Family Heroquest / Frostgrave

[Bane]

And now the crunch; Frostgrave has grabbed my attention and shaken my hobby plans right up into the air. So I'm trying to ensure anything that I now make for Frostgrave can be multi-used for my dungeon/ Heroquest project as well and "multi-purpose" has become my new hobby catchphrase. So having bought the Frostgrave rulebook (it's a lovely piece of work; the rules seem simple and straightforward to pick up and there is a real old school Oldhammer flavour with the inherent need to create terrain, use your favourite models to create warbands and to play to a narrative/campaign with the chance of advancing your character - exactly what I have strived for ever since I came across GW's Realm of Chaos). There are a lot of similarities between the two systems which I may go into further in a future post...

(http://thelostandtheverydamned.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/frostgrave-dungeon-tiles-mausoleum.html)

The Mausoleum scenario describes the terrain set up as :

"A small or rectangular building.....The sides should be at least 6". Each side of the building has a door in the middle of the wall (this doesn't need to be depicted on the terrain)."

So with that in mind and having conducted my usual image research for inspiration (both real and modelled mausoleums), I dived in by carefully measuring everything out! 6" is the equivalent of four squares on one of my dungeon tiles, so it fitted perfectly with the measuring system I already had in place:

All the parts laid out after careful measuring and cutting. The building is constructed from foamcard, with a couple of plaster of paris cake decoration pillars and a bit of plasticard. At this stage I was torn between a wooden curtain rail pole end and a Christmas bauble for the domed roof.

Detail of the door. Four rectangles are cut out to add depth, four small rivets punched out of some plasticard and a push-tack with a cool star emblem in the middle pushed through.

Gluing the walls together with pva and a trusty elastic band to keep the pressure on so I can keep my hands free and move on to the next part.

Scraps of right-angled foamcard are used to strengthen the corners

Smaller construction of the pitched roof for the entrance. Foamcard walls and thin plasticard for the roof. A piece of plastic piping to cover the join at the apex. An old Bretonnian shield from my bitz box was added to create a piece of history/narrative for the occupant of the mausoleum.

Putting the roof on and gluing the pillars into their place. Lots of careful measuring to ensure everything is central and symmetrical (and the correct height). At the front of the flat roof you can see the scored card I used to cover the edges of the exposed foamcard.

The final raised roof with the wooden pole end used. Finding the central point from corner to corner is useful for this additon.

The completed structure. I quite like the contrast of very angular lines with the curved dome.

To create the stone effect, the entire structure was coated in a thinned layer of Polyfilla. It creates a nice texture to paint onto and was used to fill any tiny gaps between different panels. Obviously my measuring and cutting was so precise to not worry about this!

A last minute addition. After the building had been painted dark grey and drybrushed with successive lighter tones, I found some old  Letraset letter rubbing sheets. I fancied some Latin inscription and went for "Dead Lead" which translates to Plumbum Mortuis. (I now know why lead is labelled Pb in the periodic table..)

All the stonework is finished, just a corroded door to add

Some weathering with thin glazes of greens and browns

And the final piece. For the dungeon tile itself I quite simply painted a white, yellow orange  mix of acylic colour, with the lightest colour emanating from the center of the tile. When this was dry I then drybrushed my usual dark grey (but covering most of the tile away from the middle and less in the middle) and then drybrushed lighter tones of grey as normal. It didn't take very long to get quite a cool (or warm) glowing effect.

And finally these sarcophogi are from Dark Art Studios and were painted really quickly to add to the narrative of the dead being awoken. I have a bunch of Heresy Ghouls which I would like to add to this idea...

Next I've got some ideas for mines with railtracks, some monsters crawing out of slime pools, a treasure room and a bridge. But I need to paint some more miniatures next - warbands and wandering monsters....

 

[Suber]

Wow! Delightful! These pics are inspirational, pretty nice work!

 

[frenchfever]

really creative ! you just need to add some snow and that's frost

 

[symphonicpoet]

Plumbum Mortuir? Somebody's clogged up your . . . oh . . . wait . . what was it the Romans used for plumbing? Ah yes. VERY nice. I love your mausoleum. That is positively fantastic. Great use of household damage and the weathering makes it look fantastic. Hope the infanti plumbi don't get into too much trouble with the mortui implacidi.

 

[Bane]

really creative ! you just need to add some snow and that's frost

I've avoided the snow, it's thawed here. Too much hardwork to adapt all of my current scenery!

