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Other Stuff => Workbench => Topic started by: Wirelizard on April 24, 2019, 10:04:03 PM
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As my English Civil War/Thirty Years War skirmish project has wandered along I've been considering adding some fantasy elements to it. Actual gunpowder fantasy is far too rare!
At the recent Trumpeter Salute show over the water in Vancouver earlier in April I picked up the new Frostgrave Wizards plastic pack, figuring that even if they didn't work with the Warlord plastics that make up the vast majority of my ECW forces I could at least build a nifty skirmish band for Frostgrave itself.
Turns out the Frostgrave plastics and the Warlord plastics are pretty darn close to identically proportioned and they use the same flat-shoulder method of adding arms to torsos, making it super-easy to swap arms round. Heads will require a bit more surgery but are also possible.
(https://i.imgur.com/cpiynCl.jpg)
Accordingly, here's the first three Warlord/Frostgrave mashup magic users for gunpowder fantasy!
On the left is one of the standard Warlord ECW cavalry troopers with a Frostgrave right arm and (just visible on his right hip) a pouch from the FG sprue to hold the magical globe thing he's holding aloft.
Centre is a WL firelock trooper body with arms from FG. He'd also be usable in a straight historical game as a preacher inspiring the troops, I suspect.
Right is a body off the WL infantry command sprue, arms from same, wizard's staff from FG with the hand shaved off to fit into the existing WL open hand.
Bits of putty and other cleanup still needed, of course.
The two primered figures in the far background are from Warlord's "preachers and rabble rousers" pack and also entirely usable as clerics/mages/whatever.
I'm planning six or so magic users all told, enough to set up several groups for multi-sided games of Pulp Alley, Frostgrave+house rules, or whatever system I wind up using for this oddball experiment of mine.
(Mods feel free to shunt this to "Pikes, Muskets, and Flouncy Shirts" or "Fantasy" if desired; I posted here in Workbench because I wasn't sure where exactly I wanted it...)
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Oh yeah, now you're cooking. I like where this headed. DaveB lent me his copy of Witchfinder General but I have only skipped through it; more like ECWHorror than ECWFantasy though.
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Those are awesome kitbashes; you're right; those two ranges go together like a dream 8)
And one name for you to consider: Solomon Kane...
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Excellent kitbashes
8)
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Oh yeah, now you're cooking. I like where this headed. DaveB lent me his copy of Witchfinder General but I have only skipped through it; more like ECWHorror than ECWFantasy though.
I'm thinking this is going to be (at least at first) horror/Cthuloid skirmish rather than straight up fantasy stuff, and I've got a WANTED post over in the Bazaar for a copy of Witchfinder General, which is out of print and out of stock everywhere.
Those are awesome kitbashes; you're right; those two ranges go together like a dream 8)
And one name for you to consider: Solomon Kane...
Definitely an inspiration. Need to track down more of the original stories.
The fact that the two ranges of plastics fit together so fantastically is a huge bonus. I have some plastic Saxons from another company (can't recall who right now) and while the sculpting is nice the heads are just a tiny bit bigger than the Warlord sculpting and the resulting kitbashes look very slightly odd.
Third kitbash was done last night. Necromancer or just a grifter out to terrify the gullible in dark and troubled times?
(terribad phone photo massively overcropped, apologies...)
(https://i.imgur.com/1sZj0WR.jpg)
FG body, head, and arms, with a WL cavalry carbine (musketoon? Can't remember the proper name.) in his off hand and poor Yorick (he knew him well) in the other.
Random wishlist item: Warlord needs to do a plastic sprue just of ECW/TWY weapons and maybe spare left and right arms. I'd love to have a batch of muskets, pistols, firelocks, swords, and so on. The cavalry sprue and infantry command sprue has some options but I'd like more!
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TAG do loose (metal) ECW period weapons... :D
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TAG do loose (metal) ECW period weapons... :D
My last order to TAG took most of five months to show up in Canada (gory details here, plus figure review of their ECW artillery, which are pretty good (http://www.warbard.ca/2017/09/18/the-assault-group-ecw-artillery/)) so I am reluctant to reward that sort of commercial behaviour with more of my hard-earned cash.
Still, you are correct, they do have an admirably complete range of loose ECW weaponry.
I'm still going to dream of plastic spare parts sprues. Plastic makes figure conversion so much more achievable than metal ever did.
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As if I don't have enough to going on with now you're giving more ideas for figures to convert up! Now I need to get a Prince Rupert figure and, as soon as Albedo do some Poodle heads and tails, start hacking that about. ;D Oh, and an Irish colleague is telling me that if I do Cromwell 'He should be a Weasel !!' lol
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Really liking this. :-*
Been planning a 'mythic' ECW or two list myself, to use with the excellent Of Gods and Mortals. A bit like the Napoleon in ancient Ægypt (https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=116192.0) game I recently posted over on Age of the Big Battalions.
