Category Archives: Fantasy

Posts on fantasy gaming using the Fantasy Rules 2nd Ed. and Hordes of the Things rules.

Fantasy, Terrain

Building some modular fantasy city tiles

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For the past year I’ve been building some modular fantasy/medieval city tiles for our Sellswords and Guilders games. It has been a long process of building as I’ve chosen the hardest method possible – laying the cut foam stones individually. But I finally have a full 2′ x 2′ square of them done. The impetus this time was our local move into Mordheim and yet another competition – this time the quarterly painting competition on Bloodbeard’s Garage Discord, which had a theme of “unfinished”. Talk about the ultimate un never finished project!

Building the tiles

As with my other modular boards, these are all based on 3D printed Open Lock tiles. I then used my Proxxon hot wire cutter to cut a few different sizes of tiles. I tested two initially: 1/8″ and 1/4″. Ultimately, I liked the look of 1/8″ (as did my wife, but she thought it was nuts).

Test tiles for my modular city
First test tiles

I also made a 2nd change early on – for the sidewalk I moved from just 1/4″ cubes to a mixture of 1/2″ squares, 1/2″ by 1/4″ rectangles and 1/4″ cubes, always tessalated so that no two of the same touched fully on their long side.

Original style in the upper right, new style in the other pieces

After a lot of work, I had bits and pieces of a table, but certainly nothing enough for even a 3’x3′ (our standard board size). After a hiatus, I got moving again. I also switched glues – from standard PVA to Aleene’s Tacky, which sped up production. So I planned out my initial 2′ x 2′ planned out (well, sort of, I tweaked it almost immediately):

Initial layout
2nd layout
Final layout

One of the pieces I’m most proud of is the curved road section. I was (w)racking my brain to figure out how to make it look good, thinking I was going to have draw lines at angles, but then I realized I could just lay the stones outward from the inner curve.

Outer curbs laid
Fully laid
Painted but not yet dirty

And then, a few (a small number, really) of hours later, I was finished tiling:

Construction done

Painting

For painting, I started simple – a coat of craft black paint mixed with white glue (and a bit of wetting agent to make it flow better), and then airbrushed on some thinned Vallejo Black Surface Primer (a hateful paint if I’ve ever used one).

The first black primer, to tie to all together
Taping the edges prior to painting

I then re-watched RP Archive’s inspiring city tile video again and decided to follow his painting and weathering method as much as possible. I highly recommend it – it certainly inspired me in my project.

To start the colour, I airbrushed a neutral grey (Demco Artist acrylic) onto the cobblestones and linen (Folkart craft paint) onto the sidewalks. This is also when I noticed I’d left one 1″ x 3″ piece in the painting box. Oops.

Grey cobblestone base layer (with new tiles in the upper right)
Whole board painted

Next up I highlighted some of the cobblestones with a dark grey (Army Painter Gravelord Grey Speed Paint) and light grey (Reaper Paint Misty Grey mixed with a satin glazing medium). I wasn’t too fussed about painting exactly here – there were multiple additional layers of paint and weathering coming to hide any issues.

With highlighted cobblestones
Only cobblestones, not sidewalk, were highlighted

And then a white dry brush across the whole thing:

To finish off painting, I did a black-brown wash. Unlike RP Archive, I did it a bit heavier in pigment – 6 drops of carbon black, 3-4 of burnt umber and 3-4 of sepia in 50ml (all were Liquitex acrylic Inks). It took ~100ml to coat the full 2′ x 2′ board.

Washed tiles on the left, unwashed on the right

And then we get onto dirt. Here I also differed slightly from RP Archive. I had a dark brown grout, so I mixed it 50/50 with dirt, which I sieved with a 1/4″ chicken wire, then baked for a few hours and then sieved a second time in an old tea strainer. This left me with a very fine powder mixture of dirt/grout.

