Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (Rust Monster face reveal)

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, chaps!

I do find myself wondering what your model mountain from days of yore really looks like though.... Rank upon rank of figures waiting to march forth?  

Ah - more like a few sizeable plastic crates filled with dust and detritus and buried miniatures. Do you remember Mac's Models in Edinburgh? I used to paint miniatures for the shop's painting service when I was a kid, and I amassed lots of freebies and staff-discount stuff along the way. I also did some "concept sketches"* for Acropolis and designed a couple of bits of scenery for Fantasy Forge, as well as doing some painting for them. Much of the payment was in kind (quite a good deal at today's eBay prices ...), so I amassed loads of miniatures that were manufactured before I got into gaming (Fantasy Tribe gnolls and the like).

All my old painted Warhammer stuff went to charity shops long ago (with my blessing), although the HOTT armies were packed away in my parents' house and thus survived. But the unpainted miniatures made their way back to me a few years ago. I offered to give it all to a rugby teammate who was still a keen gamer, but he said - sagely - "Wait until your wee boy is old enough for gaming, and keep it for him". Sure enough ...

Beefcake - yes, those trolls are a good size. I have a second element of them underway at the moment.

*loosely defined - they were pretty rough!

[Little Odo]

Nowhere nearly as well painted as yours, but here are my attempts at the old Citadel Hobgoblins...

http://littleodo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/citadel-hobgoblins.html

[Hobgoblin]

Those are great!

I'm very keen to get hold of the leader figure with the sword on his shoulder, as he's one I don't have.

I should finish the three I've got underway tonight, and then will be moving on to some of the others. The crouching ones I have had their noses flattened over the years, so they need a bit of green-stuffing. Quite a few of the rest need to be heavily reconstructed - missing weapons, feet and legs. In the dim and distant past, though, someone (can't remember if it was me or whoever I got them from ) drilled out the legs and hands, so the rebuilding should be fairly easy. And the feet of the originals are fairly crude anyway.

I'm also wondering whether to include Num-Tin the giant hobgoblin, as he's physiologically close to these fellows, though differently dressed:



He might work well as a bodyguard for the human wizard that will be leading the hobgoblins, although I have a duplicate crouching one who might do that job too.

[Hobgoblin]

Watching the rugby and child-wrangling took out most of the weekend, but I managed to make a little progress on the Perry hobgoblins. I've got four at the "almost there" stage now.

I was tempted to base them individually, but their uniformity and the fact that I've got quite a few duplicated stiffened my resolve to keep them multi-based. I'll wait until I have most of them done before basing, though, as I want to get the groups of three optimised. Two of the ones that I've yet to paint have their hands drilled out, so I'll be adding standards in a large and flamboyant old-school style.

[Hobgoblin]

And just about there now ...

[Hobgoblin]

Here's another hobgoblin - my favourite of this batch. I'll base him with the spear & shield and club & shield fellows. The scimitar chap and the discipline master will go with a still-to-be-done standard-bearer.

[Hobgoblin]

And one more - to show the malevolence in this fellow's gaze.

I think these models show an interesting transitional phase in the Perrys' development. Some of them (the one with the raised club and the one with the whip) are really quite crude, especially with the faces - it was almost "paint your own" with the club one. The club-wielder's pose is a bit crude too. But the faces on the others are much more developed. And the better models herald what the Perrys do best - convincing, natural poses. They make an interesting comparison with Tom Meier's wonderful giant goblins (aka half-orcs, aka orcs), which came out three years earlier:



The giant goblins are far better detailed and finished, but already the Perrys are just starting to gain an edge with the naturalism of their figures' stances. The hobgoblins are cruder than the giant goblins, but also less baroque.

[fred]

I do like that mob of hobgoblins, I had the figures back in the day, so its great to see them again, and even better to see them painted up so well.

The Meir goblin looks very stylised, almost serpent like in the way its limbs are sculpted. The hobgoblins do have a much more natural human like look (the look of a group of people you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley though!)

