Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (Frostgrave undead and construct)

[boneio]

Drool...

How do you achieve such a uniform 'tone' across such a disparate set of models?

And...why is it a cabinet of shame? Looks more like a cabinet of triumph!

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

The uniformity just comes about through use of the same skin colours (for most of them). But I reckon about 80% of the "cave goblins" are 1980s Perry Citadel, so there's a fair bit of commonality built in.

It's called the Cabinet of Shame because it stands in a corner of our sitting-room - and thus its contents are exposed to full public view if anyone ventures to that part of the room. My wife heartily approves of the name!

But the cave goblins fill only the top shelf - the others contain the rest of the guilty secrets of the past two and a half years:

[boneio]

Ah, I see - quite an achievement, I think you've painted more in a few years than I have in a lifetime. I do hope to increase my pace, though.

Love that the spider goblin is front and centre, one of the few recent GW Warhammer models that I like.

[Hobgoblin]

Yes, I was pleasantly surprised by the spider-goblins, given all the negative comments on them in various corners of the internet. I do think it's a shame that they were all given hooded heads and webbed cloaks, though, as it makes them far too uniform. Some bare heads, some heads with spider mandibles and some naked bodies to show the arachnid mutations in all their horror would have helped. But they're nicely sculpted and much more delicate than the plastic night goblins; a better fit for the old Perry night goblins, I reckon.

[JollyBob]

Really cool, I am envious of your Cabinet of Shame.

I am not allowed one due to the twin forces of the Five Year Old of Hamfistedness and the Wife of Disdain. 

 

[Hobgoblin]

Ha! Hamfistedness has given way to respectful enthusiasm round these parts; disdain, I fear, persists (for wargames at least; RPGs are held in greater respect following recent family games of Whitehack).

Here are a couple more 15mm efforts: a Copplestone barbarian, who could be an adventurer or an OD&D-style berserker; and another troll.

[beefcake]

Are those Gnoblars? Great work.

[Hobgoblin]

Are those Gnoblars? Great work.

Thanks! Yes, they are. Most 28mm goblins wouldn't work as 15mm trolls, but these do the job nicely, I think.

I'm trying to spot scale-bridging opportunities when I can and have ordered some Reaper Bones kobolds to use as gnolls. I don't need them to look like hyenas, just to fill the role of large, bestial two-hit-dice humanoids. In this regard, something that I usually lament - the over-muscular physiques on even small monsters - will actually work in my favour. The Reaper kobolds look far too butch to be lowly dungeon vermin (Schrumpkopf's fill that role so much better), but they'll be fairly menacing in 15mm.

[Hobgoblin]

Here are two more: a dwarf and a goblin.

[Hobgoblin]

Some 15mm lizardmen - painted ages ago, but finally based up:

[Severian]

Lizardmen aren't really my thing, but those are outstanding - really effective colours and contrasts (and in 15mm too).

In fact your 15mm stuff is just as good as your 28mm; you use the same painting technique for both scales?

I had a brief foray into 15mm a year or two ago but mostly it was the Copplestone figures. Good work on the barbarian, btw; they really are fine sculpts, aren't they (despite the slightly chunky swords).

Is it the lighting, or is that goblin, well, green?

[Hobgoblin]

In fact your 15mm stuff is just as good as your 28mm; you use the same painting technique for both scales?

Thanks! Sometimes - although I'm experimenting with some simplifications for 15mm. For both scales, what I have been doing is undercoating in white, washing in brown (using Citadel's Agrax Earthshade), then drybrushing up in white. That leaves a "preshaded" figure that can then be washed in thin shades and inks and highlighted up when necessary. The lizardmen and orcs were done that way. With one or two of the others, though, I've been experimenting with not using the brown wash and instead just using thin washes of colour over the white undercoat with an appropriate ink wash over that and then highlights - thus avoiding the recesses being too dark. I'm also trying out using the conventional technique but then black-lining before applying the colours, to give some stronger contrasts. I think that might work well with rougher figures.

I had a brief foray into 15mm a year or two ago but mostly it was the Copplestone figures. Good work on the barbarian, btw; they really are fine sculpts, aren't they (despite the slightly chunky swords).

Yes, indeed: I like the idea of using "berserkers" as dungeon monsters, as in OD&D. So these may well make an appearance there. I also have a mounted one that I've started to paint up as a Moorcockian person of the pines.

Is it the lighting, or is that goblin, well, green?

It's the lighting! He's actually yellow, in D&D style. I may, however, have to resort to green at some point: one thing I think is important at this scale is to have the various monster tribes easily distinguishable. I won't be using "by the book" D&D humanoids: one set of "orcs" might be Tolkien-esque goblins while another might be pig-faced monsters, and neither might be called "orcs". Ditto with all the rest. So I want the "red goblins" to be instantly distinguishable from the "blue goblins" and so on.

Here's a big nasty from the depths of the caverns. It's a 28mm Reaper Bones creature, but I think it works better at this scale.

I'm planning to use it as a wandering monster in a "megadungeon" cavern system. I like the idea of having some recurring wandering monsters that are too large and difficult for the PCs to kill (for a while, anyway) and so serve to block exits, force retreats and so on.

At the moment, I'm trying to decide whether to make a modular system of cavern floors using foamcore, or instead to make walls that can be arranged to create caverns of various sizes.

[Hobgoblin]

Here's a rather less impressive dungeon nasty: a giant rat. I discovered him in the lead pile yesterday. He's Ral Partha and 28mm, but works just fine at 15mm. A wolf-sized rat is more interesting than a dog-sized one, I think.

The 15mm RPG pool now stands at 25 miniatures (the big nasty and a couple of others are missing from this shot0. Around twice that many are in progress at the moment.

[Hobgoblin]

And another barbarian:

[Hobgoblin]

And one more to round off the evening: a feral, subterranean ogre (a medium-bad roll on the wandering-monster table, I reckon).

I really like these figures, but they're nothing like Tolkien's goblins. They work well as 15mm ogres. The satchel has a touch of Grendel about it, I think, even if it's not made of dragonskin.