Mantic Giant - part 1, the preparation

 

I recently purchased one of the Kings of War Giants from Mantic Games. This is for an upcoming D&D adventure called The Waking of Willowby Hall. The giant comes with two options for heads and two options for both left and right arms. Given this, I thought to myself that if I use rare earth magnets, I won't need to cast one lot of head and arm options into the box of shame.

So a lot of fiddling around with magnet gluing (and more than a few choice words that shall not be repeated here amongst polite company) and then a fair bit of green stuffing around, I finally have this lad ready for base coating.

The club proved to be the real problem child here as my magnets aren't strong enough to hold it fully in place. But I do have a cleaver plan (involving more magnets) that I'll see how it turns out. For now though I will have to stick with the sword option on the right arm. Pity. But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

I have also included a small magnet on the belt. This is to be used to attach different options for the giants hoard on the body. The Mantic giant comes with option of a dead human to hang from the belt, but I want to find other items I can use also. So this magnet is an important attachment point for the various plunder options that I hope to have available.

You can see that there was a need to do a fair bit of green stuffing around to cover the gaps in the model. In addition, the inclusion of the magnets meant more green stuff. But it wasn't to difficult to do even for an unskilled oaf like me!

I'll keep posting about the progress on this large mini. The castle walls in the background are from Kallistra and are 10mm is scale.

MDF Borderlands style Shipping Container

 

Our roleplaying group will be taking time between its D&D campaigns to go all space opera with a home brew D20lite version of Traveller. As such, I needed to get some scenery that would fit the vibe of the game and provide cover during combat.

Miniature Scenery make some excellent table cover that is of a Borderlands style. Something I'd like to emulate for our game. Their Shipping Container was just what I was after. But I wasn't too sure how hard it would be to build.

Turns out that building it was pretty straight forward. I bought two however as I wanted to cannibalized one of them to make the ends of the container able to be opened.

I took two of the central struts from the second model and used them on the ends of the container. I then used rare earth magnets to bind the two actual ends to the container but permitting the container to be able to be opened at both ends. This means that it can be used as different cover options during combat.

Making the container wasn't as hard as I feared. The real problem was getting the flipping magnets to stay attached to the MDF. Several times now I have had to re-super glue the damn things back into place. Hopefully they are stuck now and won't pull off.

I'm going to get a few more for table scatter as well as a bunch of other stuff. I can't recommend Miniature Scenery highly enough as their products are excellent and they have detailed instructions on their web site. Still have no idea how to paint this thing though...

HAPPY EASTER

 Hope you have a blessed, safe and restful Easter! God bless!

Isaiah 53:4-5 (NIV)

⁴ Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

Otherworld Leeches for D&D

 

This ugly sod is a Giant Leech from Otherworld Miniatures. A very icky addition to our recent D&D game. I unleashed these on the PC's as they waded through waste high water in a fetid swamp.

They didn't last long but that wasn't the point. They were there to keep the PC's on their toes and to ratchet up the tension before they encountered a Swamp Troll!

An Eldritch Horror for D&D

 

What the @#&*??? I was summoning a Nymph!

This thing I got off eBay for cheap some time ago. I have it in mind to be the final Boss in a fight with my PC's when I take them through the last cave at the Caves of Chaos for an upcoming Keep on the Borderlands campaign.

I purchased two. One to paint up as a statue and this is the other one. The idea being that the evil Clerics summon an Eldritch Horror as the PC's finally fight their way into the main chamber of the uppermost cave. The statue breaks apart to reveal this thing. It will be the source of all the corruption around the Caves of Chaos having fallen to earth millennia ago and slowly polluting the local area with its corruption.

Just can't tell which side is the front of this thing...

Massive Darkness' Cun-Ha

Massive Darkness' villain Cun-Ha

Here's the next lieutenant for the bad guy's who will be facing off against the player characters in my upcoming D&D mini-campaign. Meet Cun-Ha from Massive Darkness. He will be leading a bunch of mummified soldiers against those pesky tomb robbing PC's!

Water Elementalist for D&D, a Wizkids Elf Mage

This Wizkids Elven Mage has been painted to represent one of the player's characters who is a Water Elementalist.

The water spiral comes clear and was easily coloured by using blue ink. It was a pain the get the miniature out of between the spell spiral in order to do the painting, but now that its done, I'm glad I did remove it for painting. It would have been a real pain to otherwise.