Plumbum Mortuir? Somebody's clogged up your . . . oh . . . wait . . what was it the Romans used for plumbing? Ah yes. VERY nice. I love your mausoleum. That is positively fantastic. Great use of household damage and the weathering makes it look fantastic. Hope the infanti plumbi don't get into too much trouble with the mortui implacidi.

Ha! The font disguises the final "s" as an "r" and I had to use an online Latin translator too, so alas no Latin banter from me. I do like using scrap objects in my modelling, I just have to be very careful to not start hoarding them in the garage with all my other bitz.... the wife would kill me.

So I've finished my first Warband - a Witches Warband, complete with Grandad the Barbarian and Tom the Cat (warhound);

and here's the entire warband in the town of Rensburg:

From left to right; Barbarian (me), Thief (wife), Warhound (cat), Witch (Grandma), Apprentice (daughter), Infantryman (son), Thief (daughter #2) and Old Barbarian (granddad).

The idea is to use these, with my kids, in some Frostgrave games - the roleplaying element really helps grab the kids attention. I'll take some photos during the games and post them here.

And next up is a Witch Hunter warband using some of my old miniatures...

 

[Bane]

Here's a few of my older models with a few newly painted additions to create a new Frostgrave warband, namely Witch Hunters but led by an old chaos sorcerer and familiar posing as a Sigilist wizard and his apprentice::

From left to right we have 3 infantrymen, a warhound, 2 thugs at the back, the wizard and apprentice and 2 archers.

 

[Jeff McC]

Warband looks great!

 

[Warburton]

Fantastic. That chaos sorcerer works very well as the leader. And the town-scape is brilliant as well.

 

[Bane]

Cheers all. As I'm riding a Frostgrave wave, I thought I'd sort through my Nurgle models to make a new Summoners warband (they can summon a Nurgling, Plaguebearer or even a GUO) - any opportunity to get painted models onto the table:

From left to right we have a Barbarian (100gc), 4 Thugs at the front (80gc), an Apothecary (100gc) - I had the perfect model already painted with his vials and bottles, the main Wizard, his apprentice and two warhounds (20gc).

Because of the natural basing I've done on these (rather than the stone/cobbled basing on my first two warbands) I've dug out my battle mat, river and trees and a couple of other buildings including my Mausoleum, an old cottage and an old free with White Dwarf card tower that I polyfillad and improved upon many years ago. In fact the river, tower and cottage were scratchbuilt when I was a teenager, some 25 years ago, so proper Oldhammer and still look pretty decent.

 

[Warburton]

Cool warband. And, cool terrain, too!

 

[Bane]

And my final warband (for now) are a bunch of old Citadel and Marauder Orcs and Goblins, led by an Elementalist (the spells seemed quite fitting for the raw, magical energy of an Orc) and of course his Goblin apprentice/shaman:

From left to right at the back we have an Orc Templar (100gc), 2 Archers (50gc each) and at the front 4 Thugs (20gc each), The Orc Elementalist, his Apprentice and a Goblin Thief (20gc).

That's all my warbands completed for now although I do have a Fighting Fantasy warband in progress (led by Yaztromo), but next up I'll be organising and painting some wandering monsters, the Undead. 9 Heresy Ghouls, 6 Mantic Zombies, I GW Wraith, 1 GW Vampire, 17 Mantic Skeletons (12 Armoured).

And I plan to do some battle reports where these same warbands of mine are used over a couple of games, but with each game the rule system changes. For example the first game will be using the Frostgrave ruleset, the second will be a RoC 3rd Edition clash and the final one a Song of Blades and hero skirmish. It will be interesting to see how the same skirmish force performs using different rulesets. Maybe.

 

[Warburton]

Very very nice work

 

[Tex]

Lovely paintjobs and setting, very inspirational

 

[Bane]

The other night, my 3 kids and I had another very fun game of Heroquest "lite". Following on from the success of "Save your Brother", we ran a similar theme but this time trying to rescue our cat! The simplified rules I used were as follows:
•All characters can walk 4 squares. If they walk 4 squares then they can also either attack, cast a spell or investigate the area
•Characters can instead run 6 squares but forgo any other activity
•Investigating the area could trigger a wandering monster or the discovery of treasure, traps or equipment
•The spell-casting character (oldest daughter) can cast any spell she can think of (she has to use her imagination) but can only cast the spell once i.e each spell must be different. For it to be successful she has to use rhyme in her spell incantation and had to roll under her age on 2d6 (she's 9). She only uses one battle dice in combat.
•The other two characters (7 year old daughter and 3 year old son) had combat characters so could use three dice in combat. They had to roll over their age on 2d6 to attack first else they are attacked first! They only ever received scratches and bruises mind!
•Plus lots of other rules I made up as we played to help the flow of the game and keep them interested. Oh and treasure was in the form of jelly beans!

