By Saint Lazarus!

As often seems to be the case, I’ve been tempted by a new project. The lines of thought that lead me to it are too long to write out here, but largely it was excitement at Wargames Illustrated’s Assassins and Templars, rediscovering Assassin’s Creed, and then spiralling out into wanting to Wargames the Third Crusade because that’s just how these things go when you start to do a bit of reading. In the short term though, I bought myself a copy of Outremer Blood and Faith, and set about painting up a mini to whet my whistle.

During my reading and watching of various YouTube videos (largely along the lines of ‘Teutonic Knights: did they really wear such fantastic helmets?’), I came across the Knights of the Order of St Lazarus, and figured that would make for an ideal first figure. They are (mostly) knights with leprosy, charging into battle hoping to die honourably because that way is a fast pass into heaven - they are the Dwarf Slayers of the medieval period! 

So, here is my first mini for Outremer:

White really is a pickle to paint isn’t it. For this guy I highlighted up to pure white from a very light grey, but I wonder if white with a grey wash/glaze then highlighted back up to white wouldn’t be easier? 

My brief internet research suggested that leprous knights often wore masks, so I converted one for my mini - it’s a cut and carefully shaved down Frostgrave cultists head, transplanted onto a mail coif wearing Fireforge head:

I even highlighted the mask properly rather than just drybrushing it! Ugh, looking at my shonky freehanded cross on his shield in this extreme close up doesn’t make me happy, rest assured it looks much better at arms length! 

And here’s a picture of the back too, as always to prove that I painted it. Not a lot to look at, mostly white. 

I wasn’t sure what colour the ring around his head should be - is it supposed to be fabric, as some pictures suggest? It’s not sculpted like that, so I left it metal in the end…

While I was digging in my Game of Thrones box for historical sprues to convert my knight, I also came across a metal monk, and figured Crusaders could probably do with some pilgrim monks to fight over. 

It’s a fairly quick and dirty paint job - I went a bit too heavy on a drybrush and tried to knock it back with glazes, but with the end of the year looming and the Tally still… looking like it does there came a point where done was good enough and this was it.

No idea who made the mini originally - I feel like it came from Forlorn Hope some time ago, so is probably originally a Grenadier sculpt?

Finishing these two brings the Tally to:

38 vs 255 = -217

14 minis to do before the end of the year to hit the challenge of averaging a mini a week, that’s doable right? I may or may not have dug out some minis to prep that only need very simple paint jobs…

What’s next then? Well, before I paint anything else, Tim the Necromancer has managed to squeeze in one more game…

Man at Arms, the updatening

Having played a decent amount of Frostgrave recently, I had gotten it into my head that my Man at Arms mini was borrowed from the retinue of Tim’s Mortal Enemy, who in turn just borrowed some minis from my Game of Thrones Starks. As he’d been fairly pivotal to my success recently, I set about updating his model, as I felt bad that he was a proxy (and sooner or later Tim’s Mortal Enemy is likely to reappear, and would need him back). 

So last night, I dug out a bunch of sprues and set about rebuilding him. I tried to match the pose and equipment, just updating his shield initially, but then I also decided to give him a nice kettle helm, because they’re cool:

Like the original, he’s a Fireforge body with Gripping Beast Viking arms. I had originally planned to give him a shield from the Frostgrave Cultists sprue, as he’s in the employ of a Necromancer, but they were much smaller than I remembered so he got a Fireforge shield instead. Also, I’m not sure if you can see it or not, but there was a slight casting defect on his groin, which I fixed with green stuff.

He’s even got a scabbard and pouch, just like the original mini.

Then I made the mistake of reading my own blog trying to work out why I had initially grabbed a mini from the Mortal Enemy warband rather than making a new one, and realised… I didn’t. The Wolf shield carrying Man at Arms was in Tim’s gang first, and is even narratively relevant to the campaign, as it turns out Tim hired him on the spot when he saw Tim leaving his sorceress mistress’ bedroom tucking something into his pocket. I’d apparently just forgotten this! In my defence, due to my intermittent gaming time it’s been over a year since the Mortal Enemy actually made an appearance on the table…

So I guess he becomes either the first mini of a Barons War project, or maybe the first House Bolton trooper in my ASOIAF project (which admittedly I do want to add to for the first time in at least a decade, to make some usable forces). Or perhaps both, when he gets to the painting table.

In other news, I also cracked the plastic on the boards in Sedition Wars, to see whether they might be useful for a possible 2026 project:

Esprit de corps(e)

As you will have seen from my last post, needing some Corpse Tokens for the first scenario of the Hunt the Golem mini-campaign, I set about making some! I know I could have just used the laser cut exclamation mark tokens that I use for Rangers of Shadow Deep, but I figured these would be a nice little project (and I’m sure this isn’t the last scenario that I play that will have a need for corpses).