To apply the dirt, I tried the method he suggested in his video but found it didn’t work for me. So I changed it up:

  1. Sprinkle on dry
  2. Spray lightly with watered PVA + wetting agent
  3. Use my fingers to smear the damp mixture around the tile
  4. Dip my hand in water, thoroughly soak the tile
  5. Use a towel to clean off the tile
  6. Repeat 4 and 5 until I was happy with the level of dirt

I left a fair amount of dirt on the cobblestones, especially in the corners and in deeper pockets, and almost none on the sidewalk pieces. I found the grout and dirt dried almost instantly, so by the time I was finished all the tiles, they were dry enough to take outside and soak in watered PVA to seal them in. I’m going to have to do a 2nd coat, as some of the dirt is still a bit loose.

Comparing dirty (on left) with just painted (on right)
Very dirty process of dirty-ing up the tiles
Dirty tiles 1
Dirty tiles 2
Dirty tiles 3

Lastly, I had punched a bunch of leaves using an AliExpress leaf punch (non-affiliate link – I used the 05 colour). I dried some straight and soaked some in glycerin first, then dried. I found the glycerin ones were slightly translucent and showed the tile through them, so I’ll use them for something else (I’m going to try dyeing with inks and fabric dye next). Note that some of the colours were lost as they were dried, which was a bit unfortunate but expected.

Punching leaves from leaves.

I glued them down on the edges where leaves would naturally blow to, a truly finnicky process as the dried leaves were quite stiff. I tried soaking them in watered down PVA, but that didn’t seem to help – although I suspect I could rehydrate them by soaking them overnight. Some definitely will still lift (and have), but they are trivial to replace.

Leaves glued in the corners

Painting the Statues

For the statues, I painted them fairly simply. They were both on foam plinths or backgrounds. They were base-coated along with the tiles.

The bleeding eyes girl was quite simple – dry brush various greys on her and her plinth, along with some thinned greys for the streaks. Her eyes are painted with Reaper Fresh Blood.

For the Ganesh statue, I painted the statue itself with Reaper Old Bronze and then found Army Painter’s Verdigris Technical Paint, which I applied in a couple of coats. It works, but honestly this paint job is a bit simple and for larger statues I’d want to follow something like Garden of Hecate’s excellent tutorial. For the stone backing, I tried some stippling and washes, but ultimately went with sponged on greys and whites.

The Tree

The tree is fairly simple – a bunch of pipe-cleaners twisted up and then melted, with a texture paint (in my case, a DIY texture paste of brown paint + sawdust). It isn’t done, but eventually am going to try and match some of the look here:

Finished Look

And just like that, this 2′ x 2′ set of tiles was done.

The finished tiles

But of course, I need a lot more, especially if I want to get a full 4′ x 4′ Mordheim table done. So the next set is already underway:

Well, maybe not. The next set already underway, aided by Halloween candy.
English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy, Reviews

Monsters abound: a review of Devilry Afoot co-op horror gunpowder skirmish

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We love a good coop skirmish game, playing a lot of Sellswords & Spellslingers and dabbling in quite a few other games. And we both love gunpowder fantasy, so the mixture of the two, with a horror twist in Devilry Afoot was too good to pass up.

What is Devilry Afoot? Let’s let the author introduce it:

Devilry Afoot (2024) is a folk horror monster-hunting handbook for tabletop skirmishes.

Set during the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion, Devilry Afoot pits flawed human heroes, controlled by one or more players, against the creatures of the night whose actions are randomly determined by the game’s easy-to-use mechanics.

Designed for solo and co-operative play, the RPG-lite character customisation, scenario driven narratives, and unpredictable monsters combine to ensure that no two games are ever the same.

Wargames Vault description

We played two scenarios: The Dance Macabre and Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. Both were brutally hard, starting off deceptively easy. All in all, the whole two games took about 3 hours, including creating characters.

Dance Macabre

Your goal is to stop a graveyard from spawning revenants, of which only a single one starts on the table (but many more spawn in quickly). As this was our first game, we only took 3 characters (1 each).

We quickly learned that although only two monsters started on the board, bad dice luck in 1st turn by Sean had his follower run off from being scared by the spectre & his character does nothing with poor activation rolls.

