"This is a Gargoyle"... or is it a Bloodthirster?

In a game where the very Games Workshop specific Fimir trod the cold floor tiles of HeroQuest dungeons, it always seemed a bit odd that a Bloodthirster model was used to represent a more generic "gargoyle". I suppose it's very feasible that an Old World gargoyle might have been carved in the form of a demon by some master mason. But why not just have the Bloodthirster as the big baddie? Had the designer stated he wanted a gargoyle model and GW just plumped for the nearest design they had that could pass for one? Why then did Mike McVey paint the (prototype) gargoyle model as a flesh and blood Bloodthirster rather than the stone monster as seen on the artwork for the Kellar's Keep quest pack? 

Anyway, here is my recent attempt at painting this venerable model for use in Advanced Heroquest. I mean, he features prominently on the box artwork and inside the rulebook, so it simply had to be this exact model. Now, I'll admit to being somewhat loath to remove him from his original HeroQuest base, but luckily I actually own two gargoyles. So, I felt less like a desecrator of my own childhood as I carefully cut and filed away that familiar HeroQuest base of grey plastic.

The Bloodthirster, having a nice big yawn and stretch after a good night's sleep.

This would be the third time I'd painted a HeroQuest gargoyle. My dad had painted it originally, taking leave of Mike McVey's colour schemes for once, and left it mainly grey plastic to represent the stone but with enamel black, silver and bronze for a few bits and pieces of armour and weapons, red for eyes and so on. 

Later I painted the second gargoyle in garish acrylics, then later still borrowed its head to stick on the front of a Chaos Rhino for 2nd edition 40k. I also attached the wings to the back of a Chaos Space Marine in place of a backpack.

Rogue Trader Predator I turned into a Rhino for some reason. The old HeroQuest gargoyle head is in pride of place. It's hard to imagine even a single World Eater Marine fitting inside it.

Even later, I repainted my dad's old gargoyle with my then improved standard of painting, but once again like a stone statue. And finally, I rescued the head and wings from my mothballed Chaos Space Marine army, put it all back together, stripped it and painted it in its now final form. Probably final anyway. My gargoyles have had busy lives.

And this time, seeing as I planned to use it as an actual Bloodthirster, he ended up in classic Khornate red, bronze and black. I was particularly pleased with its mouth, the warm, wet and bloody feel (oops, nearly got possessed by Slaanesh then) achieved mainly by adding a wash of red ink over the top. 

So how did I end up with two gargoyles then? Far back in faded days, I was on holiday somewhere or other with my family, and in a toy shop I spotted a single copy of Against The Ogre Horde buried on a stacked shelf. I was excited to see it and had no idea that such a thing existed. The box was also enticingly bigger than the previous two quest packs.

As an aside, it was the only time I ever saw Against The Ogre Horde for sale anywhere. Likewise, I only ever saw the Eldar expansion for Space Crusade on a single occasion. I didn't buy it though (or beg my parents to buy it, more like) because I was already much more into 40k itself by that point.

So, obviously I bought Against The Ogre Horde immediately, didn't I? No, I didn't. For some reason it was only afterwards that I asked my parents if we could return to the shop to buy it. I had to wait until the very last day of the holiday before we did so, and for all that time I was increasingly worried that someone else would have bought it. But it was still there! I spent the journey home thinking happily about painting the ogre models and all the rest.  

Unfortunately, after I'd opened the box at home I found that the quest book was missing. Disaster! I handwrote a letter to MB Games explaining my plight (and I remember distinctly using the melodramatic phrase "to my horror I found the quest book was missing") and my mum sent it off in the post. 

As difficult as it is to imagine nowadays, in the early 90s you might expect a response to a letter or order placed via a catalogue to arrive some weeks after sending, if you were lucky. If you remember disclaimers like "please allow 28 days for delivery" then you're likely of my generation. Sure enough, a few weeks later a package arrived for me from MB Games. Not only was the quest book included, but also several sprues of extra monsters and furniture! This was great because I had the Adventure Design Kit and could now go further in my quest to fill every square of the board with a monster, as is the right of every HeroQuest player (hi Bard).

