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!