This week has been catching up a bit on the core Dungeon Saga figures in order to try and finish that off in order to get one side challenge out of the way. One of the most interesting things about the Dungeon Saga figures were the undead dwarf warriors... I'm not sure I've seen skeleton dwarves before. They, along with the three undead Basilean knights, can also be used as Armoured undead in Frostgrave. I just noticed that I forgot to do the flowing eyes... I'll have to go back and do those at some point!

After finishing those 6 skeletons, I figured it was about time for a few heroes and henchmen, so I started on some of the sneaky or different characters. First up is the assassin character from the Dungeon Saga KS. This is a once piece resin figure; nicely sculpted, but I think painting it with black armour was possibly a bad idea as you can't really see the detail in the photo. He'll also make a good thief henchman for Frostgrave.

Sticking to the thief theme for a second, I made one up for a cultist/necromancer style warband using the Frostgrave Cultist and Henchmen sets. These two plastic sets are great fun to play with and offer plenty of scope for swapping parts.

After the darker side of the henchmen list, I decided to go for some brighter souls. The smaller of the two is a halfling warrior from the Dungeon Saga kickstarter who is, I guess, supposed to be Tyrion Lannister.  He will make an interesting Templar. Next to him we have the warrior nun character from Zombicide: Black Plague. I tried to do some eyes on her, but failed... failed so badly. Unfortunately the face is quite open, so it really needed eyes as there wasn't enough depth for shadows to suffice. She will also be a templar option, or potentially one of the new Captains.

Finally is a massive flock of crows for Zombicide and Black Plague. They are a bit like Flock of Seagulls, but more goth. The plus side of finishing these off is that they can also be used as Blood Crows in Frostgrave. Technically the rules are for one crow, but it makes more sense for it to be a flock. One stand (in the photo somewhere) is converted as I stole one crow to make a Crow Master (which is in the painting queue). Painting these was a pain as crows are black with black and a bit more black...

This is 9 28mm figures, 1 halfling and 20 flocks of crows. The flocks are about the size of a 28mm figure, but I will leave it up to Tamsin to decide how to score them

Wizards

While I was planning the vikings form the last update, I realised that (other than the warlord base) they would be perfect to add to the options for Frostgrave, so I went in search of some wizards that fitted the same theme. Red Box Games came to the rescue with two really nice figures. I may have to find some use for their other figures if they have the same level of detail as these two.

Although they are from two different factions, they seem to fit together nicely now they are painted up.

And here they are with all of the vikings, ready to raid Frostgrave (minus the Warlord, who isn't useful here)

They will also all work really nicely for Dungeon Saga as Vikings are one of the factions listed in Mantic's mass battle game set in the same universe. I need to have a think and come up with some stats for those.

While on the Dungeon Saga theme, these are the three demonic hounds.

More monsters

This entry for the Analogue Challenge is a mixed bag of models. Some for Dungeon Saga/Frostgrave and some for Shadows of Brimstone.

First up we have the banshee from DS, which leaves one of the core set villains left to paint and 6 armoured undead. The banshee is quite a nice sculpt, with the exception of blobby hands and will see a lot of use in various games.

As a change, I decided to try some of the Dungeon Saga demons. These guys are the same size as the undead trolls and act as their equivalent in the demonic campaign. Again, very nice models to paint, though some of the seams are tricky to clean off as the plastic is slightly bendy. If the Kings of War ones are as nicely sculpted, they should be great models... not that I need any more of them. They will also be nice large size demons for Frostgrave. These guys suffered from a partial varnish fail. You can see the white marbling on the back of the middle demon; though in this case it adds to the texture rather than obscuring detail; so not so much a fail as an unexpected detailing!

Last and definitely least are two of the ghosts from Shadows of Brimstone. These figures are some of the worst I've had the misfortune to work with. The detail is shockingly soft, which makes them ugly lumps... so a quick ghost paintjob was done at the same time as the DS banshee to get them out of the way. Scale wise they are only useful in Shadows of Brimstone as they are 1/48 (ish), which makes them really tall when compared to any other Old West figures that I have, even Black Scorpion.

Because it was asked in the Challenge comments, here is the recipe for the ghosts:

1. White undercoat
2. HEAVY wash of GW's Coelia Greenshade. Add some black wash to the deepest, darkest areas if you want to get it really dark
3. Wipe of excess with fingertip
4. Lightly drybrush white. Make absolutely sure the wash is dry first, otherwise you get weird green marbling instead (which actually works sometimes)

Mantic Open Day & Deadzone delivery!

 This morning I did a slightly insane thing... I did a trip up to Nottingham for the Mantic Open Day just so I could pick up my Deadzone kickstarter box. A 5 hour round trip because I couldn't wait for the postman. What kind of idiot am I?

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the Mantic open day. The GW ones are obviously huge and the photos of the Warlord open days seem well organised and include loads of other companies, so it's more like a mini convention. Mantic seemed to have followed suit by inviting a couple of other companies along, but neither presence was massive.

The venue itself was what looked to be a closed hospital/medical center as there were sinks and toilets in most of the rooms and no actual power as there was no heating and all the lighting was from a series of daisy-chained power cables taped to the walls! As the rooms were all very small, it was quite hard to actually get in to even see what was in some of the rooms, let alone join in. On the plus side, everyone got a little goodie bag on the way in. Thanks to their work on the Mars Attacks kickstarter, Mantic were giving out packets of the trading cards. I wasn't too excited about this until I opened mine and found a unique piece of art, hand drawn. It seems that Topps get artists to contribute a series of one off, hand drawn cards to be sealed into the packets at random and the one you see here is mine... and I love it.

Anyway, back to the open day. Warlord had a small presence, mostly demoing Bolt Action and Dredd; and Hawk Games were there showing off the starter set for Dropzone Commander. One of my aims for the day was to try and get a demo of Deadzone. Despite there being 8 demo games set out, there were only 2 people to run the games, so I didn't manage to get one in. I did, however, manage to pick up the quick start demo rules and scenario so we can try it at home.

After that, I picked up my box of goodies (look at all that plastic to add to the Challenge pile!) and headed on home.

[update] Damn. It looks like I missed a whole other building with new models and loads of other stuff. Damn. Damndamndamn. It really wasn't clear...

I'm currently sat on the sofa unboxing it all and playing with the modular terrain sprues, which are fantastic. Theoretically you're supposed to be able to dissassemble the pieces for storage and to build new things... but I suspect I will be making a couple of permanent constructions out of these and filling in the gaps. I can see the terrain being massive when it gets a general release with the three other sets that were funded by the kickstarter.

Here's a quick building using 5 pieces and some accessories