Advanced Heroquest Reborn - The Henchmen #1-3

Here's the first 3 of the 12 henchmen.

These are straight from the box, Bretonnian men at arms, which are unfortunately no longer available. Individually they have a lot of character and in small numbers I found them fun to paint, though they needed a lot of cleaning up. I can imagine painting an army's worth would be quite difficult as you soon run out of options when it comes to making them different to each other.

ADHQ Henchman - Source : Stuff of Legends

Interestingly these figures armed with halberds are closer to the figures that came with the game, however the actual character sheets show that henchmen are armed with swords.

Advanced Heroquest Reborn - The Heroes

The clocks went forward this weekend which means lighter evenings and hopefully more miniature painting. Unfortunately the lens for my camera has sadly expired and all my spares are either zooms or fixed focus lenses, none of which are suitable for photographing miniatures. Because of that I'm trying to use a tablet for photographing miniatures as you'll see below. 

For the Advanced Heroquest Reborn project the first two heroes are now complete, actually more to the point, the first two figures of the project are complete!

They are, the human fighter Heinrich Löwen and the dwarf warrior Sven Hammerhelm. 

 

Sven underwent a substantial change from when you last saw him to bring him closer to the artwork found in the rule books.

 Source: Terror In the Dark - Games Workshop / Colin Howard (1991)

The parts I used for these two figures are:

Heinrich Löwen
Body - Empire State Troops
Arms - Empire Free Company Militia
Sword - Original militia cutlass removed, replaced with an alternative militia sword
Head - Empire State Troops (preceding 5/6th edition plastic box set, now out of production)
Feather - As above
Pouch (dagger removed, side re-sculpted) , bottle, treasure chest - Bretonnian men at arms set
Rope - Mordheim accessories
Shield - 1990's blank circle shield, parts from dwarf shield sprue (unknown)

Sven Hammerhelm
Body, arms - Dwarf warriors (6th edition, now out of production)
Hammer head - Dwarf warriors
Head, helmet removed - Dwarf warriors (6th edition, now out of production)
Helmet - Dwarf warriors

Backpack, self sculpted, bag - Bretonnian men at arms set

Next I plan to paint a few of the henchmen before facing up to the challenge of painting twenty Skaven.

The End of An Era

Recent posts have sadly seen a few too many obituaries.This one is slightly different and is not entirely unexpected but marks the end of an era.

Empire Free Company

Bretonnian Men at Arms

Source: Games Workshop (2016)

This weekend the Games Workshop finally retired a large number of box sets as the Age of Sigmar moves forward and the Old World is consigned to memory. Two sets that will be missed are the Empire Free Company Militia set and the Bretonnian Men at Arms set. Even I can tell they're not going to fit into the new setting and so inevitably their time is up.

These sets have for so many years been the go-to henchmen across many games and gaming systems. For me they've been my first choice fantasy humans, not just in Warhammer but in Mordheim and potentially Frostgrave. Their latest use was as part of my Advanced Heroquest Reborn project as, you've guessed it, the henchmen.

I thought about bagging one more set however, with my last post in mind, I decided the let them go. I just about have enough spare parts for this project, but a future ones will have to feature models from elsewhere.

I've been brand loyal for many years but that loyalty is fading somewhat. The new Age of Sigmar models are a mixed bunch, the latest Dwarfs for example I feel are embarrassingly bad, which is quite an achievement given that the old Dwarfs weren't very good in the first place.

I feel, in particularly with the Empire set, that their demise is a bit short sighted. These sets went far beyond being basic foot soldiers in a Warhammer army, and they could be utilized in many different games, be they old Games Workshop games or those made by others.

All this means I'm finally going to start looking elsewhere. The new Frostgrave range looks excellent, and with the option of converting between sets to create henchmen, cultists and even undead.

Source: Northstar Military Figures and Osprey Games (2016)

So next time I'm in need of a few good men, I know where to to look.

Advanced Heroquest Reborn - The Heroes

I thought I'd kick off my Advanced Heroquest Reborn project by taking a look at the heroes that would be taking on the Skaven menace deep below the Old World.

Interestingly the box art featured the original set of heroes from Milton Bradley's Heroquest, along with the full set of monsters from the same game, the familiar zombie, scimitar wielding Orc and the shifty looking Goblin to name but a few. However beyond the box art and a set of character sheets they didn't really feature within Advanced Heroquest itself.