So that's how I came to be the proud owner of two gargoyles. We found that the ogre quest itself was really tough and perhaps not up to the standard of the previous quest packs. I don't believe we ever finished it. Additionally, after encountering the infamous quest with the error in it, meaning the quest couldn't be completed unless you fudged it, I genuinely began to believe that the quest book had been quickly cobbled together in a panic by some MB Games employee just for my benefit. Kids, eh? 

Pinken Axe

Finally found the time to finish up my partner's requested/demanded pink Golden Axe skeleton for Advanced Heroquest. Well, I say he's for AHQ but he'll most likely end up on the bedroom shelf where he can wave his (or her?) sword encouragingly while my partner does her makeup.

The Skeletoon (not a typo) miniature itself is a nice little metal one from Ral Partha. It's probably old enough to be considered "Oldhammer", though I'm not as familiar with their ranges as I am with Citadel to be honest. But, I'm pretty sure he's as 80s as my old swollen-tongued high-top trainers. 

Here he is in the MDF ruins of a 20th Century house. Not very Golden Axe-y, but that's (un)life for you.

What I love about Ral Partha though is that they've kept a lot of their sometimes very old models in production, and at what you'd nowadays call bargain prices. I even bought their ancient Jabberwock recently (newly cast!) for about seven British gold coins. Amazing. 

The Jabberwock is a model I've loved ever since I saw John Blanche cut its head off for use in an undead diorama in the inside cover of the "blue" Citadel Painting Guide pamphlet. I spent ages poring over that one, and I know every tiny detail, it's so evocative. Mr Blanche had cut the Jabberwock's head off at the neck so that it looked like a water monster rearing out a pool of foul water, about to snap the head off a dumbly aghast zombie. Probably not the tastiest meal, I (try not to) imagine.  

The Ral Partha figures also sit really nicely alongside the 80s era Citadel ones, though perhaps they're sometimes slightly slimmer and with smaller heads and hands than Citadel's. Back in the day it was common to see Grenadier and Ral Partha miniatures in Warhammer armies and they even occasionally appeared in official Games Workshop publications/rule books! Inconceivable today.

Anyway, back to my (i.e. my partner's) Pinken Axe skeleton. The Ral Partha miniature was the closest I found to the Golden Axe sprite, even if a skeleton with a round shield and weapon is about as generic as you can get. It would ultimately be the paintjob that would seal it as a tiny 3D replica of his pixelated granddaddy. 

Basically, I heavily drybrushed it with the infamously kinky sounding Titillating Pink over black, added a dark wash, carefully glazed it like the top of a mince pie with a thin glaze of red ink, then highlighted from there with white blah blah blah. In other words, just like in middle-era White Dwarf issues: undercoat > base coat > shade > highlight > complete. Perfect Mike McVey results every time, hahaha!

My partner also asked for a "raspberry red shield", so I did that too (can't remember what paints I used, but Clotted Blood something or other by some company or other), I think it looks perfect! The "pink" though, it lost some of the vibrant pinkiness after the highlighting. I may add another very very thin glaze of red ink to soften the highlights and get some titillation back again.

The originals. Image taken from VGJunk.

As you can see from the above image, the pink skeletons are unfortunately wielding scythes, not swords. What a rookie mistake I made. Still, it'd be absolutely impossible to find a skeleton model holding something as unlikely as a farming implement of all things. Tsk.      

The best skeleton models ever made

Most people my age seem to agree that the best fantasy skeleton miniatures of all time are Citadel's original plastic ones dating from 1986. And just for once, the amorphous blob known as "most people" is right. It was a kit that saw a very long shelf life with multiple different repackagings and minor additions or subtractions over the years, proof in itself of how good it was. Eventually they were replaced with a new plastic set well over ten years later, chunkier skellies with bulky weapons to match the scale creep of Citadel's model range at the time. They were not an improvement in my book, even if they were decent models, I suppose.

But skeletons should be morbid things of death and decay. Look at the skellies running amok in Bruegel's Triumph of Death painting, it's their angular and skinny appearance that marks them as deathly things of horror to the living. The replacement plastic Citadel skeletons look almost plump compared to their predecessors, have silly "evil" expressions like Skeletor and they have the worst attempt at a pelvic bone ever seen on a model skeleton. It looks like it's been put on backwards. 

