Common Goblins

In spite of the name the common goblin is the scourge of many a fantasy realm.  I though it was fitting to muse about the GW version which may be the most common goblin of all!

After painting the horde of Night Goblins from The Battle of Skull Pass I found some loose sprues of the goblins that were included in the WFB 4th edition starter set.

These goblins were produced in huge numbers and the game shop I owned at that time ended up buying these goblins back from some of the more frugal customers so they could get the rules at a better price. I then sold these as loose sprues for a dollar per sprue or about 25 cents a gobbo alongside the candy bars and chips at the checkout. Everybody won and this pile of gobbos... 12 archers and a block of 48 spear... represent all that is left from those broken up starter boxes.  Pretty good rate of resale!

I think of these as "Common Goblins" not only because they don't have all the special effects that make the Night Goblins or Forest Goblins so dangerous but also, in no small part, because this whole pile consists of exactly 2 sculpts... one archer and one spear... and an assortment of shield designs.

These goblins represented the worst of what the hard plastic revolution had to offer.  Monoblock and conventionally sculpted for regular metal casting they took no advantage of the many features that have made hard plastics so popular in the decades since these gobbos made their appearance in 1992. I know, I know, my backlog is a little bit ridiculous but hey! I AM getting round to it!

 They have very sharp spears... and were very inexpensive to produce but otherwise could have been cast in metal.  Now days the hard plastics deliver sculpts that are simply impossible to do in metal... the weight to strength ratio makes models that really appear to fly a regular item... and so much more!

 These stalwarts though will continue to serve.  I've painted them as part of a marauding horde dressed largely in the tunics of the places they have visited... and looted!  The archers I'm calling Redcaps... and harken back to my favorite edition of WHFB which is to say 3rd edition... where its very possible to build elite troop types even for the lowly Common Goblin... The Redcaps will make fine missile elites for the horde. 

Next on the desk is an old Chaos Dwarf Whirlwind that I'm reviving. Some repairs to make and a change of base from a cardboard rectangle that is coming up at the edges to a plastic oval. Of course other new stuff will be added as well.

Back to the desk!

RWBY: COMBAT READY!

 RWBY: COMBAT READY is a board game that I have not played... it looks super abstract but I'll eventually get round to giving it a go.

I am enamored of the RWBY anime and totally bought the game to mine it for minis... forgetting that they *might not* be in a useful scale...  

The models are in a soft plastic and are a little bit larger than GW Heroic scale. They come mounted on a 38mm-ish beveled base .... awkward! We can see Penny is a bit taller than Sister Veridyan.  I *may* re-base these later and mix them with the Kingdom Death: Death High series but maybe not... some of the models actually use all that base-top real estate.

Penny is my favorite model in the set:

She is a fun character and the least flash ridden of the set.  The models themselves are of relatively low detail and the faces are a poor match to the original art for several of them.

I did find a fun way to paint the base that I'd like to remember how to do...

Black wash

Cloudy Grey (Reaper) blobs (diluted) in a rough cobblestone pattern.

Base White (Reaper) stippled on the grey blobs.

Sewer Water (Secret Weapon) washed thinly over the whole base.

The Sewer Water wash wash attracted to the black washed base and blended the edges of the gray blobs without any help from me.  The White stippling added subsurface highlights giving everything a nice feeling of depth for very little effort.

Moving on from Penny to the natural pairing of Blake and Yang

These had the roughest of the faces but, since anime is so color coded, it all works out in the end.

Other groupings... sisters Yang and Ruby.... and Ruby and dreamy mean girl Weiss

These really use all that base...

Finally the Villans!

All in all I'm reasonably happy with the project.  The characters are easily identifiable and will be fun to have on the tabletop.  I'd have liked them to be a little more in scale with regular tabletop models but they are not so egregiously scaled as to be unusable with Heroic scale models.

Thoughts... Board Game Kickstarters as sources for cool models.... 

I'll be doing a lot less of that unless the models are presented in a scale that is useful to me. So far RWBY: COMBAT READY!, and Darksouls: The Board-game have been in funky scales while The Order of Vampire Hunters and Chronicle X have been in standard heroic scale with bases.  Excluding the board games that are made by war-games manufacturers, like GW and Mantic, or Board-games that are intended to function as, or compatible with, tabletop wargames... like Joan of Arc (15mm) I have to be aware that my idea of proper mini scale is not universal.

With that said... I wonder where Etherfields is gonna land for figure scale?

Next time I finish up some Void Elf Executrix troops that I started working on before the big move and have relocated.

Back to the desk!

Build Day WiPs Kingdom Death

Even though the current projects on the painting desk need work I spend a bit of time building the next thing in the line.  Today its Kingdom Death.

The first Kingdom Death model I've ever built is this Kingsman.  The model is very cool but I just chose it at random from the Kingdom Death Monster 1.5 core set.

After working on it a bit I dug out the rules and started reading them....

We are definitely gonna play this game!

With that in mind its time to start working on a set of player characters.

The rules direct you to build the first group of four survivors and the White Lion to play the introduction so I rooted around in the box for a bit and came up with a sprue labelled "Prologue"  Brilliant!

Being an old metal mini guy I was reluctant to move into plastics.  I had worked a lot with resin and, while that had some advantages in terms of conversion and weight, they tended to be brittle, fussy when it came to taking paint and I wasn't sold on them as durable in the long term.  I then encountered Wyrd and the Death Marshals of Malifeux and was immediately sold on plastic!  There are just things you can do in plastic that are impossible in either resin or metal.

Now that I've worked with plastic for a bit I am able to appreciate the quality control that has gone into the Kingdom death line.The material is great with the right proportion of strength and hardness while being sufficiently flexible to take a ding during regular handling. The model cuts, sprue attachment points, and mold lines are well thought out and are often hidden on interior surfaces.  the external mold lines are very fine and easy to clean up.  There are some places, of course, where its just not possible to have the cut or mold line be invisible that will require some greenstuff but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Its easy to see why this line enjoys such support among painters.  Its got edgy topics but a lot of humor as well... its well sculpted and has high production values.  It takes advantage of the abilities that plastic has to create great depth in the sculpt and to be gravity defiant but remain solidly usable.

The game looks like its gonna be great as well.  More on that as we dig into it.

The Guild's Justice! (aka OMG Plastics!) Malifaux 2e.

Ok... I admit it... I'm slow!

Seriously!  I've heard a lot of people glowing about hard plastic minis but I hadn't really looked at one outside of a starter set, or a giant creature kit, in modern times.


I now see what I've been missing!

 First... and most important... you can do insane stuff with figure design in hard plastic.  There is no way you could produce these Death Marshals ,doing their acrobatics and coffin-fu, in white metal or even resin.  Not only do they defy gravity but, with the exception of the extrememly delicate sword of Lady Justice... yeah I snapped THAT right in two just getting it off the sprue... but the things are durable and take paint exceptionally well!

The set itself is done in the lavish Wyrd style with great art on the package, good assembly instructions, truly dynamic posing, and game rules (unit cards) all in one box.

I picked this up... because flaming coffins!... and because I hadn't done Wyrd plastics yet.  I have a couple of factions from Malifaux 1e. in metal and they were very awesome although the designs were sometimes a bit ambitious for the material.  With their obvious mastery of the hard plastic medium I'm expecting to be amazed right regular like!




 While I'm a fan of Lady Justice and The Judge the real show stoppers, mini wise, are the Death Marshals! 

 Now I must wander back to the table and get back to work!