The Box art featuring the original adventurers - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

The game itself introduced a new group of heroes who featured heavily in the artwork and fiction of the rulebook. While they followed the common fantasy adventurer grouping of a human, dwarf, elf and wizard one noticeable change was the omission of the human barbarian for an armoured human soldier. They were named Heinrich Löwen (the fighter), Sven Hammerhelm (the Dwarf), Torallion Leafstar (the Elf) and Magnus the Bright (the wizard).

The "replacements" in action - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

The miniatures themselves were early Games Workshop plastics, at that time Citadel and Marauder miniatures tended to be of the lead variety. They were comparable to the plastic miniatures commonly found in table top games of today, fairly soft detail but enough to clearly reflect the characters in the game book artwork. Apparently they painted up well as shown in the picture below, although I have to confess I don't remember painting them myself when I owned a copy of Advanced Heroquest.

Miniatures; painted by Phil Lewis (image from Stuff of Legends)

These models still pop up on eBay on a fairly regular basis and I did originally think about buying myself a set. However common sense eventually prevailed and I decided not to play into the hands of profiteers and overpay for what are some old and fairly simple plastic models. In fact it was that decision that was pretty much the beginning of this project.

And with that mention of my project it leads us nicely onto my vision of the heroes. Taking the artwork and the original models I built up my first mock-ups of how I envisage Heinrich, Sven, Torallion and Magnus to be.

With the Elf, I'm really limited in parts and I'm honestly not sure if that's a male or female head on my figure! However one thing I wanted to do was to get rid of the highly impractical bow in one hand, sword in the other pose of the original figure. And yes, I know, you're probably thinking the dwarf, Sven, is not even close to the art work and so as I write this there's a head swap taking place.
 

Painting wise, I'm going to start with Heinrich the warrior. In my next Advanced Heroquest Reborn post I hope to go into a bit more detail about how I built and painted him.

Advanced Heroquest Reborn - A New Miniatures Project

I ended my recent post on the new Age of Sigmar release by reflecting on the Games Workshop's decision to end the past 30 or so years of lore by destroying the Old World in which Warhammer was set and replacing it with a brand new world.

"The new world concept will need time to grow on me, it is of course instantly lacking the rich history that the previously established world accumulated over many years, but I suppose if I don't like it then I know I can carry on playing the older games as their rules are readily available. I can even mix and match older and newer figures and lore as I see fit. And that's it, at the end of the day a hobby like this will always be what you want to make of it." 

The last line got me thinking about how I can make the hobby what I want it to be. I have a certain nostalgic fondness for the older era models and lore. This of course is tied in with when I started collecting miniatures. I started with Heroquest before moving onto Advanced Heroquest, Warhammer 4th Edition and then Warhammer Quest along with the accompanying fiction of the era like the Konrad trilogy (by David Ferring) and Beasts in Velvet (by Jack Yeovil / Kim Newman). This shaped a clearly defined world in my mind which has stuck with me ever since, even though later releases perhaps watered that world down somewhat (before finally destroying it).

Gone but not forgotten - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

Despite my liking of the older era lore I have mixed feeling about the older miniatures. Many purists will say you can only play these older games with old models, partly what I suspect is the driving force behind the somewhat overpriced "LOOK VINTAGE OOP CITADEL MINIATURES" sales that fill eBay week after week. Now while I do also have a fondness of some of the older models, some are, lets face it, not so great. And if I'm honest, I do think some of the newer models, yes including plastics, are an improvement on the older ones.

So with all that in mind I thought, why not use old and new models, to recreate something from the time of a rich and vibrant world, the Old World meets new. For me Heroquest was my first thought, but as I still own a complete copy I thought I'd move on to the next stage and recreate Advanced Heroquest (which I sadly no longer own and won't unless I part with the best part of £100).

So what is Advanced Heroquest Reborn? It's going to be my re-imagining of a classic game using modern models (although the odd classic will probably sneak in somewhere).

I want it to stay as true to the source as possible and looking through the rulebook there is a wealth of background images to draw on. My first thought, after reading the rulebook for the first time in a long time, was that it has a certain rawness and brutality about it which was lost in favour of a more polished world later on. This is something that really stands out today and something which makes it more appealing to me as an adult.