The 'God' would be the King (for the Royalists, obviously) with Prince Rupert and perhaps Byron of one of the other generals as Legends, etc. Similar for the Parliament.
Good luck with this project I shall watch with great interest.
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Looks great! Gunpowder fantasy can be really evocative. A while back I read Pierre Pevell's novels which are like Three Musketeers with dragons, dragonborn and sorcery. The first of is called The Cardinal's Blades.
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I'll have to look up Pierre Pevell, sounds interesting!
As well as kitbashing I've been working on some Renedra gravestones I bought years ago.
(https://i.imgur.com/BAsJCQh.jpg)
Really, years ago. December 2012, FFS. I got half of the pack done last year and am finally doing the second half. (also chickens, bought much more recently from Warbases!)
(https://i.imgur.com/t3VyFE8.jpg)
The wayside cross/shrine is from Renedra graveyard parts, as is the raven. Just the thing to be a creepy landmark out on some deserted foggy moor. I really like how this one came together.
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God's Teeth! such a bloody good idea for the next thing I didnt know I wanted to do, I instantly ordered some sprues...
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Very cool 8)
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God's Teeth! such a bloody good idea for the next thing I didnt know I wanted to do, I instantly ordered some sprues...
Glad to see this idea is infecting other people!
I'll get back to kitbashing magic users soon but in the meantime I wrote up the graveyard pieces as a blog post, including several more photos.
http://www.warbard.ca/2019/04/28/a-graveyard-much-delayed/[/color]]http://www.warbard.ca/2019/04/28/a-graveyard-much-delayed/ (http://[color=blue)
I'm really quite pleased with how the roadside cross came out once covered in tufts and flowers. I might still do some more detail painting on the raven and the cross itself.
(http://www.warbard.ca/files/graveyard3_28April2019.jpg)
Warlord priest on the right there for scale; the cross on it's overgrown little hill is about half again as tall as the 28mm figure.
Probably not much more from me this week, between other hobbies, relatives visiting, and that dreaded "Real Life" thing.
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This looks super interesting, good call on the conversion possibilities!
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Nice idea. Good work.
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Very unexpected, interesting idea!
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Great idea using decent plastics.
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Fantastic!
Consider me subscribed ;D
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Some friends over on the In Her Majesty's Name Facebook page sent me a link to this fascinating thread.
As some of you may know we published a free genre pack for IHMN that gave players the tools to play in the mad, bad seventeenth century (https://theministryofgentlemanlywarfare.wordpress.com/in-her-majestys-name/, scroll to the bottom)
I have always been fascinated with this period and particularly the period 1630-1660, the time of Solomon Kane and the Witchfinder General.
This autumn I shall be starting little, personal side-project in which I shall be collecting and building a number of companies so I can play in this period. So I shall be following your project with great interest.
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Very cool, Craig! I hadn't considered IHMN as a set of skirmish rules up until now, but might have to pick them up to see how they go.
Glad this oddball little project has caught people's attention, although I'm very much a part-time wargamer these days and haven't really done anything since the initial burst of figure-building except putty some bases and do some further cleanup. I will come back to it in due time, but can't really say when that might be.
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Excellent concept. Looking forward to photos of the finished minis. The grave scatter pieces are excellent. I had a similar idea but have not gotten around to it yet. Your execution of the idea is inspirational.
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Very interesting, a good solomon kane theme
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An update! The various figures seen a few months ago on this thread have finally been primed and might actually get paint on them before the end of this calendar year, and I threw some money at the nice folks at Reaper.
Every culture has dog/wolf demon things. The UK is thick with them, it seems like every county has three or four varieties, and they show up everywhere else in Europe too, usually huge, black, red-eyed, and inclined to eat people by dark of night or just bay (they never merely bark) threateningly on dark and misty nights.
So naturally I needed a pack of huge demon dog things!
(https://i.imgur.com/fv2BthL.jpg)
Left to right there's a pair of Hellhounds, then two Goblin Wolves (the smaller ones), and finally the big guy is a Moor Hound. They're all on 40mm bases, just for scale.
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Wirelizard. Steve Barber Models have just added a rather nice 'Scribbler' to their 30Y War range. Lovely figure with large book, quills and inkpot. My first thought was this looks like it could possibly of interest to you (I'd link, but lack the skills :( ).
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That scribbler looks like it might fit right into my Weird ECW stuff! Link here, to save others from having to hunt: https://www.stevebarbermodels.com/store/The-Scribbler-p150460244
I've been painting the various Reaper demon dogs last seen above, and I really like how they're turning out. I went higher contrast than I would usually do and it really works for these critters!
