'Epic Fail' from BillA - "Not Everyone Levels Up"

So funny story about this bonus round entry - I'd originally planned to paint up Reaper's "Dead Man's

image courtesy www.reapermini.com

Chest" vignette for this round, but the more I looked at it on my work station, the less secure I felt in that idea: Because the skeletons are cast as a solid piece with the chest/base, would it be considered "terrain" instead of "figures"? I didn't want to take that chance, so in the last two weeks I managed to pull together a whole new concept, order what I needed, assemble and paint.

"Not Everyone Levels Up" is a testimony to every adventurer who has died before reaching third level in D&D.  This is to every fighter who ever stumbled into a pit trap, every thief who ever had a trap blow up in their face, every magic-user unlucky enough to be fed on by stirges.

The "Charnel Grub" is a Reaper Bones figure which I'd bought months ago and has been sitting in my project box, untouched, since I got frustrated with Bones figures a few months back (soooo happy to have learned to use good paint on them!).  I thought he looked like he was bellowing in triumph, so that got me thinking about an unlucky adventurer running afoul of this classic D&D adversary.

The unlucky adventurer is an "Overlord Casualty Marker" from Reaper's "Warlord" game.  He originally had a trio of arrows embedded in his chest; I carefully glued them into their sockets and then snipped them off as close to his breastplate as I could, disguising them further with a tiny bit of white glue.

The base is a 50 x 100mm square base from Renedra, with a 50mm round base from Reaper glued over top of it (the Grub's two lowest tentacles didn't repose well, despite a couple attempts with boiling water, so I needed a ledge to put the Grub on).  The stalagmites were sculpted out of Green Stuff, which was also used to disguise the edge between the bases.  The mushroom is a prepainted "Deathcap" from the official D&D miniatures line, repainted in purple and green to provide a splash of bright color to the scene and also give it a weird, possibly-magical appearance.