The objective was simple enough, get a character into the graveyard, say scripture 3 times. But given new revenants spawned on a 1, 2 or 3 on their movement or fight rolls, we were quickly swarmed under. One after another of us went down, until only Sean was standing, and then it was over.

We decided to roll Out of Action rolls anyway, with both Sean and Brian rolling under 3 – dead – and me rolling barely better – a 4 – for Scholar Smthye to acquire a leg injury.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Our second game we took a bit more muscle – 2 character each (for 6 characters), with Sean and Brian both bringing followers. Here the werewolves appear in a pack of innocents on turn one.

Werewolves were a bit counter-intuitive (turn from werewolves to human to attack, etc). We also had a 3rd werewolf join us – each character has a secret and one of Sean’s had bitten by a werewolf. Which activates if you roll double 1s on their activation. Sean dutifully did so, continuing his dice luck and it appeared right in the back, naturally.

We also had a character run off from the monster’s intimidate check, ironically my Goodwife Smthye who had a bonus to not running away.

Overall thoughts

Overall we all quite like it. Definitely will play again – here’s a few more detailed thoughts:

Good

What did we like?

  • Activation system was quite fun – randomness as you draw chits out of a bag for monsters, innocents, & PCs, but PCs still require an activation roll like Sellswords or SOBAH to actually do something
  • Monster and game flavour was great – it really captured the feel of the late medieval/early renaissance ignorance of the world and fear of “things that go bump in the night”
  • The period flavour of “Cite Scripture” as a PC action, which repels monsters, and the fact that most monsters will (randomly) do things other than mindlessly run forward to attack means that it can be more than just a pure brawl, which is always great.
  • A permanent injury table is always fun. We have just started playing Mordheim, which has a similar rule. For us, we had two deaths, but my Scholar Smthye gave me a great roleplaying hook for my 2nd character, as his leg injury meant clearly his wife needed to follow along and make sure he didn’t get up to trouble in his foolishness
  • Small board size – only 2’x2′ allows focused gameplay and means less terrain to build
  • Small model count – similarly, it had a very small model count. We had less than 10 figures in the first game, and less than 20 in the second. Makes getting into it quite easy.

Change?

  • Cards instead of chits – rather than drawing from a bag, flipping over cards is faster. Plus you can do some amazing period-style activation cards with illustrated pictures of the monsters

What about Sellwords & Spellslingers?

Could you retrofit Sellswords to use this? Absolutely – switch secrets to negative traits, double monster stats to create a DL, add monster activation rules. The cards would require more work, but that is doable. I may do this at some point, but let’s see.

Final thoughts

Would we recommend? Yes, 100%. It is a good price (~ $10 CAD). Pick it up today at Wargames Vault.

Fantasy, Inspiration

The Workbench This Weekend, 23 July 2024

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This weekend I have mostly been raising the dead! A while ago Corey and I split two boxes of Northstar Oathmark skeletons and revenants and I’ve finally got all of mine assembled. We’d previously split another box of skeletons, so this gives me a good size horde of angry undead and when combined with Corey’s (eventual) horde it will grow to truly terrifying size!

The Oathmark plastic figures are nicely proportioned, clean sculpts, and clean casts. I mixed some GW skull box and Frostgrave extras into a few figures for variety, and then used some leftover bits to create more weird undead constructs!

Three regular skeletons and a necromantic construct mixing two Oathmark skeleton bodies, a bunch of limbs, and some GW skull box skullz.
First five revenants, all straight from the Oathmark box.
The large necromatic construct in all it’s weird shambling multi-limbed glory! I don’t have particular rules in mind for this thing, I just wanted to build something cool and weird. We’ll house-rule it once it hits the table.
Necromatic construct from another side.
Left, a necromatic totem of some sort – broken weapons and skulls. The other two bases I’m calling “scuttlers” – little necromatic constructs of spare limbs and skulls. Scouts and messengers for an undead force, maybe? Weird little dungeon nuisances? Both?
An in-progress photo of the horde, before finishing the last couple sprues of skeletons and revenants or the scuttlers. The ghoul is a Games Workshop freebie from earlier this year, and really quite a cool little figure.
The final horde!

Total score is thirteen skeletons (surely a lucky number for the undead!), fifteen revenants, five scuttlers, one large necromatic construct, one ghoul, and one necromatic totem/midden terrain piece or objective. And enough leftover bits to make more scuttlers and more totems, if I want.

Finishing up the bases with greenstuff is next, then primer and paint. I did up the previous batch of skeletons in a fairly simple paint scheme which I’ll be copying for these skeletons, and I’ll do something similar but not quite identical for the revenants – thinking they need some purple or green to set them off against the black/red/bronze theme of the skeletons.

After that I clearly need a necromancer and his immediate entourage to command this horde! No concrete plans for that yet but we shall see…

Fantasy, Reviews

Death in the Dungeon – a quick review for a quick game

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Looking for something new to try, Sean and I played a little competitive dungeon crawling in the form of Death in the Dungeon, a quick-play zine-format brawler from Crushpop Creations that came out a few years ago. We both quite enjoyed our 3 quick games over 2 hours, but both felt it needed a bit more.

The game is quite small – only 34 pages that are 5.5″ by 8.5″ in size – so by its nature cannot cover a lot of game. But you get the basics – your PCs have a few stats – Movement, Toughness, Armour and Damage. With 6 races, 6 classes, 3 types of armour and 7 weapons, plus a dozen spells, there is definitely room for tactical variety here.

Stats are based on a d4 through d12 dice system – with the core mechanic of being Power Level (from Class ) vs Toughness (from Armour). Ties go in the attackers favour, which was different (and quite deadly for me, as it happened). Initiative uses a pooled dice of the active PCs Power Level to determine, which was quite a clever mechanic.

Our first game we built to 75 gold and I fielded 3 characters to Sean’s 2 – I had a Human Knight, an Orc Barbarian and a Human Sorcerer (who had no weapons or armour, this was bad). Sean had a Knight and a Barbarian. And he destroyed me in two different games – one a straight fight and one with endless skeletons spawning.

Many, many skeletons kept my team busy with Sean eventually did for it, one member at a time.

Our third game I managed to win, mostly by taking a pair of long-bow equipped mouselings running as Dwarves and a Dwarf barbarian. Ranged without cover is almost always deadly and in this game it was too.

Overall, it was a fun little game. But it really doesn’t lend itself well to just two people playing – there just wasn’t enough chaos. Both Sean and I felt that with 3 or 4, that would have felt right. Given the time it took to run a game, even doubling this to 1 hour was totally doable.

One key challenge with the small page count is the lack of clarity you have. For example, my initial sorcerer had no weapons or armour. Was this a legal build? Can you drink a potion or loot during combat?

Would we play this again? Maybe if we had more people. The quick setup and play time means a game can be done in very little time, even if you don’t know the rules.

You can get Death in the Dungeon from Wargames Vault for $2.99 USD. It has a number of expansions as well, which I have the free ones.

Fantasy

Joining the Nightwatch to fight endless skeletons

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Our group tried out Patrick Todoroff’s Nightwatch today, a coop fantasy/horror monster hunting skirmish game he published a few years ago. We play a lot of cooperative games, mostly Sellswords & Spellslingers and the new scifi variant I’m working on, so we’re always keen to try something new.

Our First Game

We decided to play the intro scenario set as laid out in the book, which was the big bad or Atrocity, as a necromancer, so lots and lots of skeletons for us. Good thing all three of us have lots of skeletons already. Brian choose a ranged fighter, Sean a melee fighter and myself an alchemist. As we were an odd set (in more ways than one), we ended up with Sean getting a d10 minion to balance the pact Brian and I shared (apparently we ran up a gambling debt together).

The first mission is an escort one – get Derek across the table. Here we bumped into the first challenge, as we couldn’t see exactly what stats Derek was supposed to have. We ended up playing him as having a single free move and nothing else – this did make it an 8 turn game (another challenge, it wasn’t clear to us what the term limit was – it is implied to be 7 turns elsewhere).