Doing this with the kids is definitely fun times for all, but also encourages them to use their imagination, empathy, storytelling, literacy (eg. reading the cards and the scenario) and numeracy (dice, counting etc). What's not to love? Oh and I get to play with my lovely kids and my painted toys too!

So I was the GM and the scenario was quite simple:
Catch the cat! It moved 2d6 in a likely direction (ie further into the dungeon)

The family gather at the bottom of the spiral stairs and see the cat disappear through a door into a very dark adjoining room

After discovering and slaying a few zombies (with son's trusty flail and some Holy Water he discovered), the family chase the cat into a corridor. Middle daughter decides to investigate the red glowing eye on the blue skull of the floor, which releases a gem (yum!) but also a couple of armoured skeletons..

Getting down low to capture the action. In the next room the cat runs past a few rats who are blocking the way, but these are hastily dispatched with some crossbow shots that oldest daughter had discovered.

Entering a room that was partly submerged in green water, middle daughter decides to investigate it's murky depths, only for a green warty hand to try and grab her ankle - a troll! You can't go round it, you can't go over it, you've got to go through it! Oldest daughter casts a polite spell: "Don't be angry Mr. Troll please, because otherwise I'll make you freeze". And after a successful roll, he froze! Jelly bean jewels visible near the far door!

Son runs ahead into the next room and discovers a throne room, alas just missing the cat who scarpers off behind a pillar. "I'm not scared" he says. Grabbing the scroll from the skeleton's hand they find directions to a stash of treasure under the broken pillar. A few jelly beans each!

Unfortunately we were told that we needed to finish up at this point, as the real GM (my wife) told us that tea was ready and we had to clear the table So oldest daughter cast a spell which involved a portal to catch up with the cat: "Dungeon, dungeon I am mortal, please let me walk through a portal". She successfully re-appeared next to the cat, picked him up and waited for the other two to dispatch a few more skeletons before they all caught up together to high-five a successful dungeon exploration.

The end!

Below is what they would have further experienced with the rest of my dungeon tiles, including the end of dungeon baddie - a Wight King!

Next time my eldest and I may try for a game of Frostgrave..

 

[Blue in VT]

That looks truly epic! what a great time you must have had!

Cheers,

Blue

 

[King Arthur]

Jelly Bean treasure! I wanna play next time!

Epic as always Bane, such found memories of playing HQ when it came out with my parents

Hopefully your teachings bring along a next generation of Oldhammer Fans and keeps them out the clutches of Playstations and Youtube

 

[Firstruleoffightclub]

Well done and cute childs !

 

[Bane]

Cheers all! It really has been fun playing an old favourite game of mine with my own kids. In fact they're also getting into the creative side too, as they're making their own dungeon tiles which we can play on, I'll post photos soon. My kids did ask during the last game, why there are no walls in the dungeon. Well I wasn't sure if I wanted them, let alone make them, but I was eventually convinced to have a go at making some. There were a few things I wanted to consider though; these walls had to be modular so that I could create different configurations and they had to be moveable (so as not to get in the way of gaming and for easier storage). I also had the idea that if I made them look ruined not only would they look better aesthetically (not a uniform height) but that they could also be used multifunctionally if re-based into an appropriate Frostgrave base. So after an aborted attempt with velcro(!) I experimented with magnetic strips and ferrous paper to create these:

Along a dungeon corridor - here you can see the different sections/lengths

Here are the same wall sections (and a few others) surrounding a summoning room tile. You can see a gap left for a door, these are work in progress and will be fully functional on a 28mm scale!

And detached from the dungeon base and onto a ruined city base for games of Frostgrave!

If you're interested in how they were made, there's a detailed tutorial on my blog.

 

[Cassarus]

Well done mate, I love the way the walls turned out!

 

[Bane]

So I've made some inroads on my Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge, where I hope to paint up all the models in the bestiary section. I've started with the undead contingent as I already have most of the models for this. First up are 5 skeletons and their skeletal dog:

I used a combination of griming techniques to produce the dirt and rust effects and some old Bretonnian decals that I found for the shields. I'm still unsure as to whether I should add a glowing eye effect, thoughts?