I grabbed some 25mm flat Renedra bases, as that is what I’ve used for the rest of my tokens, glued sand to them, and then set about rooting through my bits box for bits that looked like they could be used to represent the aftermath of terrible violence wrought on the human body by a massive monster with stone fists. A couple of half-empty Frostgrave sprues furnished me with some arms, one of which got a paper clip bone stump, but these were looking a little bare so I looked for some torsos. After a brief pass for thought where I considered what the worst miniatures I had that I didn’t mind sacrificing to the cause, I soon realised it was probably the sprues of Wargames Factory figures. Technically the redcoats are worse, but zulus would be a good generic body when suitably distressed - and yes, I guess the golem hit them so hard that their shirts flew off? Either way, it keeps them nicely generic, so I can use these in Frostgrave, D&D, anywhere where I need to gore things up basically. Once I’d hacked at them with a pair of clippers, I went in with green stuff to make any cut edges look more ragged (as well as making a generic glob of gore on one base that still looked a little bare), and ended up with a selection of tokens that looked like this:

The one at the bottom even got a pelvic bone added, which I used green stuff to meld with the torso:

Is it realistic? Probably not. Do I mind? Also probably not.

They then got a quick and dirty paint job, all pale skin and copious globs of TCR, and they were ready for their first outing in the frozen city:

Doeskins of which, I also painted up these tents from Renedra:

A quick grubby paint job, with plenty of sponging and drybrushing to try and make them look nice and textured and worn, but isn’t really worth a separate blog post of their own. I’m torn on whether I should go back and black line some of the creases - I still have the campfire piece to paint, so it may still happen. Good enough to use in a game already at this point though!

What else is happening? I entered a competition hosted by Wargames Illustrated, and won a copy of the book Assassins and Templars:

Handy, as I’m currently very tempted by some Third Crusade gaming (more on that in a future post, I hope).

Finally, the family D&D game has restarted after five months away, with a short after school session:

The party are rushing back to Phandalin in response to a message received by sending stone (the ringing sound for which is the sound of an old school Nokia vibrating on a table, thanks YouTube for fulfilling my weirdest sound effect needs) when they come across something unusual - someone seems to have set up checkpoints across the road, but there is no one to be seen… alive, that is (although I had to remove the corpse tokens from the board, as they were grossing my daughter out). ‘We should be careful, it’s probably an ambush’ my wife’s character warns, as the Dragonborn Paladin played by our son sprints headlong at the nearest pile of crates…

Zomtober 2025 week 4: back on theme

 For the final week of this year’s Zomtober, we’re back on theme with some Napoleonic zombies:

Perry bodies with Wargames Atlantic bits, I made a drummer mostly because the idea of a zombie with a massive drum strapped to it struck me as funny. I used a piece from the Elite Companies box to make the zombie lurching forward, arms outstretched, and was pleasantly surprised at how good it ended up looking. 

Although these conversions are basically compulsory for anyone playing Silver Bayonet, when I initially started my project I wasn’t going to make any, as I figured I already had plenty of generic zombies painted that I could use, but once again I was tempted by the number of different hats on the Wargames Atlantic zombies sprue!

Here’s the back too, as ever. The main benefit about painting zombies is that you can get pretty scrappy and messy and they still look good, I’m going to have to really focus up when I get back to painting things that aren’t the walking dead!

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

30 vs 247 = -217

Excitingly, Zomtober has actually doubled my painting output year to date! My miniature storage boxes are somewhat difficult to access at the moment though, so everything I’ve painted since we moved in are currently stood on the board game shelves:

What’s next? Warriors of Athena (now officially announced) has been my focus since the summer (although that has mainly shown itself via the medium of ordering miniatures rather than finishing painting anything), so that’s what’s next up on my painting tile. On the other hand, as is often the way, I’m fighting the urge to start a new project - a chain of events and ideas have left me fighting the urge to start a project set during the Third Crusade, so watch this space…

Zomtober 2025 week 3: a brief diversion…

 Moving away slightly from the Silver Bayonet theme this week, I present a zombie cowboy:

Apologies for the picture being so dark on the face, this was hurriedly taken this morning while it was starting to rain! Here’s a WIP pic from last night that I sent a buddy that proves that I painted the face:

This is an odd entry this month, as I have literally no use for a zombie cowboy (although I do own a copy of Dracula’s America), but it was one of those times where inspiration struck while converting some other zombies, as the Wargames Atlantic heads with cowboy hats were so cool I couldn’t resist! The rest of him is straight Great Escape Games Gunfighter, which are such beautiful clean sculpts that they are a real pleasure to paint!