Reaper Moor Hound facing down a Warlord priest. Both still WIP, especially the priest.
(https://i.imgur.com/vU7PEd9.jpg)
A few more pictures and some extra words over on the blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2019/10/29/extremely-bad-dogs-almost-finished/
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Reviving my own thread after a bit of a pause.
I finally did something I've been thinking about doing for a few years now, and picked up a sprue of Frostgrave Gnolls to see how they'd convert to gunpowder fantasy figures with Warlord bits added.
The answer is, pretty darn well, with a few caveats. The gnolls are broader across the shoulders than Warlord's firelock troopers, so you wind up having to do a hand transplant on the right hand at the back of the gun and carve the left hand off the gun entirely. This is made much easier by the fact the each Warlord plastic firelock trooper sprue comes with one body and two possible arms+firelock combo, so you always have a spare firelock after assemblilng a
(https://i.imgur.com/ln3Qyy6.jpg)
Behold, a gnoll-gunner. Gnollskteer? The right wrist need rebuilding with greenstuff, and I think I'll try giving him a more 17th C style soldier's coat over the ragged random armour he's currently sporting. Don't think I can get a hat over those ears, though.
(https://i.imgur.com/AGHlVXy.jpg)
Here's my new firelock-toting gnoll alongside a Frostgrave wizard body (left in blue) and a Warlord ECW officer (right).
One gnoll sprue gets you five gnolls, which is enough for one small unit with a human officer/sergeant. Not sure I'll get a whole box and do big units, but for a fun weird gunpowder fantasy unit, these work well.
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Gnolls with firelocks,brilliant stuff 8)
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Excellent stuff :)
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Perhaps a Montero cap from the Firelocks sprue, and perched between the ears?
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Perhaps a Montero cap from the Firelocks sprue, and perched between the ears?
Hmm, that might work, with a bit of filing of the edges of the cap and the hair of the hyena ruff, and I still have almost all the Montero caps because most of my existing (human) firelock troopers got wide-brimmed hats.
I'll give it a shot this weekend and see how it looks.
I've also got two more werewolves to start painting up which might be enough for my planned "Werewolves of England" convention game in April as that'll take me to four werewolves and five demon dog things. Need to actually start planning that scenario and character builds for real instead of just batting around vague thoughts, I guess...
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(https://i.imgur.com/7Wmaj1h.jpg)
Firelock gnolls! In this gunpowder fantasy world I'm sort of developing, apparently gnolls fill the roll of Croats, Irish, or Scots - wild shock troops from the frontier, with wildly varying equipment, from the ancestral GIANT CHOPPER right up to firelocks and infantry swords.
These guys still need a fair bit of greenstuff to clean them up, but I'm fairly pleased with them!
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Great poses WL- amazingly natural considering the kit-bashing involved.
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Great poses WL- amazingly natural considering the kit-bashing involved.
Thank you, I'm very pleased with the two carrying their firelocks in both hands (#2 and 4 from left in the photo), and the one waving a cavalry sword carrying a carbine (leftmost). Big Sword Dog is straight from the gnoll sprue, no kitbashing involved, and rightmost dude is the one I'm least satisfied with, although it amuses me to think that if he and his sergeant both survive the skirmish they're currently in he's going to get a right reaming out for carrying his valuable firelock in such a slapdash way!
I might trim the GIANT CHOPPER down a bit, even by the standards of Scottish claymores and other big swords it's a bit over the top.
Greenstuff on these doggies this week, I think, and then on to painting them. I might now give in to temptation to buy an entire pack from NorthStar and do entire units of gnolls up, but we shall see...
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Meandering progress on various things this long weekend, including a Reaper war dog that might well show up in Weird ECW and a couple of housecats I've had for far too long that're finally finished. More on the blog.
http://www.warbard.ca/2020/04/12/dogs-cats-living-together/ (http://www.warbard.ca/2020/04/12/dogs-cats-living-together/)
(https://i.imgur.com/hHO0Q1A.jpg)
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Good stuff! Always nice to finally finish a long pending piece.
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Nothing terribly "weird" about this update, but a pair of artillery pieces finally finished after finishing the crew for them at least a year ago.
(https://i.imgur.com/eRvcfFT.jpg)
Did the big culverin up in red and the little falconette in green, just because.
The eventual plan (when Warbases reopens) is to get a couple of custom cut sabot bases in 2mm MDF with slots for the crew's 25mm bases so the gun sits in the middle of the base and everything's at the same base height.
Blog thing with a couple more photos: http://www.warbard.ca/2020/05/15/17th-century-artillery-finally-finished/ (http://www.warbard.ca/2020/05/15/17th-century-artillery-finally-finished/)
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This is a great idea with some fantastic execution
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Great project.
I did something similar many moons ago. I bought a set of rules in the early 80s called Archworld.
