The underdark - first bits of terrain

As well as playing the D&D Legend of Drizzt boardgames I thought it might be nice to have some solo games using the old 2nd edition Battle system skirmish rules. Basically the Battle system skirmish rules are the AD&D roleplaying games combat system tailored for miniature use on a tabletop battlefield. Of course I needed a tabletop battlefield that was suitably D&D....

...I'm building up quite a collection of Drow from the D&D plastic miniatures and have just finished re-reading Daughter of the Drow by Elaine Cunningham. There are some very evocative descriptions of the underdark (the underground world where various races live) in that book so I decided to knock up a underdark board for some skirmishes/dungeon bashes.

I had a spare 4x2 foot MDF board so I stuck some embossed slate style sticky backed floor tiles I bought from a DIY shop. Handily these were a foot square so eight tiles covered the board perfectly with no extra work.

I made a few trail walls and rocky outcrops from pink foam carved to look suitably rock like. I then covered the pink foam structures with grey floor tile grout and sand which dries rock hard. I painted everything with a cheap mid grey undercoat emulation paint. When the grey paint was dry I painted streaks of black,red-brown and brown yellow craft paints with plenty of water to try and match the colours of the floor tiles. A final dry brush of cream emulsion and the effect wasn't half bad.

I wanted some crystal outcrops for my underdark. I looked at some commercial sets like Gale Force Nines which where very nice but a little to expensive for me. Instead I found a bag of broken and smoothed green glass (meant as decorative plant pot toppings) in my local garden centre for £2 I stuck a load of these to some old MDF round bases and treated them the same way as the walls for some nice cheap crystal outcrops.

Plenty of extra scenery to make yet stalagmites, underground water features, lava flows, lots of fungi and some chasms are all on the list plus maybe some underdark dwelling in the style of classic dungeons and more walls and outcrops like my trail ones.

Cheers Jon

Companions of the Hall

Managed to finish a few more miniatures from the Legend of Drizzt games this time Drizzt and his friends. Not overly loving some of these miniatures the picture at the top is from the first Drizzt book and I guess that is how I always imagine the Characters to look. Anyway from top to bottom we have

1) Drizzt Do'Urden the iconic Drow ranger - Not a bad representation IMO

2) Guenhwyvar Drizzt's magic panther - can't really go wrong with a black panther

3) Wulfgar the barbarian - not to bad but Ageis Fang (Wulfgar's magic warhammer) looks totally wrong to my eyes

4) Bruenor Battlehammer the Dwarf King - totally wrong for the early stories but probably a good representation of Bruenor as king of Mithril hall complete with missing eye.

5) Cattie-Brie Bruenors adopted human daughter - yuck horrible miniature with no facial detail doesn't fit my personal ideas of Cattie-Brie.

6) Regis (Rumblebelly) the Halfling - Seems rather well armoured for Regis...could be Regis as Regent of Mithril hall I suppose.

Cheers Jon

Orcs and Bugbears

A few more D&D miniatures, this time all Heroscape re-paints, at the top we have some bugbears and at the bottom some orcs. As per the previous miniatures I relied on the 2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Manual for my colours.Hence yellow skinned bugbears and green/grey orcs.

I also managed to get in a few games of the legend of Drizzt boardgame with my children yesterday which is a simple yet exciting and fun dungeon bash game. We played four games of the same scenario and all came out different and we've not even started on the advanced stuff included in the game.

Cheers Jon

First D&D miniatures

Well the long weekend is over and I managed to put brush to miniature for the first time in ages so here are a few pictures of various D&D plastic miniatures from the legend of Drizzt and Heroscape games that I managed to paint (re-paint in the case of the Heroscape miniatures). I've taken a leaf out of the D&D miniatures line and left all the bases plain black as these miniatures have to operate everywhere from dungeons, to forests and swamps etc themed scenic bases wouldn't fit to well.

Something you don't normally have to do with fantasy miniatures is research ...However in the case of the D&D miniatures I spent a happy couple of hours re-reading my old AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual to make sure I got skin colours and such like right(ish). So from top to bottom we have

1) Shimmergloom the Shadow dragon (Drizzt boardgame). Quite difficult to paint this one as the description says that shadow dragons look like errr... shadows. In the end I improvised some highlights in dark colours as I figured a black dragon on a black base was a bit boring. Not to impressed with the miniature either it was slightly miscast so the base is always crooked and for a dragon it's a bit small. In the Drizzt books Shimmergloom is big and scary.....this one isn't.

2) Ogre bully (heroscape) love this guy apparently yellow skin and green hair are all the rage in D&D ogres so that's how I painted this one.I think he turned out really well.

3) Ice troll (heroscape) Smaller more intelligent cold versions of normal trolls. I had improvise the skin colour on this troll as the description said ice trolls have translucent skin (a bit tricky to paint I thought) so I went with blue as suitably cold looking. This miniature has an insane warhammer ....

4) Frost Giant (heroscape)..Basically an over sized viking with blue hair and white skin. Great miniature to paint and very big.

5 and 6) Death Knights (heroscape) nasty undead knights...Nasty miniatures to. I did my best with the paint job but you cant polish a turd as the say. Unbelievably I saw number 5 in it's pre-painted D&D miniatures form going for £15.00 on ebay ?!?!

7) Hunting Drakes (Drizzt boardgame) Couldn't find a description of these monsters anywhere. Google threw up one small picture of the pre-painted version of these miniatures in a red and yellow colour scheme so I copied that.

Cheers Jon