I also painted the back too, as is traditional.

To keep things on the Silver Bayonet theme though, I also painted this Ghostly Norman Horseman:

One of the nice things about reaching an age and having been in the hobby for a while is that I’ve hit the point where if inspiration strikes me, I’ve probably got something in the backlog that would be suitable (which is handy, as otherwise I’ll order new miniatures, and that initial rush of enthusiasm may well have waned by the time they get here). This singular knight, for example, was thrown in during a trade made on the Lead Adventure Forum at least fifteen years ago, if I recall correctly.

Here’s the other side. He’s come out a little bit chalky (my pot of GW white is basically a globby brick at this point), but done is done, and he’ll look snazzy enough on the table if I ever get round to finishing my Silver Bayonet warband. You’d think this is a three step paint job, but as ever, I made things more complicated than usual by drybrushing several successively lighter layers onto the grey base coat in the hopes that would then show through the ghostly layer, but in hindsight I probably would have gotten much the same result just washing it onto a flat base coat, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. 

Finishing these two miniatures brings the Tally to:

27 vs 247 = -220

Next - more zombies!

Zomtober 2025 week 2: roamin’ remains

 Roaming, like Roman, right?

Another themed offering for Zomtober, this time some zombified romans:

I know, technically they’re meant to be skeletal Romans, but this is what I’ve got.

Like last week’s Vikings, they’re a mashup between some Warlord veteran sprues (handily, they come with campaign worn and battered equipment) and a mix of bits from the Wargames Atlantic zombie sprue and the Frostgrave Cultists. Some parts are straight swaps, while others got spliced to attach zombie arms to Roman shoulder pads. Yes, I know, the Centurion’s sword isn’t historical, but I figured that it would help him stand out a bit more on the table. 

I’d planned to do a few more figures with shields, but didn’t get round to it, which is probably for the best as putting the aged transfer onto the one I had was a nightmare last night. I’m not sure if it was an old transfer, a bad transfer, or just the fact that I only know where my Micro Set is (the Sol is probably somewhere in a bad in the garage), but it wasn’t plain sailing. There were white edges, clear bits that weren’t looking very clear, and one side that kept lifting, but with some cunning repainting, judicious application of varnish to try and stick it together, and them some hefty (perhaps too hefty) weathering, it looks just about palatable, which is the low bar that I shoot for. Speaking of a low bar, don’t look too closely at their glowing eyes, they’re a lot better looking at arms length I promise.

Here’s the back too! Just about visible is the one Roman where I cut off a leg and twisted it to give that classic dragging leg zombie look (which I think was a tip in a Peachy Tips video), but for ease and speed I skipped it on the rest, and I think they look just fine.

Painting these brings the Tally to:

25 vs 247 = -222

Now, if I was a smart guy, I’d have rationed these out and posted one a week to hit the Zomtober target of weekly posts, but that’s not how I roll - and to be frank, I’m also quite enjoying that I’m well on the way to doubling my total painted for the year so far in just one month… Next: more zombies, I hope!

Zomtober 2025 week 1: historical edition

Well, to a certain degree of historical!

With the release of the latest Silver Bayonet expansion featuring the rise of undead from Britain’s history, I figured that was the perfect prompt for a themed Zomtober this year, so I present my first offering, some zombie vikings:

They’re made from a mashup of Gripping Beast vikings, Wargames Atlantic zombies and Frostgrave  cultist parts (an idea shamelessly stolen from someone else on a Facebook group, as I’d forgotten that they had some nice undead bits). Some feature straight part swaps, others have had parts spliced from two sprues to make it look like there’s a zombie arm wearing armour, for example. If I were to do it again, I’d probably splice all of the arms, as the ones without chainmail on one arm look a little uneven, but it’s not so jarring that I wouldn’t use them in a game. 

Looking at these pictures as I write this post, I realise you can’t really see the shield, which is probably for the best - I went a little overboard weathering it (and the sword, for that matter), and so had to go back and freshen them up a little first thing this morning before everyone else in the house got up. 

With regards to the Silver Bayonet, these guys are likely to stand in for quite a few enemy types in the new book (Danish, Norwegian, and even Scott potentially), as I received my book after I placed an order for some sprues, and if I’d had it before I would have probably ordered up some generic dark ages types to zombiefy! On the other hand, I already have those nice generic zombies that Gripping Beast sell painted up, so I can probably cover most bases between them all. I even used the same glowing eye colour on these ones too, so I could pretend that I’d planned that all along!

