Kingdom Death Monster Prologue

We're getting ready for our first game of Kingdom Death Monster 1.5!

The presentation of the rules is very cool.. lots of space devoted to art and stories.  I'm treating this project as an exploration and haven't done my usual research on the game.  The plan is to treat it as a story and just see how it unfolds... learning the game and the lore as we go.

 The opening is called the Prologue and, conveniently, the miniature sprue was labeled as such... although there appears to be another model on the sprue that looks like some kind of barbarian butcher... but I'll sort that as we come to it.

The group of four survivors is very elegant.  Simple designs with great lines and character.  Toward the end of painting this group I realized that the rock each of them are holding (The Founding Stone) is actually a fragment of, what appears to be, a floor of stone faces.

In retrospect I probably should have used those stone face floor inserts for the starting group.  I actually painted up one to use with The Kingsman but treated the faces as though they were living... or recently deceased.

The shrouds remind me of funerary shrouds and, so far, the game seems to be a survival action RPG set in Purgatory... that is just a guess but I decided to treat the clothing as coarse linen shrouds.

Each starting survivor has the bit of cloth, a Founding Stone, and a Lantern.  The Lantern seems to be a big deal, and a major theme throughout the game,  which further leads me to suspect the setting to be Purgatory.

We'll see soon enough... I may be completely wrong but its a great new adventure!



The White Lion is the adversary for the first encounter.  Even though this White Lion isn't anatomically a terrestrial lion I took some advice and had a look at some photos and paintings of actual lions before painting.  It was a great idea and reminded me to include some details about the face markings, nose shape and color, and maine colors etc...

This lead to one of the first challenges... Lions tend to have a white mask, almost beard shaped, which I really wanted to include.  The trick was I also wanted the lion to be "white" as its name implied.  I went with the Menoth White Base (P3) for the main body and face (spot shaded with Seraphim Sepia (GW)) and Splintered Bone (Reaper) for the mask.

The shark-like teeth were and oddly hand-like paws underscores that this is not only a powerful predator... but an actual, and quite unnatural, monster!

Anyway... I'm off to set-up for the game!
I'll let you know how it turns out.

Star Saga Corporate Space Marines

 The regular corp troopers from Star Saga.

I with "The Color of Money Green" for the group which will make them easy to differentiate from the "Law Enforcement Blue" Security Guards and the "Mishima Red" Rangers... which I seem to have forgotten to include in the group picture... DoH!

 The Scientists and Tech Crew being in  "Sacewalk White" overalls and poorly armed are pretty easy to pick out as are the Plague Victims in "Prison Orange".

 I figure that a lot of the people I introduce to Star Saga won't have a firm grip on the Mantic universe so I wanted the different sorts of adversaries to be easy to tell apart with no working knowledge of Mantic's armies and factions.

To make this even easier I went with color schemes that have a modern association with the role of the model... except for the red rangers but they'll stand out because of the lack of a modern equivalent.

The bases are abstract facility representations where guiding lines are painted on the floor to help navigate.  The early versions of this were more abstract and not a focused on this theme but as the project progressed the theme became a bit more refined and consistent.  Both early and late bases are shown here.




 A couple of mines crept into the pile.  I put them on painter's tape to make them easier to paint.

The Corporate marines color scheme works for this project but I'm unlikely to use it for Deadzone or Warpath... and certainly will use a different theme for the bases. 

Looks like I need to hit these guys with a shot of dull coat.

That wraps up the main enemies for the Kickstarter Core set.  Next for this project will be mercenaries and exotic or unique adversaries.

Dark Souls: Executioner Smough, Winged Knight, and Boreal Outrider Knight

This wraps up the painting of the core set of Dark Souls the Board Game. 

Executioner Smough is part of the Boss Pair with Dragon Slayer Ornstein.  Ornstein was covered in a previous post so I'll not say much about him.  Executioner Smough however....

This is the model that convinced me to join the Kickstarter even though I wasn't a huge fan of the video game.  The Bell Hammer is just awesome! 