The greatest model skellingtons of all time on the other hand, look better proportioned (within the limits of "heroic scale" models, the thigh bones for example are obviously far too short). You could imagine that if you were to peel the Bronzed Flesh coloured skin away from a Citadel human, there might just be room underneath for one of the plastic skeletons to reside.  Not that that matters too much anyway, I mean how many Space Marines could you realistically fit inside a Rhino? Probably one, at a push (assuming he took his pauldrons off first).

I bought my own box around the middle of the 90s for use in Warhammer Quest. They never did end up seeing the inside of a WHQ dungeon and inevitably, like everyone else, I mutilated them for various morbid adornments on Chaos Space Marines, scenery and such like. I imagine many people acquired boxes of these chaps just for that purpose. 

"Zombies by their very nature are inconsistent. Skeletons on the other hand, are very consistent." Alan Partridge, 1997.

I unearthed the tragic remains of my old skeletons in their original box recently. Piecing them all back together again like some micro-necromancer, I found I had more or less enough for use in Advanced Heroquest. Painting-wise I tried to match the colour tones in Bruegel's painting, with some success I think. Some had been broken up over the years for banner pole decorations and the like, and one in particular needed a new head. I toyed with the idea of leaving him headless because it would be funny/unsettling, but sadly it just looked like a broken model.

I settled on sticking one of the decorative Heroquest skulls on his neck instead. He was missing a jaw bone of course, but that's fine, those usually fall off when you're dead. His skull was wider than the others though, so I extended his lower spine to balance his proportions slightly, unfortunately making him look like a cross between the exaggeratedly stretched skeletons of Triumph of Death and one of Ken Dodd's diddy men. Ah well, c'est la mort.

To add some variety, or rather because some of these ancient dead were damaged by a cackhanded and careless younger me and the resultant blemishes needed covering, I thought I'd try making a couple that were slightly less decayed than the others. The central axeman therefore has remnants of dried out skin still attached, while one of the sword wielders has a nice head of hair made from static grass painted brown. I find that nothing accentuates the horrors of death as much as the vestiges of life stubbornly clinging on.

Despite being dead and animated against their will, skeletons are at least grinning all the time, it's nice that they stay positive.

Now, the next little project for my boney blokes, aside from repainting their bases brown, is a pink skeleton from the classic arcade game, Golden Axe. This being at the behest of my partner, who asked, nay demanded, I paint a pink skeleton with a "raspberry shield". And I have just the right miniature for it.

You see, Kitty (for that's her name, even if it sounds more like the name of a girl you'd find painted on the side of a 1940s aeroplane, which she'd have absolutely loved by the way) grew up playing Megadrive games with her brother, especially things like Streets of Rage. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology and games publishers wanting to squeeze every last penny out of their properties, we're able to play those games again via the Playstation. 

Aside from the aforementioned Streets of Rage, we've also played all three Golden Axe games. She was somehow particularly taken with the pink skeletons, hence her plea for one to appear in the dungeons of AHQ. I'm happy to oblige and you shall witness the results soon. On the other hand, we've also been regularly playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, but I will not be painting several differently coloured beans as monsters for AHQ. No matter what she says. And that's final. Period. Nor will Dr. Robotnik make an appearance as a "Chaos Sorcerer".

No, AHQ is a serious game. Anyway, like I said, next on the agenda is a candyfloss pink skeleton with a raspberry shield. Bye for now.

Everyone's sick with the plague

It was my dad who painted all the miniatures for our games back in the day. With a white spirits filled egg-cup and enamel paints left over from his model aircraft days, he'd somehow paint entire sets of models in a single evening while I was in bed. I'd come down in the morning and find them lined up on top of the TV or on the sideboard.

He painted all of the miniatures from Heroquest (including the furniture), Space Crusade, Battle Masters and Advanced Heroquest. And he did that so quickly that we could pretty much start playing with fully painted models right from the start. That's quite an achievement in my book, and it added a lot to the enjoyment of the games. 

