The Temple of the Golden Frog & some stuff for Rangers of ShadowDerp

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

Greetings Terrans, welcome back for another lil’ peek into the state of my hobby. First up, I got another couple of fighters done for my upcoming trip to Lustria – fuck knows what they are or where they came from, (comment below if you know!), but they turned up during my lead pile dredge and I thought they could be a good fit as a pirate/merc type (spear), and a native guide type (club):

Even though they have nothing in common, I do think they work bizarrely well as a pair! I went pretty basic on the paint job, still getting my eye in so to speak, but I am pleased with the blending, especially on the skin tone for the club guy.

I also made & painted some weird attacky plants for a Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign that I’m playing through. Like all Joseph McCullough games, the bestiary is mini agnostic, so these homemade jobbies are perfect. The small ones are proxies for ‘Darkroot Vines’, while the bigger one is a ‘Darkroot Plant’:

They were fun to make, and are really just a load of GreenStuff over some dried out vine tendrils I had stored away (y’know, just in case). I built up a bit of detail over a few sessions – fiddly, but certainly nothing complicated or difficult, and I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out. Some washy/blendy Contrast shenanigans were all they needed to get them ready for action.

So that’s it for another post – more Lustrian adventurers to follow.

The Temple of the Golden Frog

18 Wednesday Jun 2025

Posted by Alex in BOYL, OldHammer

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

fantasy, hobby, miniatures, Oldhammer, Painting, warhammer

Greetings Terrans, it feels great to be writing this after a 7 month break from the hobby! I have been up to my neck in studying an MBA, but have now happily finished & that’s it – I solemnly swear to never ever do any academic learning ever again. I actually wrapped things up in April, but I had to wait until last week for the results and I found I had no motivation to do any hobby at all during that time. It wasn’t just painting – I’m way out of date with following and commenting on other blogs, and I honestly just can’t see me getting caught up with that side of things… Fresh start and all that.

Anyway, with all that in mind, I really needed something to get my juices flowing again. Luckily BOYL is around the corner, and Aidan was cooking up a lil’ WFB game and was looking for some 20ish-strong Old World warbands for a trip to Lustria. Aidan always puts on amazing games, so putting my hand up was a no-brainer. I thought about buying some new minis for the occasion, but thought it would be a good idea to raid the mounds of unpainted lead first… I found I had enough assorted Fantasy minis to put together a force. You’ll see over the coming weeks that the group is somewhat eclectic, but I think it’ll all come together in the end. The gist is that a wizard has come to Lustria to raid the Temple of the Golden Frog for some wizardly reason, and has hired a rag-tag group of pirates, natives, trackers and mercenaries to keep his wizardly ass safe in the steamy jungles.

This first group forms the backbone of the warband – mercenary Spearmen of Nuln:

Now, anyone who knows OldHammer knows about the near mythical Spearman of Nuln from the C-series Fighters range… I won’t get into all the background but suffice it to say that the original was unreleased, and so the actual mini is as rare as rocking horse poo… Luckily I had a slack handful of fan sculpts that I assume I picked up at BOYL, though I can’t for the life of me remember who made ’em… (Pop in a comment below if you know please!)

The minis are very much on the nose in terms of capturing that OH vibe – sure, the proportions are crazy and some of the casts are pretty bad, but they just ooze character and joy – they actually remind me a bit of the monopose Nightmare Legion, and that’s no bad thing in my opinion. More importantly, they weren’t a daunting paint job, which is something that I definitely needed to think about after such a long hobby break! Here they are in smaller groups:

I checked the interwebs for suitable colours and a banner design – black, red, yellow and cannon imagery were very much the order of the day. I challenged myself to practice my freehand a bit & while the striped trousers were frustrating, I’m really glad I did them… I’m bloody delighted with that banner!

So that’s it folks – onwards and upwards! :-)

Stargrave Warband – part 3

27 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by Alex in OldHammer, Stargrave

≈ 17 Comments

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I have some more Stargrave crew to share with you today, continuing the theme of using only Bob Olley sculpts. So far I have two versions of the Captain, a First Mate, a ‘Burner’ specialist and a Medic, so that’s the bulk of the heavy firepower and a bit of durability sorted out. The next thing I wanted to do was to make sure that I could contest loot – a vital component of any Joseph McCullough game! However, Stargrave loot differs from Frostgrave or Ghost Archipelago in a couple of significant ways. Firstly, you need to pass a ‘skill’ role to be able to nab any loot… this requires a roll of 14 or more on a D20, so not exactly easy, unless you have particular skills or equipment to access said loot… This is further complicated because loot can be either Physical or Data, so there are two different variables to consider, but both will come up in most scenarios. Luckily, you can hire crewmembers who specialise in either situation by granting +6 to their roll for accessing either Physical loot, (Chiselers or Casecrackers), or +6 for accessing Data, (Hackers or Codebreakers). Chiselers and Hackers are the pistol-packing bargain version of each, and I wanted to include two of each crew type into my starting warband.

First up the Chiselers, Lego-ass and Grimly:

This pair is comprised of an old GW Squat, along with an Alternative Armies ‘Sidhe Clan Female Warrior)’. The Squat (Grimly) is pretty much stock, but I did model a crowbar in his right hand. The female clan warrior was a more extensive conversion, with her shield getting turned into some kind of hand mounted drill thing, some techy doodabs round back, and her sling getting swapped for an old Autopistol. In terms of painting, this pair follow the scheme already laid down earlier in the project. One obvious variance is the blue skin tone used on Lego-Ass, no reason in particular, I just thought it’d be nice to have a more unusual looking crew member, be they mutant or alien.

Next we have a pair of Hackers – Blunder and Blix (with the cap):

This pair are both from the ‘Malig Goblinoid Infantry’ faction from ‘The Ion Age’ range. There wasn’t too much conversion work needed here, but I did sculpt on some data pads to suggest tools for hacking. Again, the painting really followed the same formula as the rest of the crew, though I did roll with the whole Goblinoid look here.

As a final note on this update, I also prepped some Physical and Data loot terrain: