CXLI. Updates On Several Fronts

Monstrous Births is slowly getting there, with only one miniature left to convert and paint. This means the short campaign ought to be ready and played out in November or December. Meanwhile, it came to life in a different form: that of a pen and paper RPG adventure. A few months back, I was approached by Witold Krawczyk with the proposal to co-write an adventure and enter it in this year's Quentin. I learned that Quentin is a Polish contest for best unpublished adventure scenario, held every year since 1999. I said yes and we agreed to adapt the story of Monstrous Births into RPG form. This required more fleshing out and expanding than I originally expected and, before we submitted it, Witold had to translate the entire text into Polish - the official language of the contest. We managed to meet the deadline, and when the results were published at the Copernicon convention last week, we were delighted. Pomiot (that's what MB's title is in Polish), was pronounced the winner of this year's Quentin. We hoped it could happen, but honestly did not expect it. We have plans for the adventure in terms of publishing, but that's a story for a different time. Thanks for initiating this, Witold; it was a pleasant collaboration.

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On to the figures. Two more Misshapen Deer done, only one to go.

I added a different species of deer for some variety in fur colour.

The deformities. Along with creative numbers of limbs in both, one of the deer is cyclocephalus, and the other is dicephalus.

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Queen Ligia of Folda received a fresh batch of subjects: four new Crypt Ghouls join my FeC warband.

Parts came from various kits again - from Empire State Troops to recent 40K Poxwalker.

On a related note, Ex Profundis announced another online contest in the vein of The Eclipse earlier this year. This time around the theme is monsters and the deadline is Halloween. Awesome! This is just that bit of extra motivation I needed to get to work on the next member of Ligia's royal court. The Eclipse had some really nice entries, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone does with their monster designs.   

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And finally, a new pair of variants of the green man shield sculpt. I use leftover putty for those, so they get made more-or-less spontaneously.

CXL. Samouse, CK2017 and Tor Megiddo box

Got this little guy as a prize at the Black Queen painting comp. If anyone's interested in seeing WIP photos, I wrote a brief article about the painting process on this mini for my club's website (in English): HERE. Samouse is a part of a whole series of mouse versions of LOTR characters from Cartoon Miniatures. They're all lovely, and I'm fighting the temptation to collect the rest of the Fellowship, starting with Boromouse. Oh, and they don't have Gollum yet, but I can totally see them basing him on a naked mole-rat, with spectacular results...    

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As I mentioned above, a couple days ago I visited another miniatures show here in Zagreb. The show in question was Zagreb Scale Model Cup CK 2017, organized by the Croatian Association of Military Miniaturists, hereabouts known as HUVM. This one is larger than UMS "Agram"'s Black Queen I wrote about back in July, but focuses on model warships, tanks, airplanes and other historical-themed and/or vehicle models and dioramas. There are, hower, a handful of categories open for Fantasy and SF pieces. In addition to manning my club's presentation booth with my colleagues, I entered some of my works from the past year in the competition. This time the organizer brought Mig Jimenez to the event, to do a free workshop/demonstration of weathering techniques, among other things. It would have been silly to miss the opportunity to learn something from the guy; things like that are terribly rare in my corner of the world. Anyway, I brought home some trophies and had a nice time. 

My entries and spoils.

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Since I've finally confirmed that I'll be attending Tor Megiddo in Helsinki in person, I thought I could use a container to safely transport my warband all the way there. What I needed was a small box, light but sturdy, that fit all the models, their stats and maybe a few dice and a measuring device. And, naturally, it also had to look nice. This is what I came up with:

It was an unpainted wooden box. I padded the interior with sponge from blisters, forming a slot to size for each particular member of the warband. There was space left for six dice, but sadly I can't fit a tape measure. The stat cards (still not made) have their slot in the left half of the lid.

After painting the box, I made a paper stencil of the Tor Megiddo logo and sprayed it on. This didn't turn out quite as planned, but the result was ok enough to keep. I'll hopefully compensate with really nice stat cards.