His paint palette from those days also continues to inspire my own painting style. Limited as he was by the colours he had available for military aircraft and 1:72 scale WW2 infantry, orcs ended up with olive drab skin and dull muddy brown tunics. And... they looked great for it. Of course, he was more or less following Mike McVey's painted examples around the sides of the box, but my dad's orcs in particular, with their dull colours and darker flesh looked proper mean and evil, dirty and filthy like they should be.  

Warhammer Quest orc archer, inspired by my dad's colour scheme.

Above you can see a recent-ish painted example of a Warhammer Quest orc which I painted in a similar set of tones to my dad's original models. Note the clear ancestry of this miniature descending from the Heroquest orc figures. Except that instead of crude (and no doubt very smelly) footwraps, this dude has Doc Martens on. By this point, Citadel's fantasy orcs had started changing overtly into thuggish "bovver boys". It's quite amusing I guess, but not to my taste to be honest. Today, Warhammer orcs have long since become blown-up caricatures of themselves (and they were already caricatures of "traditional" orcs to begin with) and I hate them. Sorry. But seriously, a modern orc's chin alone is bigger than one of Kev Adams's old orcs and has none of the cheeky malice or character. 

Moving on though, a note here on eyes, which brings me to the main subject of this post, sort of.

Back when my dad was working feverishly on the Skaven for Advanced Heroquest, he opted for painting them with yellow eyes. An interesting choice, and looked really good actually. Very animal-like. However, it's a proven fact that evil creatures have red eyes, without exception. The exception that proves the rule was my childhood cat, Tabby. He had green eyes, but, and I have to say this, even by cat standards he really was an evil little shit.

Tabby the twat cat. No photo of him exists where he wasn't genuinely and terrifyingly angry.

So, I departed from my dad's colour scheme there and went for red eyes for my Skaven, as is only true and proper. But again, my dad's Skaven were painted in the same old military enamels, and it's primarily this that inspired my feelings about what Skaven should look like. Mainly dark and grubby.

I mentioned in a previous post not liking how my Skaven looked with ratty flesh-coloured hands and feet, but for plague infected ratscum, I thought it might look nice if their fur had started falling out or something. So experimentally, I tried this on a plague censer bearer. Annoyingly, it looked really good and made me wish I'd done it for the other Skaven too. Especially as I painted a couple of plague related Skaven prior to this one. Oh well.

Only two of these rats are true plague worshippers, but the Night Runner on the right has a slight cold, so it's all good.

I have to say I was pretty pleased with the warpscroll in particular. It required the use of what my partner calls my "spider's foot" paintbrush. I'll leave you for now with the wise words of Trey Azagthoth from Morbid Angel, because it's extremely "Oldhammer". I just made a couple of appropriate corrections to an otherwise perfect lyric.

I call forth the (horned rat /ed)
I call forth the lord of plague

I am of the lost (and damned /ed)

Creatures of spawn of hate

Rejoice in the heaving earth

Praise the ripping sky

Rise spread disease
Consume their puny souls

The ultimate dungeon monsters - the Skaven. Yesyes!

There's something about the Chaos ratmen, Skaven, that makes them perfect antagonists in a Warhammer dungeon adventure. Dungeons are dark, damp and scary places that'd be filled with rats in any case, underground nests being their natural habitat when they aren't lurking about on riverbanks or rifling through my recycling bins. It makes sense that they'd be there, hatching cunning and cruel plots deep beneath the earth.

Furthermore, they aren't derived ultimately from Tolkien or Moorcock so they feel distinctly "Warhammer". Also very typical of early days Warhammer is the Skaven's mix of humour and horror. The idea of an evil "ratman" speaking in Queekish is inherently absurd/funny/cute.

Their mythic origin story seems deeply inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, particularly The Doom That Came to Sarnath. It's perfectly pitched in a "legend has it" style, combined with the fact that the Skaven's existence is generally considered a mere fairytale in the Empire itself.

Anyway, I could write more (a lot more), but for the moment I want to focus on my own initial steps into the kingdom of rats. 

My test subject Warhammer Quest Skaven painted in unlikely royal purple.

