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

02 Wednesday Jul 2025

Posted by in BOYL, OldHammer

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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 in BOYL, OldHammer

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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 It wasn’t just painting – I’m way out of date with following and commenting on other blogs, and I honestly just can’t see me getting caught up with that side of things… Fresh start and all that.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! :-)

Realm of Warcry; Chapter 4 – Beginnings

18 Monday Nov 2024

Posted by in Realm of Warcry

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Greetings Terrans, I trust this finds you well. I’ve been looking forward to putting this post out because it marks the beginning of the end of my Realm of Warcry project… well, sort of.

So far, Chapter 1 has been focused on Tzeentch, and Chapter 2 on Nurgle. Both of those warbands have been expanded, and are both pretty decent sized forces by now. Most recently, I launched Chapter 3, dedicated to Slaanesh, and I certainly have more planned for that warband, but I couldn’t resist kicking off Chapter 4 in parallel… obviously, this one will be dedicated to Khorne.

So, as with all the other Warbands, this one started with a randomly generated champion and 4 rolls on the follower’s table in the Realm of Chaos books… and that’s where things started to get pretty weird…

For the Champion, I rolled a highly unlikely Lizard Man, and his ‘gifts’ were a missing limb, an extra eye, and Chaos Armour. His followers were no less unusual, with 2 Ogres, 11 Humans, 4 Hobgoblins and 5 Snotlings… yeah, Snotlings of Khorne! (I’m already reimagining the pump-wagon idea crossed with a Juggernaut of Khorne… Bloodling Pumpanaut anyone?). I haven’t built the followers as yet, so that will give me something to work on over winter, but I did build the Champ & got him undercoated before the weather turned. Here he is, K’horanak Dark-Star, Champion of Khorne:

He’s based on the newish ‘Seraphon Saurus Scar-Veteran on Aggradon’, who has quite a nice ‘come at me bro’ pose going on. I added some chunky Chaos armour, and I think the legs came from the old Possessed kit (with a slight toe-swap and a tactical rock to get the balance right). The right arm got given a whopping great mace from the Slaves to Darkness kit I think, and I modelled the left arm to be amputated but growing back, (because Lizards?), to reflect the missing limb ‘gift’. That little chaos badge on the right pauldron is his extra eye gift, but I’ve just realised that I forgot to paint it realistically! Don’t worry, I’ll get that fixed :-)

I went back and forth with black, grey and red for the scales and flesh, while the armour is a 3 part affair of steel, bronze and metallic red. The red was thinned Flesh Tearers Red over a gold basecoat if anyone is curious!

And that’s it for now folks, but I do have one last pic that I have really been looking forward to taking – the 4 Champions together!

I’m somewhat annoyed that Scynir is facing the wrong way, but meh – Tzeentch.