'Fellowship' from Barks: Nine Adventurers

Nine legendary adventurers; men, halflings, an elf... it must be Blackstone Fortress. I've painted three of this Fellowship up for other Theme rounds here and here. Here's all my Nine Walkers:

And here's the remaining six for your review today:

The Rogue Trader

Janus Draik is a Rogue Trader. I've always seen them as a bit grubbier and more Han Solo-ish than GW's latest aristocratic incarnations, but hey. I thought he looked like a Napoleonic Russian general, and painted him up thus inspired. His pistol is an Eldar prize.

The Navigator

GW has gone 110% with a distinctive helm for Espern Locarno. The diamond-shaped third eye navigator icon is present front and back on this miniature. He's the support wizard for your group.

The Priest

Taddeus the Purifier, AKA The Tad, AKA Battle Pope. He's got a prominent belly, and I  like his gun-servo skull. As befits a member of the Ecclesiarchy, he's festooned in skullz (10).

The Zealot

His off-sider is Pious Vorne, whose therapy sessions start with firing up her flamethrowing chainsaw. She hits hard, but cannot sustain much damage herself. I'm really happy with how her flames, cloth, and armour came out.

The Robot

The most amusing character is UR-025. He's a 10 000 year old 'Man of Iron', an artificial intelligence looking to link with the AI of the Blackstone Fortress. AIs are anathema to the Imperium, so UR is pretending to be a dumb robot! I painted the sculpt in an industrial yellow, which I think I've now got the hang of. He's got lots of nice detailed hatches and access ports.

The Elf Ranger

I've always liked the aesthetic of the Biel Tan Eldar craftworld with their green and white scheme. Amallyn Shadowguide is a Biel Tan ranger, but I'm not a huge fan of her pose, unfortunately. I'm least happy with the pink knife, but her other gems came out fine. I wasn't going to paint the thorns on her cameleoline cloak, but I'm glad I did.

I've rather enjoyed painting these varied and colourful figures. BSF has allowed GW to dig into its history a bit, and is an excuse for weirder and more wonderful miniatures. The game really is a dungeon crawl in space, with archetypal elf rangers, clerics, wizards, thieves etc. It was a goal of mine to get this set done over the Challenge, which I'm glad to say I have done. It has, however, taken me longer than planned- which I really should have anticipated.

Skull-o-meter™: 12

5x28mm and 1x 40mm: 32 points

'Fellowship' from MikeF: Female Fantasy Fellowship

Here is my submission for this weekends final bonus round. A classic Fantasy "fellowship" is a Warrior, Wizard, Dwarf and Elf. As I mentioned during the Mercenary round, I bought a large number of fantasy miniatures from Hasslefree Miniatures. 

I dug into the collection and found the figures necessary to make my fellowship. The twist is that they're all female! I'm fairly happy with how they turned out. The details on these minis are so fine it was quite difficult painting them at times. I tried experimenting with painting the eyes, but I kept getting a Homer Simpson result, so I abandoned the attempt.

Mike

'Fellowship' from PeterD: Mice and Mystics

My submission for the fellowship round is a band of nine intrepid fantasy adventurers - three fighters, an archer, a mage, a healer two thieves and a ranger.  Oh and they are also seven mice, a shrew and a gecko!

Here's the full set, although a couple of the shy ones are hiding in the back row.  I'll see if I can draw them forth shortly.  These miniatures come in Red Hat's board game Mice & Mystics and its expansion Downwood Tales.  The game features a royal (Human) household that overtaken by an evil sorceress and the heroes change themselves into mice to escape.    long the way they battle cockroaches, rats, centipedes and spiders (including their human enemies who also morph themselves).  It is a surprising good play, with simple rules,  great story line scenarios, a good challenge and lots of nice colour.  The currency is cheese, there's a ring of cat strength magic item and triggering a mouse trap means that your mouse both takes a hit and gets a cheese.  Better yet you can find a dinner fork and mouse-a-pult yourself over danger.

Tilda, Colin, Maginose

First up we have the leader, Price Colin in his red cloak flanked by his counsellors Tilda the healer and Maginos the mystic.  Tilda also fights with a nasty mace and gets more deadly if she's defending wounded comrades.  Maginos has his familiar wyvern Meeps who's been transformed into a lady bug.

Filch, Nez, Lily

Next up we have the royal armourer Nez, flanked by Filch the scamp and Lily the archer. Nez is a tinkerer (which is sometimes useful) and a warrior which is always useful especially when he uses his Thundersqueak ability.  Lily has always been a mouse and is a member of a local mouse clan that Colin befriends.  We meet her in one of the early scenarios when they rescue her from a mousetrap.

Jakobe, Ansel, Ditty

The last set of three are characters that we will meet in the expansion game as Colin and fiends venture into Downwood.  As with Lily, these characters have always been critters.  Jakobe the gecko is their guide and carries a boomerang.  He looks chatty and may try and sell us car insurance.  Ansel is a valiant mouse warrior and wears a serpent scale breastplate.  Ditty the shrew is a scamp.  She carries a peppercorn sling and a fiddle.

I'm not sure if Sarah's Challenge includes only human characters.  But there are three female anthropomorphic rodents in this groups so I've tagged them any way.  Here are the three ladies in question, Mother Hen Tilda, Adventurous Lily and well keep a hand on your valuables Ditty.

Final group shot.

FYI when we play M&M, I play Tilda, Curt plays Filch, Sylvain is Nez, Jeremey is Maginos and Stacey is Colin.

Points wise these figures are shorter than 28s and taller than 20s.  I'll leave it to the gods and GMs to work out my points.

'Fellowship' from StefanK: The Unicorn Club

For this theme round I've held back a couple of miniatures I painted at the very beginning of the painting challenge. Those figures are from CoolMiniorNot's board game SMOG - The Rise of Moloch and are representing a couple of members of the honourable Unicorn Club.

The Unicorn Club is a secret society of ladies and gentlemen gathering their powers to tackle down the forces of evil (vulgo the Nemesis) and hamper the return of Moloch a demonic world destroying creature of unspeakable cruelty.

Some of the gentlemen are inspired by Imperial literature like brave Peachey Carnehan from The Man who would be King (above, left hand side).

Others are inspired by pure fantasy like Mr Fox (above, right hand side).

Anyway the game comes with an incredible lot of wonderful figures. Unfortunately I didn't dare to go all in on Kickstarter so I'm missing the expansion The Wheel and the figures from it. Darn, it's not released for common buyers yet!

The figures are made from the usual semi-flexible board game plastic but nevertheless cast crisp and clear with a wonderful amount of detail. Unfortunately some of the faces appear rather flat so some of the figures proved difficult to paint in that behalf.

As said the club consists of men and women. Thus I was eager to paint a couple of honourable damsels as well to contribute something to Sarah's Choice finally.

After all it was really great fun to paint these figures, They are well-detailed and full of character. Fortunately the Kickstarter campaign provided enough figures to live on for many painting sessions.

As usual for CMON games SMOG is played on board tiles rather then real wargaming terrain. Thus I was on the horns of the dilemma of how to base the miniatures. They had those mandatry cast on discs below their feet but I wanted to have them more flexible and not arranged for a certain type of underground. Thus I cut and grinded away as much from those bases as possible and replaced them with clear acrylic disks. It was a dirty and labour-intensive job but I'm very happy with the result nevertheless.

So that's it for the last bonus round and Sarah's choice then. Next week I present my ACW troops which saw action in Hamburg and maybe I'll finish the Curtgeld orc I digged out of my lead pile. Anyway the challenge is heading to it's home straight and I'm really curious about seeing what you other fellows have left in their quivers.

Cheers
Stefan

'Water Feature' from IannickM: Kaynora Uldum, High Priestess of Hydana

As I mentioned in the last bonus round, in December 2017, I started a Fighting Fantasy RPG game with two of my best friends. We changed game and setting at the end of 2018.  So I decided to reward my players with a gift, as a thank you for their dedication and the seriousness with which they played for a year. So I painted a figure for each of them, one that represented as closely as possible their characters.

So today (a funny coincidence that both characters could be used in the bonus rounds!) we have Kaynora Uldum, commonly refered to as "Kay". Kaynora is a black elf, daughter of Ralyana Darrenim and Eranil Uldum, and spent her childhood on the roads of the "Old Allansia", as part of a merchant caravan. In the world of Fighting Fantasy, black elves and dark elves are separate races, and while the later are universally evil, the former are a race of nomad merchants, of mostly neutral alignement. Kaynora left her family in search of adventure after meeting Lexana O'Aria, the Kharé mercenary who would in time become her trusted companion. Chosen by Hydana, master of the oceans, during the exploration of a sunken temple, Kaynora devoted her life to the teachings of the God of the Seas and rose from apprentice to High Priestess.

One of the power I really enjoy in the Fighting Fantasy RPG is that priests may call upon their God to directly intervene in the affairs of mortals once in their career. Kaynora managed to survive an entire campaign without calling on that favour (and there were quite a few moment when she almost did), and used it in the final scene of our campaign, to smite a mighty black dragon in the battle between the forces of Salamonis (the good guys) and Balthus Abhoré's evil Chaos hordes. It was an epic moment, as the mighty old God rose from the oceans to spearhead and then engulf the dragon in a powerful tidal wave of destruction.

I easily found the figure to represent the High Priestess, from Dark Sword miniatures. Kaynora wielded a metallic blue trident given to her by Hydana, wearing a turquoise robe and an equally blue magic armour. The figure was just a perfect match, and she has that High Priestess prestance for sure!

So that's 5 pts for a 28mm character, and a candidate for Sarah's choice. 

And here's a picture of the legendary mighty duo of Allansia, Emilie's Lexana O'Aria and Marie-Claude's Kaynora Uldum. Both figures now in the hands of my two players.

'Water Feature' from Noel: A Walter Feature

Curt’s idea for bonus theme 4, a Walter Feature, at first seemed a little odd to me. But then I thought: it’s Curt – the strange man who annually invents three months of torture for himself; the man who paints in meticulous detail exquisite figures for some very peculiar subjects. He’s testing us. He’s come up with this theme to really sort the Guelphs from the  Ghibellines (look it up!)