Before I regained a copy of Advanced Heroquest (thanks for the overwhelming Christmas present last year, Kitty), I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest, which was Advanced Heroquest's handsome son. Inside were twelve Skaven warriors, pretty similar to the older plastic Skaven pose-wise, but more detailed, more armoured and slightly less hunched over. In fact, as time went on, Skaven miniatures became less and less hunched over, more upright and stronger looking until they resembled muscular monkeys. Which is why everyone knows "manthing JesGoodwin" made the best, most Skaveny Skaven in the 80s and early/mid 90s.

Above you can see my initial painting test subject, Mister Scritchstink. Looking back through old copies of White Dwarf, and indeed, the dark memory cellars of my mind, it was apparent that the hands and feet of Skaven were generally painted flesh coloured, somewhat akin to the pink extremities of real rats. As you can see, I only made a subtle gesture towards that on my first Skaven because the first attempt with fleshy colours looked stupid to my mind. The ears at least should have been fleshy pink though. 

Clothes for rats. I can't imagine that Skaven have tailors, nor a textile industry. But who then makes their attire? Particularly as it all looks fairly uniform and stylistic, a sort of comfy quasi-Medieval outfit of tunic and liripipe. Probably it's best not to think about these things too much, similar to how we ought to ignore Tolkien's orcs talking about a "menu", with the implication that orcish restaurants exist.

Well, maybe Skaven stage regular hold-ups of travelling clothing merchants or something. In any case, I painted Scritchstink with a purple outfit, in keeping with the mid-90s feeling of the model. Really the liripipe should be a different colour to the tunic underneath, but this guy just likes purple a lot, alright? As for purple, it's a very unlikely colour really, purple being the most uncommon colour for textiles due to the rarity, and therefore cost, of the necessary dye. Hence why it was more or less exclusive to royalty. I believe at one point in the Middle-ages it was even forbidden by law for commoners to wear it. 

But, we're talking here about Warhammer, maybe Scritchstink is a regicide with a penchant for stealing clothes, I don't know. And purple contrasts nicely with the otherwise natural colours. That being said, I decided to paint the Advanced Heroquest Skaven in less flamboyant clothing.

Look how hunched they are. I think later sculptors mistook "hunch" for "hench".

It's weird in some ways that Skaven were the main antagonists for Advanced Heroquest, they don't even appear on the main box art. The painting, a somewhat more cartoonish version of the MB Games Heroquest art by Les Edwards, was clearly made to the same brief. I guess there were various commercial reasons why that was so, but nevertheless it felt a bit odd.   

Nonetheless, ecstatic with my new copy of AHQ (yes, by now it's a bit tiring writing the full name each time), I set about painting the included monopose warriors. As you can see, this time the bases were painted a brownish colour to better match the AHQ room and corridor tiles. These models have softer detail than the WHQ version but are still fun and simple to paint. 

I haven't yet painted the full horde, simply because I don't need to. The original idea outlined in the rulebook was to use different colour bases to represent the different Skaven, the sentries, champions and so on. But because I have adult money these days I've sought out proper models for those more specialist types. More on that in a later post. The remaining Skaven I've decided to paint as Clan Pestilens warriors for specific scenarios. More on that later, too.

As mentioned earlier, I went for a more subdued, natural and earthy colour palette for these, adding some brighter colour here and there on the shields for a bit of contrast. I think they look rather nice and give me the grimy, stinking Old World feelings that I crave.

More ratty shenanigans next time, manthings!

Obligatory introductory post(ory).

I've written a couple of so-called "blogs" in the past. They're long dead and buried in concrete like the ambulance from the Salisbury Novichok incident, or Jimmy Savile. You know, just in case.

Unlike those former attempts though, this one will last a bit longer probably. I have better things to be doing actually, but this'll keep my hand in on the old keyboard tapping. I need to because I'm getting rusty and want to finish my novel during my work lunchbreaks. 

At my author's alchemist workbench, I came up with the winning formula of boiling together A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lord of the Rings, adding essence of Roald Dahl, The Worst Witch and a few other bits and pieces. I don't think anyone else has done that yet. I'm making it really obnoxiously middle-class, too. Should make me millions.