 I didn't look at any reference material for this project.  Mostly it was because I always thought I'd farm the minis out for other purposes but keep them together so I could play the game if it turned out to be good.  We're going to give the game a few more tries before we make a call on it.

Since I didn't know what my final use would be for the figures I just played around and experimented.  They look like they'd make great Daemon Princes for Warhammer Chaos or exotic giant types for an RPG.  When I setle on a regular use for them I'll add some heraldic details and possibly some themed patterning.

The big experiment here was the primer.  I used a metallic bronze primer and am pretty comfortable with the way it worked out for the armor.  It has a kind of hammered look before you do anything to it so I was able to do some shading and highlighting with thin glazes and retain most of the hammered look.  Some sepia glazes actually enhanced the hammered appearance which was an unexpected, but pleasant, surprise.

There is a lot of fiddling with shades of green and yellow in the big Jade-esque areas as well as on the legs.  These were dry brushed in and softened with a Green wash from Secret Weapon.

This guy is massive seen with both Dragon Slayer Ornstein... a pretty large fellow in his own right... and the Warrior player character... that hammer bell thing is gonna really hurt!


















The Boreal Outrider Knight and the Winged Knight are Mini Bosses.  They are less massive than the Main Bosses but are still large models.















The ancient bronze metal look worked out really well on these and really sped up the painting process.  These two have significantly more shading and highlighting on the bronze than Executioner Smough does.  I did that with the Boreal Outrider Knight because the model is almost entirely armor and I wanted it to be visually engaging even if its a bit monochrome.

Shown here with the player character Assassin the Boreal Outrider Knight looks a bit weedy and almost insectoid.  That lanky look is shared with the Dancer of the Boreal Forest.


















The winged Knight has more color, being largely covered by a tabard, I worked up the tabard with Reaper Bone triad and some touches of the P3 Menoth White set.  The tabard is left free of heraldic designs so I can update it when I find a regular use for it.

The two Mini Bosses together.

I *think* the next thing I'll do is finish up the Star Saga core set... but other stuff mmmaaaaayyy insert itself into that process.

Looks like the queue currently is:

Star Saga
Twisted Dickensians
Lust Elves
The Ynnari Triumvirate
Necromunda Bounty Hunter
Undertown Street lights and Barrier walls
Brugelburg Street people

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.

Keshryii and her Centaur Troopers (SF ver)

 Keshryii from Raging Heroes is an amazing model.

 Her retinue, modeled in her own extreme image, is an example of powerful a personality she must be. 

Lust Elves are shape shifters.  the more powerful personalities among them determine the shapes of their followers... in the case of Keshryii, whose form is one of the more extreme, that personality must be powerful indeed!

 I've painted this batch as proxies for the Grotesques of my Dark Eldar Blood Rain Kabal.  These models really illustrate the feeling of horror that the flesh shapers of the Drukhari must evoke.  A horror made all the more terrible by the fact that the grotesques choose this existence and pay the Haemunculi dearly for the procedures that remake a normal Dark Eldar into such a fearsome visage.

I've continued refining the red process in particular and made some progress with cool highlights and lowlights.

Flesh also got a lot of attention being a wash of Sunny Flesh (Vallejo) over the base coat of Krylon Camouflage Khaki which had been dry-brushed with Apple Barrel Sandstone. A Flesh Wash from Secret Weapon was then applied followed by layering Sunny Flesh and Fairy Flesh (Vallejo).

 I love blue hair... probably the Anime geek in me but I do like it a lot!

Hair was Nightmare Black (Reaper) a heavy dry-brush of Void-Shield Blue (Warpaints), a Sapphire Wash (Secret Weapon) and a very light dry-brush of Void-Shield blue and top dusting of pure white.

Because the centaurs model themselves after Keshryii they all tend toward similar colors and were worked up using the same process.

 When started working on the model I kept seeing the cover of the old Chrome 2 supplement for Cyberpunk... and one of the old Gamma World covers.  I didn't look at them for reference or anything but I wanted to convey the metal augmentations.  Keshryii isn't just a shapeshifter... shes got ecstatic minions actually grafted into her form and the joins are very chrome!

