Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (ogre bodyguard for Mordheim)

[swiftnick]

That blue skin tone is blowing my mind.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, all!

Yes, hope the big game goes well.

Thanks! It went very well. Whitehack's really a brilliant system for imaginative kids. One girl skinned a cave lizard and used its hide to sneak past other underworld nasties - all the while expanding on the simple goal I'd given her with an in-depth backstory. Another girl came up with a brilliant backstory for her wolf-person character (an old Traveller vargr) and reasoned her way into rolling for a longer-than-normally-possible charge with a leap for the enemy's throat on account of her lupine origins. Whitehack actively encourages such things, so it was a joy to play.

Inevitably, they only got through about a third of the stuff I'd planned (neither the necromancer's house nor the stairs to the goblin lair in these photos came into play). But they're all keen to play again next week, so at least I've got a couple of sessions ready to go now.

A great series of updates in the past few weeks - the blue-skinned dwarf is very striking. Will they all be blueskins, or do you plan a variety of dwarven (or dwarfish) skin-tones?

At the moment, I'm keen to make them all blue. I think dwarfs in contemporary fantasy are too human and not nearly eldritch enough. It's largely Tolkien's fault, of course - but even his dwarves are a bit more than the current short, grumpy Scots/Viking stereotype. In Norse myth, dwarfs are often rather sinister - and they are shaped from the limbs of  Blainn ("Blue": "the Dead"). Somewhere in the Edda, their ghastly appearance is touched on, too. Also, they're usually equated with the svart-alfar and dokk-alfar ("black elves" and "dark elves"), so non-human skin tone seems to fit. And I think that glowing eyes go well with an underground species.

On top of all that, I find non-human skin easier to paint than human tones!

[Severian]

Excellent - always better to have extra material than not enough - and the scenery looks most effective.

Re blue dwarves. Of course, I went to look this up, and, yes, Voluspa mentions Blainn's limbs and Brimir's blood as the source of dwarves; no reason why a giant (if that's what Brimir is) shouldn't have blue blood (in one or more senses), or any colour you like in fact. There's also the passage in the Snorra-Edda (in Gylfaginning) that quotes the same Voluspa verses after saying dwarves began as maggots in Ymir's flesh, before the gods gave them human likeness and intelligence. Again, I reckon these maggots can be any colour you like, and blue looks most striking. This "blue" is the livid blue-black of bruises, too, or so Zoega tells me. You probably know all this already, of course. But moving away from the "grumpy Scots/Viking stereotype" is certainly a good thing; interested to see where you go with this. Eldritch in any case is good and to be encouraged...

Looking forward to further updates and your next sessions.

[swiftnick]

I am now looking at the Copplestone dwarfs and thinking Blue!

[Hobgoblin]

Re blue dwarves. Of course, I went to look this up, and, yes, Voluspa mentions Blainn's limbs and Brimir's blood as the source of dwarves; no reason why a giant (if that's what Brimir is) shouldn't have blue blood (in one or more senses), or any colour you like in fact. There's also the passage in the Snorra-Edda (in Gylfaginning) that quotes the same Voluspa verses after saying dwarves began as maggots in Ymir's flesh, before the gods gave them human likeness and intelligence. Again, I reckon these maggots can be any colour you like, and blue looks most striking. This "blue" is the livid blue-black of bruises, too, or so Zoega tells me. You probably know all this already, of course.

"Maggots of Ymir" has been one of my favourite phrases since I first read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child! Yes, there's definitely an association of dwarves with death - Thor's words to Alviss in Alvissmol, for example:

Thor spake:
2. "What, pray, art thou? | Why so pale round the nose?
By the dead hast thou lain of late?
To a giant like | dost thou look, methinks;
Thou wast not born for the bride."

[Hobgoblin]

Here are some other participants in yestersday's game (hastily painted yesterday morning!): a Traveller vargr (one of the PCs), the metallic guardian of the crashed spaceship, and the alien worms that lurked near it.

[Dr DeAth]

Nice brushwork, those GW Rippers are very useful, I've got a load for my 15mm sci-fi.

[Hobgoblin]

Cheers! Yes, they're great - nicely imposing aliens in 15mm. I need to get hold of more.

I did a bit more on the no-highlight black orcs tonight. Still WIPs, though. I've got a few more underway: preslotta Chronicle hobgoblins and some Acropolis goblins.

[Severian]

Great shields! and the alien worms above are indeed very good.

Interesting that Thor says Allviss looks like a thurs - now we're in Grendel territory, at least with the name. And to make it all more fun, Allviss gets turned to stone by the rising sun, which makes him like a giant in another way too. Of course, dweorg in Old English seems to mean not just "a dwarf" (in glosses) but also "a fever or fit" in the medical literature. Hmmm. Fascinating stuff...

[DivisMal]

The freehands on the shields make me ashamed of my poor painting skills. Wow!

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, both!

Interesting that Thor says Allviss looks like a thurs - now we're in Grendel territory, at least with the name. And to make it all more fun, Allviss gets turned to stone by the rising sun, which makes him like a giant in another way too. Of course, dweorg in Old English seems to mean not just "a dwarf" (in glosses) but also "a fever or fit" in the medical literature. Hmmm. Fascinating stuff...

Have you read The Shadow Walkers? It's a collection of academic essays on supernatural creatures in Germanic mythology and folklore. It's edited by Tom Shippey, who also provides an essay (and whose prose is much better and freer of tiresome academic formulations than some of the others, I might add ....). It's a really good read on all this stuff.

And thurs takes us not just to Grendel but to Tolkien's orcs. Shippey notes that orc is glossed with thyrs in the Cleopatra glossary. And in the The Road to Middle Earth, he supplies this quote from the Norse poem Skirnismal:

"The mirk is outside, I call it our business to fare over the misty mountains, over the tribes of orcs [Shippey’s translation of þyrsa]; we will both come back, or else he will take us both, he the mighty giant."

All of which goes to show, I think, that dwarves should have much more in common with trolls and goblins than with the sort of hearty, down-the-pub types that populate so many games!

[Severian]

Yes, I have The Shadow Walkers on my bookshelf (next to the four volumes of Grimm's Teutonic Mythology...). It is indeed a fun book. There's also a good essay by Shippey on light-elves & dark-elves, and what Tolkien makes of them, in his collection Roots & Branches, which you may know.

Apropos of nothing, I just opened volume 2 of Grimm and came across a reference to a medieval writer, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, making a pair of dwarves ride on goats... and here was I thinking this was a nonsense of more recent origin. But Grimm notes briskly that, unlike these later works, "the Edda nowhere represents either alfar or dvergar as mounted", which is probably as it should be.

The whole dwarves-and-beer thing is indeed vastly overdone (and I am as fond of beer as the next man, or moreso). I remember being rather disappointed by this in the original Warhammer Forces of Fantasy supplement, which was the first Warhammer item I bought rather than borrowed. It makes them both more trivial and, as you say, much less uncanny.

One of the very good things about Dragon Warriors, incidentally, is the way it presents goblins (and hobgoblins) as malevolent folkloric tricksters rather than "the infantry of the old war"; although it then rather spoils this by introducing orcs, as a separate species, in the "infantry" role... I suppose we blame Gary Gygax for this, at one or two removes...

[DeafNala]

You do the most FANTASTIC WORK with the Little Folk...I am impressed. VERY WELL DONE one & all!

[Jagannath]

Gosh, those shields are a bit good!

[majorsmith]

Those shields are really impressive!!