Curis' Warhammer Cornucopia - (May 2021: Dark Age Ringfort)

[Curis]

Delving deep within my Lead Mountain for robed acolytes I came across this Mantic Goblin Sneek.  He's been painted with fire-motif robes as he will be joining my warband as one of Clyro Burns' assistant sorcerers.

This miniature is out of production, which is weird as I still think of Mantic Games as the new kids on the block and not a venerable old company with the luxury of retiring its older offerings.  Time flies.  Only yesterday I was horrified to be told it was my tenth Twitter anniversary.  Next thing you know I'll be off to a field to drink cider and watch Fairport Convention unironically.

In 2016 I had a weekend of Frostgrave gaming looming and was desperate for fully painted figures.  I quickly rebased a Ruglud's test miniature and slipped him in with my Chaos Thugs with a matching shield.  It established a precedent, and I'm now seeing what other greenskins I can paint as part of this multiculti force.

Though I'm working on these guys with Dragon Rampant in mind, I'm wondering how to get them onto an Age of Sigmar battlefield.  Kairic Acolytes is my current best bet, but their compulsory weapon options don't make them a perfect fit.  Suggestions welcome!

Clyro Burns and his acolytes in the City of False Idols.

[Duke Donald]

These are beautiful!

[Major_Gilbear]

I think they look lovely - the deep crimson reds with the crisp white flames are just excellent.  

As for what to run them as... Hmm, not sure really. If it's tricky to run them as Kairic Acolytes because of the weapons options that unit has, then I think you'll have the same issues with other Counts-As units. Maybe if you do a few models with the "correct" weapons, then you can just hand-wave the whole unit to be the same?

[randycarter]

Wow, these are just beautyful!   

[Curis]

Thanks for the comments!  With the General's Compendium 2017 out I think I could field these guys as actual Fire Wizards, justifying it to myself as "they've all just graduated to battlefield duties".  Also means my points get high without having to paint too many more models.

Curtis over at Ramshackle did a limited run of figures for Bring Out Your Lead 2016, and I've painted one to accompany Clyro Burns. As an event, BOYL focuses on "Oldhammer", so Curtis sculpted this model holding an old hammer.  Ha!

I've converted my figure with a new face shaved off a Citadel Judge Dredd Perp – Zuggy Spotz/Crazy Joseph.  I then resculpted the hood around the front with putty.  This does make me feel a little guilty, but of all people Curtis will understand the need to hack up and convert figures.

Post-Knavecon games of Dragon Rampant have made me feel uncomfortable with my wizard unit – Clyro Burns plus five tiny familiars. This reduced strength unit gets caught in combat, and seeing a tiny familiar taking as much effort to kill as two chunky human-sized models is really odd.  I'm planning to reforge the unit at twelve-strong – all twelve being human-sized figures.

Nocturnal rituals being enacted in the Mourning Wood.

Shout out to Curtis for his generosity and community spirit!

[PhilB]

Great figures! I love the work you've done on those robes, with the white flames on a red background. And the bases are just magnificent!

[cheetor]

Beautifully crisp work Curis.

[majorsmith]

Great work

[stone-cold-lead]

Lovely work! 

[Cubs]

Lovely work. I spot a Vintage LOTR Saruman (with added flames)!

[Curis]

One day at Games Workshop HQ, Aly Morrison came up to me with a big bag of Talisman figures.  “I found this bag of scrabby old models in my basement, and I was gonna bin ’em.  Then I remembered you like scrabby old stuff.”  I was over the moon.  Here’s the first three painted.

The Chaos Brothers defending portal dolmens in the Mourning Wood.

All three figures are from 3rd edition Talisman, which I originally owned as my Dad bought it for me and my brother in the mid-1990s .  Until that point I’d been exclusively into Warhammer 40,000, and this was my first real experience of the Warhammer Fantasy world.  My painting has improved since then.

THIN YOUR PAINTS.

I’ve been quite annoyed at my initial choice of colour for my Chaos Warriors.  Red and metal is very vanilla.  To start stamping greater identity on them I’ve taken the flames from Clyro Burns’ robes and run them onto the armour panels.  It does help break up the plain surfaces and make them less generi-chaos.

With the rising market value of the old metal Chaos Thug ranges, these muscly barbarians are welcome reinforcements to my Chaos Thug unit.  I have played with them as Blood Warriors in Age of Sigmar, and Bellicose Foot in Dragon Rampant.  The variety of designs and themes in the range means they can slip in, though they are noticeably beefier and taller.  But hey, it’s Chaos.

3rd edition Talisman Barbarian and Warrior.  Interestingly, one of these is a resculpt of the other.

I’m looking through the rest of the Talisman range now to see what other figures will fit in my Chaos warband.  The Minotaur, Skaven, Black Orc and Chaos Sorcerer are all potentials.

Thanks for the minis Aly!

[Duncan McDane]

Wow, you really made those old plakkies shine. The darkish red on the repainted Chaos Warrior especially is stunning. Love it  .