Painting these (as well as bringing an end to my months long painting drought) brings the Tally to:

19 vs 247 = -228

Next: more zombies, hopefully!

Oozy like Sunday morning…

Once again necessity for the family D&D game has steered my output, with the possibility of needing an Ochre Jelly in the near future:

Having seen how much it would cost to buy an official mini, I set out to make my own. Especially since if an Ochre Jelly suffers slashing or light ing damage, it splits into two smaller jellies (and theoretically if it gets hit again could then split into even smaller jellies!), so I’d need multiple miniatures. Years back, I’d planned to make a gelatinous cube using a hot glue gun, and a few YouTube videos seemed to suggest that this was a viable plan. So, I dug out my trusty glue gun, and traced around the various bases that I wanted slimes for to use as a template:

Then it was a case of gooping an appropriately sized glob of hot glue onto the template, and then desperately flipping it round to let gravity pull it into various shapes to look like it was reaching out an oozy tendril towards a hapless adventurer:

I had a ramekin of cold water on hand so that I could quickly set any results that I found particularly pleasing. With a lot of trial and error (and managing to burn the palm of my hand as I reflexively caught a blob of hot glue that I had allowed to drip too much towards the kitchen counter), and in some cases additional layers of glue, I had my five ooze miniatures. 

I made them on greaseproof paper rather than straight onto a base to give myself some room for error, and figured that I’d be able to glue them, with their nice flat bottoms, straight onto a painted base:

Obviously that looked awful, so I bit the bullet and applied a generous dose of hot glue to the bottom of each of them and smooshed it onto the painted base, so they actually looked like they were on it. The first attempt I was a bit timid, and ended up ripping a chunk of painted sand, but even more hot glue fixed that and you wouldn’t actually be able to tell if I hadn’t told you now, so I’d consider that a roaring success.

Then, it was time to paint them. Worrying that it might not take paint well, and I might ruin what I’d achieved so far, I quickly knocked up another mini slime to test out paint on:

And it came out looking like this, which I was very pleased with!

That’s a coat of the old GW Casandora Shade, and came out looking great - it’s definitively yellow, but still remains translucent and so looks nicely oozy.

Here’s a family picture of all of them, which due to their relatively low profiles are fairly hard to get a good picture of:

The biggest one is on a 50mm base, with the medium on a 25 and the smallest on a 20. 

Here they are from side on, to try and show their oozy lunging:

And from above, just because:

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

22 vs 147 = -125

And also updates the Monstrous Alphabet:

A is for
B is for Bullywug
C is for Carrion Crawler
D is for
E is for Elemental (More than one)
F is for Flameskull
G is for Goblin
H is for
I is for
J is for
K is for
L is for Lich
M is for Mind Flayer, Myconid, Mummy, Manticore
N is for
O is for Owlbear
P is for Purple Worm
Q is for
R is for Rust Monster
S is for Shambling Mound, Scarecrow, Skeleton
T is for Thri-Kreen
U is for
V is for
W is for Wraith
X is for
Y is for
Z is for Zombie

I’m also tempted to make some more in different colours that can also double as vapour snakes for Frostgrave. Not an original idea I know, but I’ve really come around on it now…

Back at work this week (and working further afield than usual, so deathly tired by the evening), so this is the end of this current streak of productivity!

On the family D&D front, we’ve now finished Dragons of Stormwreck Isle - they’ve killed their first dragon, and my youngest’s response was to ask if he could carve it’s heart out, so I guess he’s taken to the stereotype fairly well. They’ve had some quest hooks exposited to them, with the plan being to run a mash-up of Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver, but first they were bequeathed the deed to a keep, and need to clear it out so that they can claim their prize…

Doctor something, I presume?

This week I’ve finished another model for my Silver Bayonet unit:

A Doctor, converted from a Perry British Command figure, with some Frostgrave accessories. The unit is themed around vampire hunting, so his medical kit is mostly weird doodads in a sack on his back rather than anything more traditional. 

I imagine he’s called something like John Fotherington-Smythe, and is also a survivor of the massacre that led the Captain on their quest for vengeance. 

Painting wise, there are so many things that I’m looking at in the pictures that I could have done differently, like the fire on the torch and the back of his jacket, but I think he’s fine enough to play with (and the rest of the minis in the painting queue aren’t getting any more painted if I spend any longer on him!)

