With all the boxes that have been showing up this week my mail carrier has been a very busy guy.
My order from Warlord arrived which had:
box of soldiers
box of cultist.
Lich Lord
Lich & Apprentice
Enchanter & apprentice
x2 armored skeletons
x2 wraith knights
Spell cards
Amazon order: Frostgave core rules & Thaw of the Lich Lord
Multiple Ebay bits orders & Avatars of War Dwarves
Head sprues from Statuesque Minis
GW Huntsmen box and Dwarf Thunderers
I also picked up Dave Grafham's ruined terrain bundle from wargaming vault. I also picked up glue and foam core at Hobby Lobby and plenty of printer ink and cardstock at Office Depot. It's been a pretty full and expensive week.
The dwarves I've been drooling over for the last two years as I'd considered building a dwarf gang back when we did our Mordheim campaign, I have a unit of Long Drong's pirate slayers which are great models and what I've used for past campaigns. I love the models but they are always brimming with too many pistols and they don't have have a proper treasure hunting feel. I really liked the dwarf pathfinders as they looked more like rangers or thieves as they had fairly minimal armor and I really liked the hooded heads. What I didn't realize is that despite being label as "plastic" they are the crappy PVC restic type "plastic" that Sedition Wars uses or the Mantic games style PVC. The sculpts are pretty well detailed but the difficulty comes from getting the pieces cleaned and lined up. I really hate working with that stuff but at least I finally have those dwarves.
They are all armed with either crossbows or two handed great weapons which works fine for rank and file units, for Frostgrave of Mordheim they'll need some modifications so I picked up some axe and hammer arms from the Ironbreaker kits and I'm currently scrounging through my bits box for shields as I have a giant pack of them somewhere. The fit on the stock PVC crossbows is a giant pain to get lined up as they get hung up either on the beards or the arrow quivers hanging on their belts. I'm hoping the
GW crossbows will fit better, but it's likely that I'll need to shave off the arrows and do some minor resculpting. The axe and hammer arms fit well although they are a bit static looking. I still have half the box left so I can expand the gang should I decide to brave more work with the PVC. It may prove easier to recast some of them in resin and work on copies instead.
My planned Enchanter, Apprentice, & Great Weapon Henchman
Random Gang filler
Crossbow carriers awaiting their arms
I also started working on a female gang made from the soldier box, Statuesque heads and Huntsmen parts. I recast the heads in resin as I dislike mixing plastic and metal on models and it also makes them top heavy and prone to tipping over. Outside of the weight issue the detail on them is simply amazing and I highly recommend them.
The two handed sword model proved more difficult than I expected the stock left arm that crosses over the chest is quite flat and looks very unnatural and the hilt of the sword has a weird indention on the side that faces the body rather than the whole grip being round. I wanted the left hand to help cover that indention so I cut the left arm above the elbow and replaced the upper arm with one from a different arm. Getting them to line up was a pain as the glue kept refusing to hold and one arm would pop off, then just as I'd get it to hold the other would let go, or both would fall off at the same time. I repeated this about 5-6 times with a lot of dropping parts and swearing until it finally held. Once it finally took hold I added some extra glue to the seams along the back just in case and it'll need some love with greenstuff as it's still a very rough fit. After seeing it in the pics I think I also need to go back and trim the hood down a bit as it's pretty high when viewed from other angles.
To get the models dual wielding I did some careful trimming and transplanted them from the other right handed copies, I took one of the open cultist hands and cut it off at the wrist, then used the dagger hand from the soldier box to replace the hand. Carefully trimmed away the dagger blades and added the axe and sword also adding the lower part of the hilt on the axe. The connection seems fairly solid but I may need to revisit it with plastic glue instead of the super glue I've been using. The bow & arrow arms are from the huntsmen box and needed a slight bit of trimming at the shoulder and edge of the chests to get lined up, but it was very minor compared to the sword swaps.
I may add another 2-3 melee fighters once I figure out what the ideal mix will be for the gang, not sure if I need an additional dual wielder or if I need another shield or two in the mix. I'd started the conversion before my huntsmen showed up otherwise I would have just used them as the kit has a couple of left arms holding combat weapons.
Next stuff in line is to work on building some of the cultists and start cutting out all the cardstock terrain.
The combat models
Fire support
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