Quick zombies...or...quickly painted zombies.

In another move to apparently paint an undead army in under a month, I smashed out some 40+ zombies in about four days - only waiting another three days for enough tufts to finish them!

 

This is the ever-so-lovely Fireforge Undead Peasant box - but I pushed the 36 minis with some extra torsos, a few extra bodies, and some 'junk' to just squeak in two bricks of eight bases.

 

Love this absolutely desaturated "blending" palette where they just meld into a mass of junk.

An Araby wizard and his bodyguard...

Going against my normal wizarding convention (using singular heroes), I decided to make my final mercenary infantry unit into a kind of wizard's bodyguard.  This will give the wizard a bit more security before dying, but when fighting in combat a spellcasting unit can't cast spells...so we'll see how this works out.

 

 

Fireforge Games Peasants and a maybe-sorta-kinda Civil War project.

I speed-painted a few more peasants for use as "Peasant Mobs" in FSF - a scenario unit.

 

I also finished my first Confederate battalion from Warlord Games's 'Epic' line of Civil War minis.  I havent' decided if this is a project I'll continue to pursue (I picked up a few boxes during a sale several months ago).  They're not hard to paint, but tedious...

 

 

More Araby mercenaries.

Added a smaller company of Araby missile infantry - but ones with additional weapons and armour (this can be added with traits in FSF).  I will probably do one more similar unit before finishing my mercenary infantry.

 

Not a great pic.

 

 

Sliding into base at the end of the year...over 500 minis painted!

Yes, it's cheating.  I 'painted' up these last 10 minis today.  These are spectral heavy infantry which can be summoned by a spell in Famine, Sword, & Fire.

These ten guys put me over 500 painted miniatures in 2024!  That exceeds my previous best by...around 250 minis.  These are Fireforge Living Dead Warriors just primed and hit with some Vallejo contrast paints.

Araby Mercenary Cavalry

A large portion of 'Brivoli's Great Company' (my Warhammer themed mercenary army) will be of Araby origin.  My working thesis is simply that Anselmo, while on a Crusade in Araby, refused direct orders to slaughter a large number of Araby prisoners.  In doing so, he was either forced out of the mercenary company he was employed by...or he fought to escape it.  The prisoners were so taken with this decision that they provided Anselmo a life debt...and now serve alongside him in his newly founded mercenary organization.

That's the plan, anyway.

Up first is a small unit of light cavalry, made from Fireforge Northmen cavalry mixed with their Berber infantry box.

Svenbald's Gunners - Dwarfs join Brivoli's Great Company

My small mercenary force, henceforth called 'Brivoli's Great Company', has just gained its second unit, a block of Dwarf gunners.  Led by the grumpy Dwarf, Svenbald.

A unit of eight bases, with optional pavises (a trait which light missile infantry can take).

I'm intermixing mercenary units to offset the exhaustion of painting so many damn Hobgoblins!

Some games of Scrapheap, and some filthy peasants!

 Got some games of Scrapheap in earlier in the week.  As usual we made some claustrophobic 'jungle gyms of death'.

Also put together some spare models I had on hand for the start of some 'peasant mobs' for Famine, Sword, & Fire.  These are npc units that'll feature in some scenarios.  I have another box on hand to assemble and paint.

Games!: Famine, Sword, & Fire in a large multi-player game.

Had one of my best buddies come to town over the weekend and we made sure to put together a nice 2v2 game of FSF on Saturday.  He had just speed-painted a whole Dwarf army for the occasion!  While we didn't have a scenario in place, just a "meeting engagement", the game came down to...being too close to call when we quit!

Games!: Merciless, but in a dungeon

My buddy felt like DM'ing some dungeon crawling style scenarios, so we used Merciless to do so.  It worked well, and perhaps I'll add a simple bestiary to the Merciless rules to make it easy for players to run ad hoc scenarios.

First minis of 2022.

 I threw some paint on three more men-at-arms (likely to find use with Merciless skirmish games and the dungeon crawl).  I'm struggling to stay motivated on these guys because I'm really wanting to build and paint something else, but only six more and I can set them aside.

My goal for early 2022 is to finish up a bunch of unfinished projects - or even throw them out or sell them off.  Too much clutter sitting around my desk - something I don't normally have.

Some new Merciless fellas...

 I decided to start an opposing "loaner" warband for Merciless using some Frostgrave and Fireforge boxes I received in a Secret Santa exchange.

They will have a kind of worn-down military unit look.  I will be adding transfers to the shields, but I first need to find some suitable ones that I like.  These guys will also serve double duty in the dungeon crawl at some point, so I've continued my themed basing for the dungeon.

The beginning of a dungeon crawl...

So one of my current projects (without much of a concrete objective in mind...) is the creation of a dungeon and a dungeon's worth of suitable monsters.  This will be kept and used for pretty much any dungeon crawl or small fantasy skirmish I feel like gaming.

Scale: 25/28mm with 1" squares (using Dwarven Forge dungeon pieces) and 25mm bases up to about 75mm bases for larger creatures.

Inspiration: Older style, simple but charming figures.  I want some decent simplicity and retro look without going too retro (no button nosed gnomes in big flouncy shirts here...).  So a kind of D&D original look but without the 70's flair.

Game?: I may eventually produce a card-driven game to run at conventions (maybe not sell...).

Anyway, on with the pictures!

A group of Men-at-Arms for use as towns' guard, mercenaries or allies.  Gripping Beast Vikings mixed with Fireforge Crusaders.

 

Mantic Ghouls for use as ghouls, zombies and various unpleasant things.

GW LOTR orcs...very poor plastic sculpts (huge bits of unsculpted plastic on the minis).  Pretty disappointed considering how good many GW plastic kits are.  Will be used for goblins.

Wargames Factory orcs - not the best sculpts, but very nice to see something different.  You'll find no gigantic muscled green orcs here...I'm avoiding that "look" as much as possible.  Never been a fan.

Wargames Factory skeletons with some Mantic bits thrown in for good measure.  I like the skeletons okay but as with most plastic skeletons I fear some will break with gameplay.  Good thing I have more spares sitting in the box!

The start of our intrepid band of adventurers.  Otherworld Miniatures in the front rank (far preferred) and some "gigantic" Reaper miniatures in the back.  I'll keep adding to this bunch, as the characters will also serve double duty, standing in for evil characters or special NPCs etc.

Recycling the trash...

For many monsters and creatures I've found very cheap reasonably pre-painted miniatures from HeroScape, D&D, Pathfinder etc.  I've recovered several of these for use as they're decent figures (very soft on the detail unfortunately) but I like the look and they do rather well as monsters.  Most of the large creatures are based on 40mm plastic rounds, while normal figures are 25mm renedra plastic rounds.

A HeroScape troll was recovered, given a different look and based.

I really love the look of the D&D Ogre I found, so I picked one up, repainted, re-based and re-armed him.  Unfortunately my dip dried up without me knowing it, and I dunked him in goop...I managed to save it, but the overall miniature turned out poorly.  Still love the look of the guy though.

I can't afford lovely OW Minis bugbears at the moment so I started gathering up a handful of pre-paints from D&D.  They're all horribly painted and some of the sculpts are so bad I've thrown them out.  This fella is the first of five I'll be saving and refitting to look decent in the dungeon.  I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

More to come later...