Painting him brings the Tally to:

10 vs 147 = -137

I’ve definitely got enough finished to use the Unit in co-op Silver Bayonet play, but I need to decide what else to paint for solo or versus play. Conventional wisdom suggests a couple of mooks to up the numbers, but there are so many cool options in the rulebook that I’m tempted by something more esoteric…

A beardy lad with a big hammer…

Finished last week around the same time as the pair of werewolves from my previous post but only getting posted now is a converted Sapper for my Silver Bayonet Unit:

A beardy lad with a big hammer indeed. I imagine he’s a no-nonsense Scot who survived a vampire attack with the unit’s leader, and ever since has been seconded to him to open doors, as it were.

Terrible photos again due to the lack of natural light, but you get the gist.

He’s made of mostly Perry bits, with a Napoleonic British Command body combined with the hammer wielding arms of an Agincourt archer, a Frostgrave beardy head (as Sappers were apparently allowed to have beards, so I figured that mine should too). The musket on his pack had a hand shaved off of it so that it could be stowed, and although I had originally planned to turn the hammer into an axe (which seems to be the default equipment for most sappers) the idea of a chap wading into a fight with a vampire swinging a massive hammer was too funny to ignore. I haven’t yet selected his special equipment, maybe the hammer is silver, and so good for bashing in monsters but less useful at being used as a… well, a hammer.

For his apron (essential fashion for every Sapper, practical and stylish) I’d originally planned to copy the detail of an existing sculpt, so as to give some nice folds and whatnot without having to rely on my hamfisted attempts at sculpting, but that came out looking terrible every time so I gave up and just stuck a bit of green stuff on and went at it with clay shapers until I had something that vaguely approximated an apron, and it looks… fine, I guess.

Painting him brings the Tally to:

4 vs 14 = -10

Those numbers are a little different to last week, I hear you cry? That’s because I nipped into GW and built a free ghoul:

I was never entirely sold on the ‘new-style’ GW ghouls (‘new-style’ in this case actually meaning ‘released in the last twenty years’ I believe), but in hand they’re actually quite nice, and I might like some more of them at some point…

I also spotted that Arcane Models and Scenery are having a closing down sale (as the owner is retiring), and despite my usual ‘no purchases between Salute and Christmas to save up all my hobby funds for one big splurge’ rule I couldn’t help but treat myself to a few heavily discounted packs of Artizan Alamo minis:

The Alamo obsession seemingly continues unabated, but more on that in a future post…

I also got my copy of the new Frostgrave book Mortal Enemies this week, and set about rolling up a mortal enemy for Tim the Necromancer, which has been interesting, and set me scrabbling through my drawers of unopened miniature blisters when I realised I had the perfect miniature for what I had rolled…

Other than that, I’ve been prepping some VSF minis for an upcoming Alien Safari rule set designed by Titus Painting on instagram, we’ve ordered the minis for the children to paint for their D&D characters (next session this afternoon hopefully, not at my suggestion I might add), and even finished my next Silver Bayonet conversion:

So surprisingly busy on the miniatures front! Now I just need to paint some more! And prep some more. And convert some weird aliens out of kinder egg toys and my bits box…

Zomtober 2023 Week 5

And so Zomtober 2023 comes to a close, this week with two zombies:

Here’s a slightly different angle of the chap on the right, as it’s a little tricky to see what he’s doing from head on:

And here they are from the back, where you can see that they are painted in the livery of the two provinces that the Empire troops come from in Zombieslayer, Talabecland and Reikland:

Annoyingly in the notes that I took during my reread of the novel, I noted down the colour schemes, but not the names of the provinces, assuming that I’d just remember, which obviously I couldn’t when I went to look up some painting references! Luckily I was able to reverse engineer ‘Talabecland’ from ‘mustard and burgundy’…

This pair of conversions came about from me having a root around my bits box and pulling out a couple of old starter set Empire spearmen (from a starter set that I never owned, but that’s not the focus of this). Looking at the armour on one, I wondered if I could bisect him across the waist, and then Frankenstein him with zombie bits to make two Empire zombies. Which started like this:

And ended like this:

As I started cutting, I realised that the spearman’s front and rear plate armour were not the same lengths, so rather than a straightforward straight cut, there was a certain amount of knife angling, and then rebuilding waistlines with green stuff, which is pleasingly unobtrusive on the finished model. I also sanded down a zombie head to fit the hat on at a jaunty angle, since just because your guts are hanging out not doesn’t mean you don’t want to feel pretty right?

Painting this pair brings the Tally to:

33 vs 112 = -79

I did originally have plans for a bigger finish than just ‘two zombies’, but I kept getting outbid on minotaurs on eBay, and spending most of last week in Germany didn’t leave me enough time to work on the zombie wyvern conversion that I’ve had planned since starting this project…

After two Zomtobers, my zombie regiment so far looks like this:

8 more and it’s a legal unit! Although you always need more zombies…