Nightwatch begins very quietly. There isn’t a single foe on the table in the first Pact turn. We moved as much as we could given we had to wait for Derek, so that meant the Darkness got lots of turn to spawn. The early turns were fairly easy – we shot or used explosive grenades on foes and got rid of them quite easily.

Brian’s ranged fighter faces off against a bow-wielding skeleton over the graveyard

By turn 3 or 4, it was quite different. The Darkness was now spawning many more skeletons than we could handle in a turn, so out came the smoke grenades. These work wonderfully – any foe inside them moves in a random direction, but this also ended up being a place where some more explanation in the rules would have been nice. it wasn’t clear to us what happened with foes outside the smoke – would they move through it, then randomly once they were in it? And if they moved randomly out of the smoke, would they change direction once out of it to move towards the PCs?

Then the end was coming – one way or the other. Two of us got wounded and that meant we lost our d10 action. Thankfully a pair more smoke bombs and then some flashpowder to get my alchemist free followed by the last explosive grenado my alchemist had.

The end. The PCs and Derek are up in the top corner, about to escape while the hordes close in. Another smoke bomb can be seen in the upper right.

Closing thoughts

Overall, we quite liked the game. It played well and fairly quickly – 2 hours for a game including time to build characters and understand the rules. The core of game is the alternating turns between the PCs (the Pact) and the foes (the Darkness). The second major mechanic is around activations – both PCs and the foes activate worked well too – the PCs get three activation dice (d6, d8 and d10) and use them for their actions looking for successes with a 4+. This gives you some options about what you choose to do.

We rather liked the wounding system – it wasn’t everything to nothing, PCs lose their best actions as they get wounded, all the way down to 3 wounds where they can only move, and then dead at 4 wounds. This meant that PCs degrade naturally, although we never had a PC with more than a single wound.

Sean quite liked the fighting system and how the shield bash and other abilities worked, although we forgot about our guild abilities quite often. The abstract different melee/ranged weapons combinations was an interesting way to cover off many types of weapons without naming them all.

The rulebook is well written, but needed another pass to reorganize and clean up bits. We found ourselves flipping through many pieces to find rules, including some basic stuff like Free Move can be used for reload, which isn’t listed on the quick reference. The author did mention that this was basically a home-brewed system expanded into a commercial product, and as someone who is putting the final touches on a beta for playtesting for a ruleset, I know just how hard this can be.

Sellswords has a nice flow chart for foe action that would be good to incorporate, although the wording around how foes act is quite nice – gives players a flavour for how they are supposed to act, not just as mindless creatures.

We’re definitely going to play at least a few more times, likely through the intro scenario. And I’d definitely recommend others try it out, it does play quickly and well.

You can get Nightwatch on DrivethruRPG for $9.

Fantasy, Painting

The Workbench at the End of the Year (Dec 31 2023)

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A quick look at the workbench right at the ragged end of the year! After not really painting anything for most of the second half of 2023 I rediscovered painting energy in November and have been plowing through a whole bunch of stuff.

The workbench at the end of 2023. Click for larger.

The anklyosaur person is from Fenris Games and is massive – that’s a 60mm base and they hang over every edge. The baggage ogre and little robot are Reaper, as are most of the random humans over on the back left. The sea serpent and big frog are Footsore Miniatures.

Overhead closeup of the current entertainment. Click for larger.

I’ve shown off some WIP photos of the anklyo-person over on BlueSky but they were early, no weapons mounted and painting not quite finished. I’ve got a whole bunch of WIP photos of this figure and will also be taking some good closeups after I finish painting and basing, because I’m really, really pleased with how they’re turning out!

The baggage ogre is just a fun figure, much more interesting than yet another horse and wagon if you need a baggage element for a fantasy game!

Rear view of the anklyo and ogre. Really, really pleased with how the shell of the anklyo turned out! Click for larger.

Hope everyone had good holiday season, and an excellent 2024 as we roll into the New Year!