I didn't really get on with the rules, but I never forgot the background. It was a Fantasy world, based around earth, where the Mediterranean culture was 17th Century, and it got less advanced the further North you went. Goblins, Dwarves etc lived in the mountains, Centaurs in the plains, Elves in the woods. As you hit the North, that was inhabited by Hun-esque barbarians.
It's USP was that a cabal of seven evil wizards, working for some Cthulhu like god, were constantly plotting to take over the world, and raising the Huns to sweep down on the civilised nations.
One Partizan show, I was asked to put on a game at the last hour, so I put together an Archworld game. My ECW army faced a combination of goblins and huns. It raised some eyebrows indeed. Pity it was pre-smart phone, I never took pictures. I've still got the Goblins and Huns, but the ECW got sold on.
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Now you've got me contemplating centaurs in 17th C kit...
I might need to hack up a Warlord cavalry trooper and his horse and see what I can come up with!
A friend sold me the "For King and Country" starter box for silly cheap (I offered $40, he bargained me down to $20 and "at least three painted ECW figures, whenever you get around to them") after he won it in a raffle and it then spent several years on his shelf totally unopened, so I have surplus Warlord plastics around the place...
Hmm.
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Oh, centaurs would look very cool in ECW uniform. Dammit... now you've got me pondering on all sorts of conversions. Do not need another project :D
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I found this illustration from inside the Archworld rulebook really inspirational at the time. The perspective from the wrong end of a pike is great.
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Awesome image, Nick, thanks for sharing.
Did up some quick scenery today, all five pieces done start to finish today because the weather was blah and who wants to leave the house these days, anyway?
Four bits inspired by the teleportation circles needed for one Frostgrave scenario, but generic enough to be used for all sorts of other things eventually, I'm sure, and a CD-based fairy ring of really gnarly looking mushrooms!
(https://i.imgur.com/NRKblPZ.jpg)
The mushrooms themselves are from Bad Squiddo and are really nice sculpts. That's a 28mm Frostgrave witch on a 25mm base behind the fairy ring; most of the mushrooms/toadstools are at least waist high on a human. Whatever sort of fairy comes out of a ring like this, it's clearly best avoided.
Couple more photos and some more verbiage over on the ol' blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2020/05/30/quick-fantasy-scenery/ (http://www.warbard.ca/2020/05/30/quick-fantasy-scenery/)
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Cracking stuff as usual - I'm nicking the fairy ring idea.
I was really struggling to find some decent witches - I tried the Westwind versions, but they were a tad too large to fit with the Warlord figures - HOW did I not think of that Frostgrave set ?!? Cheers for mentioning it!
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Cracking stuff as usual - I'm nicking the fairy ring idea.
I was really struggling to find some decent witches - I tried the Westwind versions, but they were a tad too large to fit with the Warlord figures - HOW did I not think of that Frostgrave set ?!? Cheers for mentioning it!
Frostgrave Wizards II is the female magic users plastic set, and highly recommended. All of the Frostgrave stuff is very size compatible with the Warlord 17th C stuff, as seen elsewhere in this thread.
Looking forward to your version of the fairy ring, pretty sure Evil Giraffe and some of the other folk horror stalwarts have gotten there before I did!
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Oh that's great, I love the mushroom circle idea
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More big scary dogs. I've actually owned this particular demon dog at least six years, so it long predates my current Weird ECW project but finally got painted to run alongside all the newer demon doggies in my collection!
(https://i.imgur.com/0QHkbue.jpg)
By way of scale, that's a 28mm Frostgrave pastic figure on the left on a 25mm base, and a 28mm Warlord 17th C mounted officer on the right on a 20x40mm base. Doggo is bigger than a horse.
Bit more on the blog: http://www.warbard.ca/2020/06/03/the-beast-on-the-moor/ (http://www.warbard.ca/2020/06/03/the-beast-on-the-moor/)
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Great work mate!
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My weird ECW/gunpowder fantasy project has shaded off into Frostgrave, or rather Forestgrave, because rather than start from scratch with winter terrain I'm just dailing up the weird eldrich fae woodland feel starting with the forest/greenery terrain we've already got.
I've got a post over on the Frostgrave subforum (http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=124954.0) so won't crosspost everything here, but here's the current state of the first piece of terrain.
(https://i.imgur.com/3Fi1283.jpg)
Anyone got any favourite resources, tutorials, or just inspiration for weird dark creepy fae forest scenery?
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More great stuff. :-*
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Weird tree is finished, for those not following my Forestgrave posts.
(https://i.imgur.com/kYvkMD5.jpg)
This post will return to actual "weird ECW" stuff soon, I promise, as I start to actually get paint onto the gun-gnolls now that they are (I think) puttied to an acceptable point.