A size comparison with the centaurs and Canoness Veridyan (GW).

As you can see the centaurs are massive!

 A couple of views of the assembled troop.

 they are even more frightening as a group than as individuals.

A final comparison with Centaur Trooper, Canoness Veridyan, and a Void Elf Hunter.


There is also a set of these in Fantasy Version.  But I may try to knock out the rest of my Lust Elf Sci-Fi stock first...

Choices, choices!

Dark Souls the Board Game Boss: Dancer of the Boreal Valley

The Dancer of the Boreal Valley is the third Boss from the core game  painted.  Leaving only three figures to complete the core game paint project.

There is a lot of experimentation on this model.

The Armor was sprayed Krylon Bronze the details were relatively shallow so the armor was black lined to add depth then highlighted with Citadel Shining Gold (a very pale metallic gold)  and washed with Seraphim Sepia.

 The Cloak was an experiment in red.  I'm still refining it but the result was an interesting enough surface in its own right before adding the freehand about halfway through the red build up.

I'm torn between calling this "The Babble Cloak" or the "Cape of Incoherence"  The free hand started out as some patterns that resemble, but are not actually, a  script. Then some larger characters, and some that are not quite actual characters but could almost be several characters. Basically its nonsense... which is kind of what I felt about some of the game rules at the time!

Adding the freehand midway through the red build up resulted in some partially buried lines which was a desired effect.

The freehand was an experiment with cool highlights and warm highlights.  The characters are lines with a bright orange in warmer zones and with a pink in cooler zones or shadows.  The goal was to make the freehand mildly 3D in the top (warm) zones and to get it to stand out legibly in the shadowed (cool) regions.

I'm getting interested in shadowed highlights, and it needs a lot more work, but I learned a lot and I'll refine it as I go.









The white areas were Graveyard Earth (Reaper) over the Krylon Bronze, layered with Splintered Bone (Reaper) shaded with a very dilute (50-50 Shader and Glaze Medium (Vallejo)) Military Shader (Army Painter).



For size the Herald faces off against the Dancer... this may not end well..

Next up are the Centaurs!

I'm continuing to work on warm and cool highlights with them which is giving a some really interesting Light and Darkness interactions.

Star Saga Rangers, Hi-Tech Bio-Convergence, and an Afterglow traveling salesman.

 I made a push to clear the desk of a few WiPs so I'd have room to start on the Raging Heroes Centaurs (SF) group.

Star Saga is making great progress with the finish up of these Corporation Rangers.  This unit is a lower tier elite group and will go by the moniker "Hostile Takeover".

The six figures, but only two sculpts, painted up fast and I like the crimson and grey combo.  The detail is mixed but I really liked the plate in the back of the heads.  I used it as an ID plate but used letters in place of names as a nod to the high turn over rate in corp forces.

 Next up is a traveling salesman from Afterglow. 

My primary use for him will be as an RPG NPC with a secondary use as an objective marker for the Jailbirds... who have a chronic supply problem and few people willing to trade with them.

The resin for this is a bit on the brittle side.  That seems to be a trend in the miniatures that come out of Poland.  Its very dry and takes paint very well.

 It also comes with an automatic shotgun on a sling but it looked so awkward on the mini that I decided against using it. Its a nice sculpt though and it'll make a good addition to the bits box.

Size comparison time.  Canoness Veridyan (GW) and a Void Elf Hunter (Raging Heroes) for scale.

 Hi-Tech Miniatures Bio-Convergence.  Even though they are tracked their size and weapon load out made me think of them as servitor proxies fro ADMech or even for RPG use.

The weapons are magnetized so I can vary up the loads later if I end up using them often.  The weapon loads are not precisely correct for ADMech but might be ok for Inquisitor retinue or a Dark Millennium/Rogue Trader game.

 I haven't really started work on ADMech and haven't gelled on a marking scheme and Iconography so I'll save that for later.  The paint scheme could go a couple of different ways so options remain.

Size comp with the ever present Veridyan.  I like the size of these for servitors... not too massive.