Sunday 22 July 2018

Frostgrave: The Illusion of Progress

The summer heatwave continues and so I've tried to cool down with another trip to chilly Felstad. That's right Venturers; it's time for some more Frostgrave!

I played the second game of the new campaign on Friday evening at the club and decided to prepare and paint a suitable model to represent my Illusionary Soldier. So here's my Cultist Knight:

The model is a straight forward build from the Cultist kit with a sword arm from the Soldier sprue.  I used the new Games Workshop Hexwraith Flame with a light grey/white dry brush over the top. Very quick and surprisingly effective.  



I'm still trying to crack the flagstone base effect, and whilst the paint job is alright I feel I can do something better (we'll come back to bases later in the post).

The game was great fun (3 treasures, 2 level ups and no casualties, so I'll call that a good result) and has left me with a massive Frostgrave itch to scratch over the weekend.  I knew that somewhere on the shelf of kits was a Dark Ops Mausoleum kit which I was given earlier in the year, so I dug it out and got cracking.



It's a lovely kit; lots of detail and not to tricky to put together (although I had to refer to the Dark Ops website pictures as there were no instructions). The roof is removable and there's a nicely finished interior to it as well:



My only criticism is the roof is a bit fiddly to remove and replace, but that's hardly the end of the world. It will make a great centre piece to the GW Gardens of Morr grave yard kit.  

There were a number of flat tiled pieces left over which didn't seem to have any obvious use and it seemed a shame not to use them. One dive into the bitz box later and I have some little pieces of scatter terrain/dungeon dressing and nicely based treasure markers:

Spare grave stones from the Gardens of Morr
Treasure chest from the GW Azyrite ruins
Remember Varchilde's Rule; never throw spare bitz away!

Coming back to the beginning of the post, these funky base pieces got me thinking about the flagstone effect I've been trying achieve on my war band models and whether I could make some flagstones rather than getting the effect from paint. One experiment with cereal box card and a spare base later:

Before painting

After painting
I'd say that's pretty good for a first attempt. I might try and get hold of some 1mm plasticard as that will be more solid and likely take the paint better, but as a basing technique it definitely has promise.

Frequent Venturers of the Vault will know that my Frostgrave terrain collection is very eclectic with pieces from a number of different sources intermixed with some home made items. I've seen the Pegasus Hobbies Gothic Ruins on a number of different Frostgrave blogs/sites; it looks fantastic and having also realized it's push fit (and so easy to store) I've bought a few sets to round out the collection (the fact it will do double duty for 40K is icing on the cake). The first kit has arrived:




Of course what I really need to do is actually paint some of these pieces! There's a lot of unpainted terrain of disparate origin in my collection but I'm hoping a coherent paint scheme will pull them all together. I can see some rattle can sessions coming up when the weather cools down.

As always thanks for reading; I'll bring more you more tales from Felstad soon!

2 comments:

  1. I wish Kill Team came with scenery like that (i.e. that could be used in fantasy settings, as well as sci-fi).

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    1. Thanks for stopping by Ben.

      A lot of the older 40K Gothic stuff is OK for fantasy (we use it for Frostgrave at the club to avoid hauling boxes of stuff down), but the new stuff is definitely more industrial.

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