At home though, I paint miniatures and play games. It's the usual story for someone my age, I'm afraid. Fed on a diet of 80s fantasy and science fiction TV, films, books, comics, music and general popular culture, I eventually ended up with a copy of Heroquest, probably in 1990 or something.  

Guess what happened next? I developed a chronic tabletop (if the living room floor counts as a "tabletop") gaming addiction and could often be found grimly shooting up with purest Chaos Black Citadel paint at every opportunity, pocket money / Christmas / birthday permitting. 

Then there were some years in the wilderness. I'll save writing about that for my autobiography, which I'll have published on Penguin Modern Classics. Not Penguin Classics, because unlike Morrissey I'm terribly modest.

On my return to Warhammering, I didn't much like what I saw. There was no atmosphere to anything anymore, all too slick and polished, impersonal, dull. Still, having a hankering once more for the sweet highs of fiddling around with little men and rolling dice, I found myself in possession of a new big box Games Workshop game - Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game. It was the Battle of Pellenor Fields box, to be precise.

Some of my MESBG elves, posing heroically in a dark wood for some reason.

The rest of GW's model output now looked more like a line of action figures than anything else, so MESBG (as we wisely prefer to call it) with its somewhat dated, realistically proportioned miniatures suited me.

Now, I've always been a "narrative player", the idea of competitive gaming had always been quite weird to me and was in any case not as common as it is today. It seemed like tabletop gaming had, while I was away, morphed into some analogue version of "e-sport" (a term I find ludicrous and embarrassing). There's nothing wrong with tournaments, but I'm not a fan of the fact that competitive gaming seems to be the default nowadays.

But whatever, I could play as I wanted despite what everyone else seemed to be doing. As good a game as MESBG is though, and it is really good, especially using the Battle Companies book, I felt slightly troubled.

"Troubled" is over-egging it, but being a serious Tolkien-ite I couldn't help feeling that my options for narrative playing with emphasis on one's own imagination and storytelling was limited by the setting. Being set in the Third Age of Middle-earth where the history is well documented meant that battles outside of the known timeline of events felt contrived and weird. My brain and my slavish adherence to avoiding the wrath of Tolkien's ghost is annoying like that.

Then I remembered I'd always been really into World War Two. WW2 was almost as ubiquitous as fantasy and science fiction as far as childhood cultural food went. Before I was pitching little orcs and barbarians against each other, I'd had all my dad's Airfix soldiers to boss around. So, I got into 2nd Edition Bolt Action.

Some of my Bolt Action Soviets, Sovieting and probably Unioning.

Bolt Action was, and is, really good fun. Thinking back to my youthful days of 2nd Edition Warhammer 40,000, I realised I'd never truly enjoyed playing the damn thing. And here I had two games that were genuinely enjoyable (maybe I was just too young back then for anything more complicated than Space Crusade). Something was missing though. Ultimately, I missed that vast Warhammer Old World of the 80s and early 90s. A rich world that served as a sandbox to have adventures of your own in. That Old World map had a lot of blank spaces to explore.

Amazingly I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest from 1995, but what was really beckoning to me from the depths of memory was Advanced Heroquest. A game I had received one Christmas long ago and never really played (too complicated for my puny developing mind to comprehend at the time). I'd lost my copy during the wilderness years, but I could still remember its somewhat cheap-looking black and white rulebook resembling nothing so much as a death metal fanzine, and the overall browniness of its components and box cover.

Here, I am Advanced Heroquesting. That T-junction won't work. Idiot.

It's not just nostalgia, at this point it's aesthetic preference. The feelings and mood conjured by listening to some rough death metal demo tape from the 80s with xeroxed cassette inlay just can't be reached by a shiny professionally produced digital album. You can actually smell it, feel it, taste it. A heavy atmosphere like incense. The same applies to games. 

Warhammer Quest is of course great, the massive Roleplay Book alone was unprecedented, fantastic! But Advanced Heroquest is very different, it's strangely dour, grimy. Death is ever-present. A place where orcs are skinny gangling creatures and would scorn a bright red axe-handle. I'd found my way to what everyone today calls "Oldhammer", and it is sheer magic.

So yes, I'm going to be writing about all of this shit. Probably some other stuff too. Cheers.