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, fred!

Basing is underway - although the second base needs the standard-bearer (a variant of the guy with the club).

I'm also going to work on some dwarfs over the weekend - Citadel Fantasy Tribe with a smattering of Asgard. Initially, they might even form part of the same army. I've always liked this line in The Hobbit:

" ... in some parts wicked dwarves had even made alliances with them [goblins] ..."

[Hobgoblin]

Here's a hobgoblin of a different sort. I've got four of the slottabase Chronicle hobgoblins kicking about (the best four, as it happens: Soul Stealer, Mangler, Champion and Hero):



I've also got the three similar hobgoblins/goblins from Ugezod's Death Commandos: Sileth, Kudra and Shylob. They're not quite as Japanese-styles as the others but are close enough - and all of them are quite distinct from the earlier Chronicle hobgoblins. They all look more like Japanese oni than anything else, so I've decided to treat them as such. So they're getting lighter-coloured and somewhat cleaner clothes than hobgoblins might be expected to sport.

I see a future for these chaps in A Fistful of Kung Fu (as oni), in SOBH and in Dragon Rampant (as Elite Foot).

[Hobgoblin]

And a Chronicle cave goblin to keep him company. One thing about most "hobgoblin" ranges is that they don't really map onto a corresponding "goblin" range. The hobgoblin/goblin big/small thing comes from Tolkien into D&D, but then gets confused by D&D's proliferation of humanoids. So, while Tolkien's orcs were goblins, and the biggest orcs (uruks) were both goblins and hobgoblins, D&D confused things by separating them all out into different species. Miniature companies followed suit, but somehow the link that was there in Tolkien, D&D and first-edition Warhammer (where the first few goblins in the Ziggurat of Doom scenario could be hobgoblins) was generally broken. Chronicle, though, did produce the cave goblins, which were essentially smaller versions of the company's hobgoblins, with the same long hair and topknots and slightly oriental stylings.

I've got a few of them, which will give this warband some cannon fodder. I want at least four, so that they can be used as the mandatory four generic "fighters" in Battlesworn and as a group in Rogue Planet, as well as additional "extras" for A Fistful of Kung Fu.

This one probably needs a bit more work on the fur and face. The somewhat crude sculpting of the Chronicle range has been compounded, in many cases, by the decades these fellows have spent in the lead pile ...

[Reed]

You truly make out the most of these old little lumps of lead for sure. Makes me wanna stay in the 28mms

[fred]

Nice work on those last two. I'll forgive the dreadful pun in the title...

I'm looking forward to see what you do on those Dwarves, as in the bare metal they look very basic, probably even crude. I think most of them pre-date my rather old Dwarves. Doing them as evil Dwarves to band with the hobgoblins would be different, and interesting.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, Reed!

Nice work on those last two. I'll forgive the dreadful pun in the title...

Cheers! There's probably much worse to come on the punning front ...

I'm looking forward to see what you do on those Dwarves, as in the bare metal they look very basic, probably even crude. I think most of them pre-date my rather old Dwarves. Doing them as evil Dwarves to band with the hobgoblins would be different, and interesting.

Yes, they're old, old dwarfs - Fantasy Tribe from 1982 or so. When I got them, they'd all been painted as statues. But they're quite nice figures in their way, so I'm looking forward to painting them.

I probably won't paint them as specifically evil dwarfs, but I do think that all dwarfs should be quite sinister. They generally are in folklore and myth. I'm not too keen on the post-Tolkien dwarfs-as-cheery-red-cheeked-ale-quaffers idea. I think they should be pallid (they are subterranean creatures, after all), gimlet-eyed, tricksy and suspicious. And physically inferior to humans (for all that dwarfs are strong for their size), yet armed with fearsome magical weaponry to make up for it.

[Hobgoblin]

Here's the first cave goblin completed, along with a friend - and with their bigger, badder oni master.