The "old" Old World in all it's savage glory - Source : Advanced Heroquest (1989)

Some of you may remember a post I wrote a long time ago where I contemplated building character models from the Warhammer 40K world. That never took off because first of all because I always felt more connected to the Warhammer world rather than the 40K world, and second, because I just didn't have the knowledge of the 40K range or enough spare parts to start with compared to Warhammer. So, as projects go, it's still somewhat ambitious for me but I do feel better prepared and more connected to the subject matter this time round.

Advanced Heroquest contained 36 figures, 20 of which were Skaven and me and Skaven have never got on due to my inability to paint them so that in itself will be a bit of challenge. It's also why I'm going to start my next Advanced Heroquest Reborn post by looking at the heroes.

Looking Back... At The 2nd Century AD

Taking a break from the modelling desk, I recently decided to take a visit to the British Museum in London.

Wandering through the various ages I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the Roman section, I'd wanted to look at some of the Roman armour that is on display there. However while I was there I made an interesting find, some ancient Roman miniatures which I thought I share.

Mars

Mars, un-armoured

Moorish cavalryman

Now if these pieces were listed on a well known internet auction site I'm sure they'd be described along the lines of, LOOK!!! RARE Roman Miniatures LONG OOP (Incomplete, see description).

The two figures of Mars would have originally have been carrying a spear and shield. Made from bronze they're both beautifully detailed pieces. The Moorish cavalryman, identified by his hairstyle and beard, has of course has lost his horse but again has some really nice details.

And finally, before Iana dragged me off to look at one of the museum's jewellery collections I managed to grab a photo of some early Roman figures. Not as detailed as the ones above but they still have a certain charm and remind me somewhat of the lead miniatures of the early 1980s!

Anyway these rather tenuously leads back to the present day and a game and range of figures that I've been watching. I've always wanted a collection of Roman gladiator figures to paint and when I first saw Arena Rex back in early 2013, featuring detailed resin gladiators, I was blown away by the initial sculpts.

In the end I didn't actually pledge for the initial release as I didn't feel there was enough detail on exactly how the final miniatures would look. I've been following the project ever since and as more information came out I'm kicking myself for not committing. General release looks to be mid-2014 and I'm hoping I can get hold of them here in the UK. Until then I might have to dig out an old Citadel pit-fighter...

Looking Back At 2013

So here we are, a new year and for many of us a new set of modelling goals. I'm sure you've already read many to-do lists for the next year but for me I'm currently reflecting on the past year. The whole purpose of this blog was to chart my journey as I returned back to scale aircraft models after a long absence from any form of modelling.

However as the year passed I found myself trying my hand at many other projects as well. Looking back at my very earliest posts I had set out to complete certain models but at the end of year I find I haven't achieved that. I did however try many things that I hadn't original intended and I'm very pleased to have widened my modelling focus.

So 2013, lets look and the good and the bad.

The Good

With out a doubt the highlight of my year was rediscovering (the newest) Airfix models, a brand that had featured strongly in my childhood. It didn't start too well with my first Airfix kit of the year which was strong mix of nostalgia and disappointment. However by the time I reached my final build of the year I was thoughly enjoying Airfix again and felt that I'd experienced the rejuvenation of a much loved British icon over the course of the year.

My 2013 Build of the Year

If I was to give out awards, then Airfix's 1;72 scale A6M2b Zero (kit A01005) would be my 2013 build of the year without any hesitation.

Looking forward to 2014 I'm really hoping to get a few more Airfix builds under my belt.

The Bad

The bad point for me really was the way I approached my return to the hobby. First of all I set myself targets that were way above my current skill level. As a result it sometimes took the fun out of the hobby for me. Secondly, at times was impatient and rushed builds. Partly because I felt I had to get something done for this blog and partly because of my aforementioned misjudged level of skill. I know I can build to a good standard but I also now know I'm still learning.

So for 2014 I'm going to take a more relaxed approach to my hobby. I'm also not planing on buying many more kits as I intend to build the ones I have in my stash. When the stash is smaller I hope I feel more of a sense of achievement.

The Ugly...

One of the surprise highlights of 2013 was my discovery of a selection of old miniatures. I came into possession of a large collection of metal miniatures in varying conditions and I'm slowly in the process of identifying /stripping / repairing them.

As I've said before I originally intended to work only on scale aircraft models but this discovery made me really appreciate some of the older miniatures of my teenage years in a way that I've not found possible for scale models. These models may not be able to compete with the latest resin casts, but I have found that sometime a simpler model can be just as much fun to work with.