[Curis]

I've got so many disparate Warhammer models knocking around I want to get painted that I decided to round them all up and form them into a hodge-podge force.  Here's the wizard that is all centres around.

The band started taking to the field for Frostgrave, but have since reached Age of Sigmar size.

One of the things to get your head round for Frostgrave is that you're not really playing with a warband, like you would in Mordheim.  It's about your wizard.  And I agonised over different wizard models for a good long while before settling on the Citadel ME-56 Saruman, for reasons of:

-  I want the warband to be built out of 1980s Citadel Miniatures
-  I've got a couple of spare Sarumans ("Sarumen?")
-  Importing the Lord of the Rings figures into Warhammer proper is pleasing.

"Tell me, friend, when did Saruman the Wise abandon reason for Tipp-Ex®?"

I really do like the 1980s Middle-Earth figures popping up in mainstream Warhammer.  After Games Workshop lost the the Tolkein licence in 1987 a lot of the not-character figures were rolled into the main Warhammer range, like the Noldor Elves into the High Elf range.  Occasionally the named character miniatures pop up in artwork or studio photographs, like ME-1 Gandalf here in the colour section of the Ravening Hordes supplement.

Gandalf™ is a wise and powerful wizard.
Gandalf™ est un sorcier sage et puissant.
Gandalf™ ist ein weiser und mächtiger Zauberer.

To unSarumanise the figure the Palantir hand was replaced with a suitably chunky hand from a Citadel Night Horror.  Saruman's left hand was flipped over and had a flame effect added from a (gasp!) modern Tzeentch kit.  This anachronism still makes me feel uneasy.

Despite leading a Chaos warband, I made no attempt to make him chaotic.  The red scheme and the age of the figure ties him in enough.

A burning sensation in your palm – classic symptom of carpal tunnel syndrome.[/i]

He initially had grey hair, but it looked bad. Too much like Saruman still.  To remedy this I sculpted over his bald patch, and repainted his hair fiery orange.  One of the nice things about figures so old is my own limited sculpted talent doesn't look as out of place as it would on a laser-crisp modern miniature.

I finished the figure with bone-coloured flames on his robes.  I was hesitant initially as he had flames popping out of his hand – I thought both 2D and 3D flames together would be confusing.  But keeping them a flat colour rather than the blended highlights of the Tzeentch-fire, and putting them in bone rather than a orange colour, keeps it obvious what's meant to be real and what's meant to be pattern.

Clyro Burns, looking a little like Donald Sutherland in Kelly's Heroes.

There he is, Clyro Burns, alongside his 1980s Chaos warband.

I call them "Burns' Knights".

Sorry.

[Hobgoblin]

Ha! Brilliant! That's a splendid-looking warband.

Couldn't agree more about the merits of using the 1980s LotR range. With a few exceptions (Aragorn the king and his soon-to-expire horse), they're some of the nicest miniatures that Citadel ever did. My old Warhammer orc army was brimming with them.

[Curis]

I have that Aragorn!  The LotR range is all over the place in terms of style.  But I do love it.

My teenage Orc and Goblin army featured a Night Goblin shaman on Cockatrice.  I’ve sold the bulk of the army, but hung onto the Cockatrice out of sentimentality.  Bulking out my Frostgrave Chaos into a Dragon Rampant force demanded a fantastic monster, so this mythological bird resurrected itself from the ashes.

The wings on my Orc and Goblin Cockatrice weren’t the original MM44 ones, but had been nicked from an High Elf Dragon.  I replaced these original replacements with a pair of 15mm Demonworld dragon wings.  Since I was converting the figure with non-Citadel parts, I figured I’d swap the rather dull tail with a scorpion one from the Dark World Manticore.

The Cockatrice torso showing his original yellow paintjob.  He was known as “Lemon Chicken”.

I did plan on him having a Chaos rider, and tried every single mounted Chaos figure in my collection.  However, anything bigger than a weeny Night Goblin shaman looked ridiculous, and the wings and neck all obscure the rider.  So Stingwing is an unbound monster, which also means he’s easier to legitimately field in Age of Sigmar.

Chicken stripped.

Attaching the Demonworld wings, and at a different angle to the original MM44 wings, required hacking away the sockets on the torso and some heavy pinning.  I used three layers of putty to first fill the gaps, then sculpt muscles, and then add fur.

In my efforts to bend the old lead wings into curved shapes I managed to break the left one straight in half.  The metal along the split crumbled, and I had a pig of a time trying to reattach it.  I managed it with pins in the only two places that joined, and a good amount of putty.  Luckily the membranes had very little sculpted detail so my repairs are barely visible.

Anyways, here’s the finished beastie! I went with a mainly flesh, and ran the warband’s signature red colour onto the comb, wattles and scorpion tail.

Cockatrice breaks through a clearing in Mourningwood.

Sadly I have no good photos of the six-way Dragon Rampant game from the Knavecon weekend – I’d borrowed sho3box‘s selfie-stick and only managed photographs of my own arm.

Put in black and white, however, this looks intentionally arty. And you can’t see my Superman socks clashing with the hotel carpet.