I thought about Walters for a while. What about a Walther PPK? Perhaps too small for a centrepiece. Could I come up with something suitable for Walt Disney? A Mickey Mouse missile, perhaps?

Then I hit on it. Sir Walter Raleigh. Who could be a stronger character for a Walter theme than the man who invented the potato? Where would snacking by the TV be without him?

So I picked the iconic scene where Sir Walter lays down his cloak on a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I. There were rumours about these two, of course. After all, what woman could resist a man with a sodden cape and a potato in his hand? (Even if, sooner or later, he was inclined to lose his head). So perhaps the famous occasion of the puddle and the cloak occurred at a clandestine meeting of some kind.

My next problem was that I don't have a Walter Raleigh figure in my collection. Not even something close. Never one to let historical accuracy get in the way of a good idea, I postulated an evening when the Queen takes part in a masque at Hampton Court, a pageant based on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In it Liz is Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself, whilst Raleigh takes the role of the Red Crosse knight, who is enamoured of Gloriana. For the pageant Raleigh would dress in antique armour, whilst Liz herself would be in her finest garments. Then after the show but still dressed for it, the Queen of England meets up with her romantic warrior.

So for Raleigh to show proper obeisance I chose a kneeling man-at-arms from Perry’s C14th Carroccio set. 

The model is clean shaven, though, so I had to fashion a Raleighesque tash and beard from green stuff. This is in his younger years when he’s a little more hirsute, rather then the dapper primnesss of most of his later portraits.

I placed him kneeling by the cloak he's just laid down:

The Liz I figure is, I think, by Wargames Foundry though I’ve not been able to track it down in a catalogue, so I may be wrong. It seems to be a simplified form of the “Ditchley Portrait”. (It's apparently by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, a name which means nothing to me, dated 1592 and in the National Gallery):

I did my best to replicate that portrait in painting the model. The trouble is if you get too detailed, it easily becomes a mess.

Also it was fashionable in the C16th for women to have extremely white skin, as the portrait shows. If you try that on a 28mm model, she either looks like she’s only been undercoated or she's a wannabe zombie. So my Liz is a little healthier looking than the portrait.

The set is scratchbuilt. Thick card and wallpaper from my daughter’s crafting supplies for the walls and the Tudor arch (properly called a four centred arch I believe), scribed balsa for the door, mdf offcuts for the steps, foam from a playmat for the base, a puddle of superglue and varnish, and a cloak fashioned from tissue stiffened with white glue.

I’m pretty pleased with the result, though there are some obvious areas which could be improved. Here's a slightly wider angle:

Once I’d seen the finished model I realised an alternative title might be “Sir Curt and the Lady Sarah”, as I guess this pretty much represents their roles, as far as I can tell from the Snowlord’s posts. At least, it may well be Sarah's Choice...

I also thought of “Queen Eilizabeth and Sir Water Raleigh”. See what I did there? Making the puddle the main feature. But that seems silly.

I think that's just 10 points for the 2 figures, plus the bonus. Not sure if the terrain is worth points, as it's more of a setting than fully reusable terrain, but just in case: it's a 4" wall mounted on a triangular base of sides 10", 8" and 8".

Now I just need an idea for the final challenge. This, I think, will be even harder than the Walter challenge. Let me think: "Pillowslip"....

'Water Feature' from TamsinP: Lady Sarah

Way back in AHPC7, I posted this motley bunch, the crew of the Lady Sarah:

*linky-link*


The Lady Sarah is a somewhat scruffy, very rusty, disreputable old tramp

...freighter. Clearly, besides the name, she bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Snowlord's better half.

As several people had commented back then that they wanted to see the Lady Sarah, I had no choice but to fulfill their wishes and when the "water feature" bonus round was announced, well, I just had to do it.

Some more pics:

The name plates were printed out onto white card, cut out and fixed in place with superglue. They then got a spray coat of gloss varnish, followed by a light airbrushing of matt varnish and finally a light mist of Army Painter Soft Tone wash.

The cargo ship is a 28mm MDF kit from TT Combat. It is modular, so can be extended to make the ship as long as you want. Lady Sarah has one extension; here's a pic of the base kit:

And the ship broken down into parts:

I also painted up some deck equipment from Pulp Figures:

The pack included two lifebelts which have been glued to the bridge section.

I've had good fun over a couple of days painting and weathering this ship. After doing the rust effects and stippling some gunmetal all over, everything was given a mist coat of Soft Tone through the airbrush, then some "spills" were added using Strong tone and Dark Tone washes.

For scoring, I don't know whether this should be treated as a very large 28mm vehicle or as terrain. In either case, the dimensions are:
Superstructure - 6 x 6 x 5.5 inches = 198 cubic inches
Deck section - 6 x 23.5 x 1.5 inches = 211.5 cubic inches
Total - 409.5 cubic inches = 1.9 terrain cubes.

Plus the deck equipment.