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

Still here...

Well it's been a while since I posted anything. I just ended up in one of those places, I guess a lot of us do at sometime, where I just couldn't motivate myself to do anything hobby related. I haven't bought anything, played anything or painted anything for a while. All this has changed in the last couple of weeks.


First up I've been playing a lot of Heroscape with my kids. My 6 year old found it in my wargames room and asked if I'd play with her. So we had a game and it was really good fun so much so that eldest also wanted to get in on the action. Were now playing Heroscape every night. I even purchased some extra sets (not as easy as it sounds as Heroscape is now OOP). I'm sure my kids will get bored of Heroscape soon but it has fired up my hobby interest again.



I purchased the original Heroscape along time ago and added the Marvel heroes set later on. When we started playing Heroscape again I had a look online to see what was up with game. Apart from finding out Heroscape was OOP I also found out the last version and boosters had been based on Dungeons and Dragons. I bought a few booster packs of these D&D miniatures and really liked them. Underneath those horrible Chinese sweatshop paint jobs are some really nice miniatures.

As well as playing Heroscape I came across a box with all my old Forgotten Realms novels in a few weeks back. For those that don't know Forgotten Realms was one of several settings for AD&D back in the 80s/90s as well as the game products their were loads of novels. Ok these stories weren't exactly high literature but they were good fun to read. My favorites were the Drizzt books by RA Salvatore. So I started re-reading some of these books which stirred up a desire to dungeon bash.

When I was at school a few of us were pretty dedicated roleplayers. As teenagers we didn't go in for adventures of intrigue or investigation we just enjoyed invading dungeons killing everything and looting the place. So there I was wondering how I might dungeon bash, in a group of one with no Dungeon Master, when I came across the the D&D boardgames which apparently can be played solo. A quick look at the three titles available and it didn't take me long to settle on the Legend of Drizzt game. So I bought one.......

So I'm back on the hobby trail with a bit of D&D

Jon

The Albion IV Imperial Guard

Finished these guys last night. Basically I wanted to do some Imperial Guard for 1st edition 40K the original 80s ones where a bit expensive on ebay .....the new GW ones where a bit expensive to. I did come across someone selling some Cheap Warlord games 28mm plastic British infantry on the sprue which gave me the inspiration for these guys. This is the test unit painted up and I think they work quite well.

The Warlord games weapons supplied were way to small for 40K (ie were in actual scale) so a raid of my bitz box furnished me with dozens of IG las-guns from past projects as well as numerous pistols and chainsaws. What I didn't have was any heavy weapons in the end I bought a pack each of Maxmini resin tesla cannons and grenade launchers. This gave me enough heavy weapons for a IG platoon in the 1st edition IG army lists. The Tesla cannons are going to proxy as conversion beamers.

Minimum units in a IG army for 1st edition is four tactical squads (10 men and 2 heavy weapons) plus a command section (5 men and 2 heavy weapons) an officer and commissar this comes to about 1100 pts. I want to keep my forces down to 1000pts though so I'm dropping a tactical squad (200pts for 10 guardsmen) and throwing in a ratling sniper squad to make up the points.

This means I need 35 guardsmen happily a box of warlord games plastic British has 25 miniatures which works out very well I'm toying with getting the commando box as I can then have some heads with berets as well as helmets.

Cheers Jon

Another Ogyrn

Just a few pictures of the second Scibor space ogre I picked up cheap on ebay. This guy in the sergeant or bonehead armed with a ripper gun. The shotgun is from the first space ogre model, who got an axe instead and replaces the powerfist this miniature should have had. The bottom picture gives some scale perspective.

Cheers Jon