Fantasy

Adventuring in a dungeon in Sellswords & Spellslingers

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Sellswords & Spellslingers is a fantastic co-op fantasy skirmish game, but it does have one small challenge – it works well for games that take place outside or in large areas, but not so well for a classic dungeon crawl, where bits of the dungeon are revealed as the players explore. So I thought I would set out to design some basic rules for this.

What’s the challenge?

Sellswords biggest challenge comes with how it spawns the foe – continuously and in great volume. This means that if players are in a small space, that is going to get really deadly, really quickly.

Creating a dungeon that gets discovered as you go

Sellwords usually works where you lay the whole board out in the beginning, so I had to create a way to have the dungeon, some foes and a few lost adventurers show up. I used a standard deck of cards and split it up – you’ll see the cards in the shots below. We tried two different versions – the first with 10 terrain pieces + 10 foe cards and then a second version with 6 of each. The second worked much better

So how does it play?

Just as deadly as regular Sellswords. Our second game we took 7 PCs into in, found 2 lost adventurers and still finished the game with nobody alive.

It began quite well. Up until the photo below, we had killed most of the skeletons that had popped up, we’d recovered the lost friendly Goblin (metal figure furthest up the picture) and we’d discovered another lost adventurer (a friendly gnoll), but we has Out of Action behind a pillar in a far room.

Beginning of the game
Near the beginning, as we have got out of the initial corridor and are headed into the linked rooms on the upper left

And then it all started to go downhill. One little group of skeletons – one horde and one ambush, did for 3 characters – two dead outright.

Middle of the game
Right when it all started to go wrong. Sean’s witch leader is down, his archer already dead and my mousling archer about to go down.

After the massive death in the upper left room, death was soon to follow us into the next rooms. Quickly enough my first mousling archer and one of Brian’s were downed. All that remained were two. We did discover the NPC merchant, but he only watched as the skeletons slaughtered us.

And then there were two – Brian’s witch finder and my last mousling – Robin the Good.

And a few turns later, it was all over. Brian’s witch finder was able to revive the friendly Gnoll – Fur Face – but he quickly fell to an ambushing skeleton.

All down, just a short distance from the end.

What’s Next?

Not sure, I’ve got some rules, but I also know that the author Sellswords & Spellslingers has been working on some dungeon crawling, so likely going to wait for that.

As for my hell terrain, it will soon be much more colourful, but that’s a post for another time.

Fantasy, Historicals, Links

Dead Animal Bits, A Kickstarter

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Conversion bits for strange projects can be hard to come by, even these days when high quality plastic figures make kitbashing and bits-finding easier. One of the staples of a certain flavour of folk horror, though, is folks with antlers, either on their helms or straight up growing out of their heads, and nobody has done horns, antlers, and such… yet.

Enter Pete The Wargamer, who has partnered up with Wargames Atlantic to do Dead Animal Bits: Plastic Wargaming Bits as a Kickstarter. As of writing this it’s got about 16 days left to run and is over 2/3rds funded, which is promising for full funding!

Some of the planned bits. Image ganked from the Kickstarter page and cropped.

His campaign video is also over on YouTube and is nicely done, and one sprue will give you enough related bits to do whole units up similarly, which is always nice.

The Dead Animal Bits intro video

I’ve backed for a pouch of bits, 3 full sprues, and I’m really hoping to see this funded and produced so I can get inspired to get back to my weird folk horror 17th C stuff sometime in the new year!

So, if antlers and horns and bones and teeth and feathers and other gribbly conversion bits are an interest, have a look before December 18 2023 and consider backing Dead Animal Bits.

Not a paid endorsement or anything, just one of those chance finds via social media that slots very, very neatly into some of my specialized wargaming interests!

Fantasy, Science Fiction

Cliffside monastery of Sheksha-kah on Halite #galaxy23

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Today we find ourselves on Halite, the namesake planet of the Halite Commonwealth and homeworld of two separate intelligent species – the related lizard-like Qoss and the snake-like Yishk. On Halite is the cliffside monastery of Sheksha-kah, a famous religious centre in the commonwealth and a common retreat location for the wealthy and powerful to avoid unwanted notice or rehabilitate their image.

