Monthly Archives: April 2020

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy, Painting

Dogs & Cats Living Together

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(Or, The Workbench This Week, 12 April 2020, also known as the 43rd of Marprilay, Blursday the Somethingth of Pandemic)

Strange times, faithful readers. Strange and stressful, and one of my stress responses is to flit from project to project, starting things and then flitting off before they get very far.

This long Easter weekend, though, I’ve been nudging myself to actually move a few things noticeably closer to actual completion. The first small sign of this is the three critters below, two cats (from Eureka, I think) and a Reaper War Dog finally moved along to the flocking-and-base-detailing stages.

28mm dog and two cats
Two housecats and a war dog. Click for larger.

The cats have been on the edges of my painting table for almost exactly five years now, as my email archives tell me I made the Eureka USA order for them (and other stuff) back in March 2015. There’s another two of them somewhere in the “nominally in progress” mountain somewhere, but this white cat and the orange tabby will have to do for now.

No idea how they’ll be used in games yet… maybe I’ll come up with a Pulp Alley games that involves chasing cats around a quaint English village looking for a clue one of them has attached to their collar. No gunfire, you’ll scare the cats into hiding!

the workbench this week, April 2020
The rest of the workbench. L to R: ECW cav, Renedra building, Frostgrave and ECW plastics, the critters, werewolves, and such! Click for larger.

So what else is on the rest of the workbench, hopefully lurching closer to completion? A whole mix of stuff (surprise…)! I’m quite please with the progress I’ve made on the nice little Renedra Wattle & Daub Outbuilding, some long-neglected ECW cuirassier are seeing basing progress, I’ve been building some Frostgrave wizards and soliders as mentioned in my last post, and the whole mess of werewolves (over on the far right of the photo above) are meandering onward.

Stay home, stay safe, attempt to stay sane, and I hope you and yours are well.

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy

Dogs With Guns

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OK, technically dog-men or gnolls with guns. Firelocks, if we want to be really technical.

I started with Frostgrave Gnolls from North Star Figures, having picked up a single sprue frame of gnolls (five of them) from Brigade Games, the North American distributor.

The firelocks are leftovers from the Warlord Games Firelock Storming Party; each figure in that set comes with two complete sets of arms + firelock so you wind up with lots of extra guns.

The gnolls are wider across the shoulders than the Warlord humans, and have longer arms, so I cut at the wrists and re-glued.

gnolls with guns
Gnolls with guns. See text for details. Click for larger.

I’ve now assembled all five gnolls. The leftmost gnoll has a Warlord cavalry sword in one hand, and a cavalry carbine in the other; next is a gnoll with a firelock and an infantry sword at his hip; the middle gnoll is build straight from North Star parts, waving his massive ancestral sword overhead (that might get trimmed down a bit, it really is over the top massive…); fourth along is another firelock gnoll, and finally on the far right a gnoll who’s going to get yelled at by his sergeant for carrying his firelock in such a sloppy way while advancing with a large dagger in his other hand.

I might yet buy an entire box of these guys and do up more units, but for now they’re a fun gunpowder fantasy addition to a game. In Pikeman’s Lament terms they’d either be a Forlorn Hope or Clansmen, depending on your opinion of their actual quality, or possibly Commanded Shot given the generally high level of equipment they’re carrying. In the “English Civil War + magic” game universe I’m slowly developing I suspect gnoll troops occupy the same sort of niche as Irish troops seem to have, being treated as semi-disposable shock troops for the most part.

I’ve got a bunch of work with greenstuff on these guys before they’re going to be ready for painting, but given the current lockdown/physical distancing requirements of our global pandemic situation I don’t suppose there’s any hurry to get them onto the table.

Stay home, stay safe, stay healthy, stay sane, and try to get some hobby time in as your stress levels allow!