If time allows then I'd certainly like spend some time rediscovering older miniatures again alongside my continuing scale model projects.

A Games Workshop Necromunda ganger with claw conversion

On that note I'll leave you with a teaser of the first, hopefully of many, that I'll be working on and wish you all best for 2014, whatever you choose to work on this year.

Completed - Games Workshop Moving Skeletons Diorama

Finally, something has been finished! My moving skeletons project.

When I first started building these skeletons I had an idea that they'd be facing off again an opponent (or opponents) who would be in a similarly dynamic pose. Unfortunately searching through my spares box yielded little in the way of suitable figures. The one candidate was an Empire halberdier but he was holding his weapon aloft rather than in a combat pose. So this meant rather than a fight, a pursuit would be the theme of the diorama.

And so on to the final hurdle, finding a suitable base. The first time I had the idea of a pursuit an image of a dungeon corridor came to mind but I felt the skeletons didn't complement each other well on a rectangular base. I felt a circular base would work better allow the chase to develop from several side (especially with the figures I had).

It was then that I found some perfect circular resin bases from Fenris Games. After picking one and waiting for it to arrive, (which was not long, they provide a very good service), I could finally complete this project.

So here it is:

And as the whole point of this project was "movement," here's an animated version:

All in all this has been a thoroughly enjoyable project. I've had a chance to paint skeletons for the first time and was surprised how satisfying they are to paint. From that one moment of thinking, "those skeletons need to look like they're moving" to finishing this project I've really enjoyed trying to bring some life into static figures. I certainly hope to try something along the same lines in the future.

WIP: Moving Skeletons

Following my last post I've made some progress on a few moving skeletons. But first things first, I have new found respect for anyone making an army of these things. They have a habit of breaking very easily. Even more so when you been chopping them into pieces, repositioning, and then glueing them back together (and when you throw my aggressive dry-brushing into the mix)!

So here's a few WIP shots. All the parts are from the Games Workshop, I just need to finish up the armour and weapons and attach the arms that are currently in the way of painting. Once that's done I'll mounted them on a base (yet to ordered) as I've decided on a small dungeon themed diorama.

Standard skeleton warrior, chaos marauder shield.

Standard skeleton warrior, right leg from a mounted skeleton.

Standard skeleton warrior, legs from a tomb king skeleton

Standard skeleton warrior, shield from a chaos warrior, with original hand removed. Left leg from a mounted skeleton.

I have a few more ideas, but until I've worked out how many I can fit on a base these four will be all for now.

So anyway, thinking back a few posts I was rather critical of Games Workshop and their new painting guides. Time to put my money where my mouth is and give you all a quick, but helpful, skeleton painting overview (no pictures I'm afraid as I was painting in bad light for photographs). To paint these I've used Citadel paints, but not the most recent releases so you may need to check out the conversion chart if you're using newer paints.

Step 1
Primer layer, straight onto the plastic with a coat of Scorched Brown, make sure you cover all areas as you don't want any grey showing through.
Step 2
A heavy dry-brush of Bestial Brown. This is effectively your base coat but in some of the deeper recesses (such as eye sockets) you may leave the primer layer showing.
Step 3
Dry-brush Bleached bone over the whole model. Before the paint is dry clean you brush and use it to give a hard polish to areas of bone such as, legs, arms, the tops of skulls.
Step 4
Wash a slightly watered down mix of Badab Black into joints and the gaps in the ribs, leave to dry.
Step 5
Highlight bones with Skull White You can miss this stage out for a really dirty looking skeleton if you want. The skeletons above are meant to be dungeon dead so I figured they'd be a bit cleaner than buried dead.
Step 6
A final wash with either Gryphone Sepia or Ogryn Flesh, leave to dry. When this wash dries it gives an aged look to the bones, so vary the amount of water mixed with the paint for each skeleton to get a varied look across a group of them.
Step 7
Finally highlight with Skull White, teeth, around the eyes, finger bones and you're done!

Overall they're fairly easy to paint and seven steps isn't as much work as it seems. It's worth varying the various stages and using different strength washes if painting lots of them because that helps add variation. Any more advice? Feel free to comment or contact me!

Review - How to Paint Citadel Miniatures (for iPad)

RRP - From £1.99 to £17.99 (although I received a free promotional offer)

Having found the miniatures I mentioned in my previous post I decided that before I started painting them I'd take a quick at a few painting guides to refresh my memory a bit. Naturally my first stop was the Games Workshop website which I knew had a wealth of resources, except it didn't...