The Myth of Othaos

Perched high above the seas below on a narrow ledge, the monastery was founded by famous Halite scholar and skeptic turned prophet Othaos. They (neuter gender Qoss) famously boasted that “The gods don’t exist” and lead a group of atheist scholars that were seeking to unseat the orthodoxy.

Legend says (as told by Othaos themselves) that they were on a small boat travelling to Scorzetti when a massive, unseasonable storm suddenly descended upon their little ship. Soon all hope for control was lost as the heavy waves and wind pounded them. For hours the storm raged, pushed them closer and closer to the menacing cliffs they were pushed. Othaos said they prayed to the Goddess Sheksha of the Light Moon (the larger of the two of Halite’s natural satellites) in his time of need.

Othaos’ ship founders in the storm, as the light moon breaks through the clouds (Stable Diffusion)

Shortly after midnight , the Light Moon broke through the clouds and illuminated them, pointing them at a gap in the cliffs. Through that cliff was a small protected beach and stairs up to the ledge high above the seas. Through skillful navigation, the small ship found its way on the beach, nearly swamped.

Othaos promised then and there to build the grandest monastery on Halite, the building that now stands on the ledge to this day. How much of this tale is true is left up to the reader.

Adventure Hooks

As the monastery often hosts the wealthy and powerful who are looking to avoid some public scrutiny or atone for a public failing, the possibilities for adventures include smuggling people or goods out of the monastery, a covert assassination or similar nefarious things. The monastery can only be reached by foot – either up Othaos’ cliffside route or the newer path alongside the cliff. Both are under easy view of the monastery staff at all times, so any party would need excellent skills and some luck to pull off an action. Conversely, if defending the monastery the powerful storms that whip up in the seas below it often prevent easy reinforcements, so if players are defending the monastery, they might need to hold for quite some time with limited resources.

Authors Note: The above is also being rolled into an upcoming Sellswords & Spellslingers source booked tentatively called The Free Cities of the Rift, a Venice-like city in the world of Norindaal

Fantasy, Painting, Reviews

Folk Horror Miniatures

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I tripped over this little Kickstarter earlier in 2022 for a dozen figures inspired by European folklore, Folk Horrors by Ana Polanšćak. They’re very much “things that go bump in the night” weird horror miniatures and I decided to grab them while the KS was still running.

twelve folk horror miniatures - image snagged from Kickstarter
Image snagged from Kickstarter – the twelve miniatures included, all assembled and painted.

Some of them might be humans in costumes (might be!) and some of them really definitely… aren’t. I think I’ll be using these as plot point markers or similar for Pulp Alley-powered weird horror games, either in the not-quite-17th-C gunpowder homebrew setting I’ve been gradually putting together or more conventional early-20th-C pulp horror games. A good creepy alternative to the Cthuloid fishmen and such I already have!

the twelve miniatures all in actual pewter, laid out on a cutting mat for scale.
All twelve figures laid out. The cutting mat is 1 inch/quarter-inch grid squares, for scale.

I’ll get this lot assembled, based, and primed over the next few weeks; painting should be pretty short and sweet if I follow the KS paint scheme!

The figures themselves are nice and clean, minimal mold lines and flash. I have some concerns about attaching the horns on some of the figures and the arms on the one “Bellman”, but thick gel superglue and tiny bit of greenstuff should work OK to keep everything in place!

All twelve figures based and assembled.
The right half – the Bear far right, Death and the two Straw Children across the front, Roga, the Cow, and the Horse across the back, R to L.
Left half – Ooser, Sixhorn, Horse, and Cow across the back L to R, the two Bellmen, Bezub, and the two Straw Children L to R across the front.

Unfortunately with the KS closed I have no idea where you might go to buy yourself these figures. Meridian Miniatures appears not to have their own website, just a fairly inactive Facebook page. Andrew May has a Patreon page and has run a bunch of other Kickstarters, but again, no info about post-KS ordering. Slightly odd – if anyone has links please let me know in comments!