Sunday 29 April 2018

“We are now starting our Descent...”

In my last post, I alluded to exciting things happening. Primarily, the cause of this has been my birthday, which is always the point in the year where I forget all my promises about working through existing projects and ask for and buy big boxes of new figures for games I don’t play.

Last year it was The Walking Dead and Terminator, both of which are still ongoing. This year, it’s happened again...twice.

One of the big boxes of new stuff is Descent from Fantasy Flight Games, which I’ve acquired due to my enjoyment of playing through the Imperial Assault campaigns run by Pete. Descent is essentially the forerunner of Imperial Assault and given that buying and painting a game I’ve already played through seemed odd (even if it is Star Wars), I decided to take the plunge into the fantasy world of Terrinoth.



Obviously this means painting is required. A lot of painting. I’ve tried to keep thinks simple and quick, so that I can plough through the plastic pile. Therefore, don’t expect to see my best work on this stuff.

You’ll also notice that even though the miniatures are single sculpts, I’ve painted one of each group slightly differently, usually involving red. This is because the game divides monsters into minions, which come in cream coloured plastic, and the slightly tougher masters, which are red plastic. I wanted to keep a simple visual cue for the players to know what they’re up against.



The goblins aren’t great models. They are small and spindly, the arrows are sculpted oddly and the had quite a lot of flash to clean. They’ve turned out okay, just don’t look too close.



I like the cave spiders. Mainly because, to my mind, giant spiders are the quintessential fantasy gribbly (I blame Tolkien), and back when I used to run D&D sessions, I would always try to sneak a spider or nine into an adventure.

Unlike the other models, these needed removing from their bases to paint and base them. I probably should have done more highlighting, but they’ll do.



Of the three groups I’ve done so far, I like the Barghests (sort of zombie wolves) the most. This is because the combination of drybrushing and washes (my painting ‘techniques’) works best on fur, and slopping on some Citadel Blood for the Blood God also lifts what could have been some quite flat and featureless areas on the zombie side of the models.

And that’s it for now. Expect to see some Descent monsters and characters popping up fairly regularly, as I want to start a campaign fairly soon.

And as for the second big box of figures? There was something else I liked about Imperial Assault, beyond the gameplay...that should give you a clue...

5 comments:

  1. They all look good and the consistent basing brings them together nicely.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks. Not my best by a long chalk, but they’ll do.

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  2. 'Descent' is an excellent game (which I recently aquired and the models are better than average 'tokens' for game. I will no doubt get around to paintng mine, but I don't hold out much hope of getting them anywhere near as good yours or others I've seen.

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