Minis for the Master Forge

If you've read the earlier D&DF2F posts, you'll know that I had to change the focus of the in person session. What was going to be a pleasant ramble in a delightful Feywild valley became a tense exploration of an abandoned dwarven forge.

Fortunately, I was able to source a lot of what I needed from my collection of pre-painted minis. 

I still used some newly painted stuff or pre-paints that I added detail to and rebased to match my collection.

A fine selection of creatures

Valley Trolls 

Three jolly trolls

Three troll backsides, sorry, back sides

These trolls are Reaper Bones minis, and are pretty good representations of D&D trolls, to my eyes at least. I dug these out of my unpainted Reaper Bones box (it's a very big box).

They were originally planned for the Valley; indeed I've acquired a few more of the same design in different poses, so I've a good selection of trolls now, should I need them.

For the game session I was going to repurpose them as Scrags (aquatic trolls), but the heroes avoided that encounter.

Painting was straightforward; a liner of 50:50 Army Painter Dark Tone and Vallejo Xpress Medium to pick out the details and give something for paint to adhere to, then a white drybrush.

Then a series of Army Painter Speedpaints and VX paints. I kept the colours simple, and I'm pleased with the results.  

They might not get any table time this time,  but they'll come in useful in the future. 

Constructs 

A recurring feature of the Thunderforge Clanhold and the Master Forge is a variety of constructs made and used by the dwarves to help in various tasks.

Kluku

Delightful

Many of these had already been defeated or avoided, but the party, especially Harrow, have adopted Kluku, the dragon construct. 

I used an old WotC prepainted Young Copper Dragon mini.  I gave it a Strong Tone wash, then a drybrush.  I picked out a few details in copper, gold and silver to make it look like an assembly of different components rather than a living creature.  

Forge constructs, ideal for smithy work

There are also some forge constructs, designed to help with the heavy manual work. These are WotC Hammerers.

I did the bulk of the painting many years ago, they appeared in The Mines of Dhur, a 4E adventure I wrote as part of the long campaign. 

I added a few extra details and shading. Unfortunately I couldn't rebase them as I've run out of clear bases.

Elementals

Much of the danger in the Master Forge came from elemental creatures. I use the World Axis cosmology, as developed for 4E, for my current 5E campaign*. The individual Elemental Planes, with associated Para-elemental stuff has gone, replaced by the Elemental Chaos. 

This meant that I didn't need lots of gates, cracks, portals or whatever to bring different elements into play, just one McGuffin linking the material plain to the Elemental Chaos can create all sorts of variety.

Further, I don't have to be tied to just one element; different elementals can turn up, though in practice I'm not sure how well that came across.

I already have loads of elemental type miniatures from WotC and Reaper. These generally got used as is, and I took far more than I needed.

The following minis did get a bit more attention.

A xorn

Zzkk Slth

Zzkk Slth is a xorn; Xorn are one of D&D's wierder creatures,  looking like rocky barrels with three legs, three arms, three eyes and a gaping maw. It's certainly not something that's easy to proxy.

Fortunately WotC produced at least two different versions.  Zzkk Slth met the party a few weeks ago and wandered off after being given some bronze symbols of Baphomet to eat. 

I gave him a more varied colour pallet and painted in the eyes (black on the original mini). I painted the teeth and claws like steel, after all, it eats metals, so it's bound to have teeth that look a bit different. 

I didn't get a picture of the Sand Creature (presumably some form of Earth Elemental), but I'll get that posted soon.

So that's the minis I painted for the game.  I'm sure they'll see more use in the future, thus adding to my painted RPG minis.  some of them might have limited use, but all of them are nice to have done.

Mini Studio?

As you can see I've used the Master Forge scenery as a backdrop. 

I've been wary of doing this sort of thing in the past as I've wanted to fit everything into the light box and didn't want too much extra stuff to distract the eye (or the auto focus).  But I think this works,  helped a lot by very bright sunlight to illuminate everything, so I'll be experimenting further.

*This mismatch of game world and game edition seems to be feature of my campaigns. 

I ran 3/3.5 and 4E campaigns in Mystara, originally designed for Basic, Expert, Companion etc rules, so it makes sense (???) To use the 4E setting for 5th edition.