After searching in vain and almost convinced that'd I'd somehow losing the ability to search the internet I realised that all the painting guides and all the conversion articles had been removed. Now I suspect the official reason will be that the conversion guides have been removed because they no longer sell components, and the painting guides, they'd have gone because all the names of the paints have changed.

Anyway whatever the reason my search eventually led to the iTunes store where, to no surprise, I found that you can buy painting guides. I opted to try a free guide to Space Marines for the iPad before deciding if I should buy one of the others.

First impressions are that it looks very good on the screen, bold high resolution pictures and plenty of content. These painting guides are fully up-to-date, featuring the newest range of Citadel paints which saves me having to use a conversion colour chart, (although in reality I'm using a mix of old and new paints). After a very short introduction to a few hobby basics it takes you straight into the guide for painting the first type of Space Marine.

There's another 70 pages of this

The typical painting guide page consists of list of paints, a large interactive picture which shows you each painting stage. This is then repeated for each part of the model, the armour, weapons, faces etc. And that's it, a few pages in and it allow seems a little empty. Words are kept to a minimum, advice on technique or mixes is non-existent. You finish the section on blue Space Marines and then it's on to the white ones, black ones, yellow ones and so on. It's just (on average) four colours per stage, which is great if you want to paint models to the Games Workshop's "standard". Want to do anything creative, then it seems you're not exactly going to find much help in the world of "How to paint Citadel Miniatures."

Until recently the guides in the White Dwarf magazine and on the website helped aspiring painters by showing such a wide and varied range of topics and painting styles. Inspiring they most certainly were, you'd pick up a brush really wanting to try to emulate what you saw on the pages of the magazine.

How it used to be

I remember the the old painting guides from the 1980's, the unique work of John Blanche, (a painter and artist that inspired me so much), the helpful step by step guides of more recent years and I can't help but wonder where it's all gone.

So where do aspiring painters go. Thankfully there is the internet and there are thousands of guides, websites and blogs ran by people who love their hobby and are more than willing to share that advice with others.

Overall, technologically a good tool, the content however is shallow and basic, much improvement is needed before it'll appeal to anyone other than beginner painters and even then it offers little in technical guidance.

Buried Treasure?

A while ago my father asked me to take some of the huge collection of old miniatures that'd I'd left behind when I left home, almost 20 years ago. Of course in recent years I'd built up a sizeable collection of my own which was filling my own home but I took a few figures that I'd found buried deep in a box and promptly forgot about them.

When I started painting metal figure were by far the best option, plastics were far behind the models you see today. But as time progressed they caught up and I found myself painting them and my vast collection of lead and white metal figures were discarded into boxes to gather dust. I remember at one point I'd do anything to avoid painting metals, so old and out of date was how I viewed them.

Back to the present and I wanted to try a new way of stripping paint and so I decided these old figures would be good for a test. The paint stripping was a success (and will feature in a future blog post). After reading an excellent blog, Realm of Chaos 80s, I began to to look at the figures and see them in a new light.

Sure some of them were certainly worth something on eBay, I'd seen some of the figures selling for between £5 to £50! But really I have no desire to sell them, I feel inspired to give some of them a chance to be repainted rather than cashing them in for a short term gain.

So what did I find?

Here's some of the highlights:

First up a set of figures from the 90's game Warhammer Quest. The Pit Fighter and Chaos Warrior were playable characters, the rest were NPCs from the Lair of the Orc Warlord expansion pack (left to right Gubbinz the Jester, Bogoff the Snotling and Growler the Squighound).

Next up was part of large group of undead, I seem to remember writing a lot of undead scenarios for Warhammer Quest. If my memory serves me well these are all 1990's Wraiths, with the exception of the figure at the bottom left. This one is a 1980's Wight, made from lead.

Finally we have a collection of hero figures that I used over several years. The Golden Wizard and the Dwarf Pirate were more recent figures. The 2 Dwarfs were part of a larger group I had when I played advanced Heroquest in the late 80s / early 90s (before playing Warhammer Quest).





So is nostalgia going to be all it seems? I certainly have happy memories of the times when I played games with these very figures and maybe I was wrong to write off these figures all those years ago. Will they paint up well second time round or have me rushing back to painting newer plastic and resin figures? Well keep reading and I'm sure future posts will hold the answers.