them as part of the Bones 4 Kickstarter. They're about shoulder-height compared to human-sized miniatures.

I painted them quickly with just heavy drybrushing for the red-brown skintones and beige-brown horns, then heavy brown washes over everything. I'd say this was speedpainting, but it still took a while.

These miniatures actually saw use on a tabletop about a year and a half before they were painted. They appeared in grey plastic, to my eternal shame. Still, they're ready now for D&D or whatever else needs chaotic, angry beastmen. To stay on theme for this year, they could also be primitive aliens.

Rudulian Runner

 This is the last member (for now) for my first Stargrave crew. He's another red, forehead-ridged Rudulian, and he came out pretty well. He's got the team arctic camouflage pattern on his sweatpants, paired with a dark blue-grey hoodie. He's also got a pistol and sweet goggles. All parts are resin from Anvil Industries.

In Stargrave, he's a runner, a free (no cost) and fast but pretty ineffective unit that can be used to fill out your crew. He could also be used as a Recruit.

It's nice to have the full crew done. Below is a group photo.

Back row: Runner, Chiseler, Hacker, Sentry, Trooper, Trooper

Front row: Burner, First Mate (Veteran), Captain (Tekker), Pathfinder

More Scavengers

 A while back, I posted a picture of a scavenger team that I put together. Not too long after, I put together a few more models that would fit in as similar units, using the same camouflage pattern. They were speed-painted, and I never got around to doing the skin or weapons at the time; I recently found them in the "In Progress" bin and decided to finish them off.

These are all Warlord Games Project Z models, mostly from the Bikers box. The poses are a little awkward sometimes, but they hold good detail. The rightmost guy was originally a child, but I put him on some sandbags for height and, when I continued the project, I took off the original, oversized head I'd used and put on a Setla head.

So, all in all, these are five more "filler" units for whatever. With a heavy wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade, they look pretty good despite their speed and sloppiness.

Stargrave Crewmates

 

With Stargrave coming out at the end of this month (April), Osprey Games recently released a chapter from the rulebook detailing how to create a captain and crew, allowing players to ready their forces before the game releases. I devoured the chapter, as one does, and realized that my ex-miner Dwarves would make an excellent core for a crew (as I'd expected). To fill out the rest, I put together these five fine folks.

As something of a test piece for the paint scheme, I put together this guy. Like the other Dwarves, he's made from the Wargames Atlantic "Einherjar" sprues and modeled loosely after a videogame character. In this case, that character is Bardin Goreksson from Vermintide.

The color scheme is very wintry, making use of the fur collars available to the Einherjar and keeping with cool colors like the Heavy Charcoal blue and a series of greys. I hadn't fully fleshed out the camouflage pattern yet, but the cloth elements are a mix of several different light greys. Bardin here also has some orange to pop against the cool colors. I actually added the mustache and beard to a clean-shaven old Catachan head.

In Stargrave, I plan to use this model as a Sentry, a mid-range unit who can shoot with a carbine but is better at hand-to-hand combat.

Here we have two Troopers, mid-range units who focus more on the shooting than the hand-to-hand stuff. Both are armed with carbines.

On the left is another Dwarf and on the right is the only Human on the crew. Both heads are from Anvil Industries, and both have blue headbands, like the Sentry. It wasn't totally planned, but when I saw I had a theme going, I went with it. They also have matching fur collars, since I found that the Einherjar collars fit decently well on Anvil bodies (with a bit of putty to fill the gaps).

The Human actually has pupils! The first one was a happy accident, but it looked good, so I put one on the other eye with great fear and trembling. It actually worked!

I did these in a batch along with the two Setla (below), and finalized the camo pattern on the cloth. It turned out pretty well.

The last two crewmembers from this batch are more adorable Setla. In Stargrave, these both represent cheap objective grabber units.

On the left is a Chiseler, a unit that can unlock physical loot tokens. The only addition I made to the model was to add a backpack for his tools. The backpack is just a single pouch taken from the Einherjar sprue; these Reaper Grey models are tiny.

On the right is a Hacker, a unit that can unlock digital/information loot tokens. I made no changes to the model, as it was good enough as-is.

As with the troopers, the camouflage looks pretty good. With their smooth jumpsuits, it might even work better on the Setla than on the others.

I still have one "free" unit to finish for the crew to make ten (when adding the four ex-miners), so this project is already nearing completion! This is why I love small skirmish games--they're so manageable!

Starlink Ships

Serendipity.  At a local dollar store, I found a shelf full of starter sets for a 2018 XBox One game called "Starlink: Battle for Atlas." While I have no interest in the game, the sets came with little plastic ships (the "Zenith" model) that are basically 28mm scale. I picked up several boxes.

The ships are modular, too, which is fantastic. For miniature gaming purposes, it allows easy customization of the ships for whatever role they're meant to represent. To the left, you can see a ship with wings but without weapons. You can see some other configurations I've put together in the picture at the bottom of the post. They look surprisingly good.

The ship is a little over six inches long, about seven inches wide (with a pair of wings and weapons), and two and a half inches tall to the top of the orange circle thing.

For as cheap as they are, these are fantastic. Maybe at some point I'll paint one, but for now, they're good to go as terrain right out of the box. The modular weapons look good even when they're not attached to the ships. The three-barreled cannon and blue missile launcher, especially, could be turrets or other weapons emplacements.

Several groups browse at Discount Starfighter Warehouse.