Holiday Game Preparations Continue

Somehow, despite starting earlier than in years past, it is still coming down to the wire to get everything ready for the Christmas game.

First up, here are the finished captives and the last of the colonist militia types for this game (you can see their in-progress pictures on an earlier post)

The prisoners came out quite a bit better than I anticipated. The scout guy was harder to paint than the others since his pose blocked easy access to his clothing.

 Once those were finished, I started in on the monsters.

I had thought about building armatures entirely from wire, but then I thought, "Why not shortcut the process and start from a figure?"

 I have a pile of 54mm-ish blue Marx-style knights and this seemed like a good a use as any for them.

For the first creature I was going to make, i lopped of the arms and legs. Then I thought,"Why waste the legs?" Two monsters for the price of one!

It's just a flesh wound.

Here is the second one, with wire looped to form a claw and a start like hand, slathered in air-dry clay:

He's kind of cute. And kind of grotesque. Exactly the kind of thing that I find most disturbing.

Here both are, awaiting priming:

In their natural air-dried state.

Using more knights from the same pile, I lopped off bits - faces, arms, a head, and covered in strips of Mod-Podge soaked tissue to look like rags (you can see them to the left below)

Black, followed by a white dry brush (and for the clay guys, I added some glowing dots and some frosty blue dry brushing on the the hands) and voila:

Are the dots eyes? The actual monster? A lure? A magic missile weapon?

Here's a close-up of the headless guy to show off his head:

You can tell he has a helmet on, but my players won't notice.

Yesterday, a bag of 100 2" tall skeleton warriors arrived:

Bag O' Bones

And I promptly set about hacking a bunch of them to pieces. These will be used to make some scatter terrain for the final game board:

It's like watching a Law & Order episode.

100 is far more than I need for this project, and I will have enough left over to fill out a 750 point Age of Fantasy Vampiric Undead army (they have skeletons, zombies, and werewolves in addition to vampires). 

I might even replace the clay monsters in this scenario with some skeletons strategically covered with rags(tissue to hide the "ancient armor" bits). Since I think the bogey men (or whatever they are) kind of deserve their own scenario.

Still lots to do. So many more hack apart

I really want to make a cave lair to put at the Big Bad's board edge, but we'll see what happens. The Big Bad itself is far more important to the game than the cave.