The big lad is done! I added some extra highlighting to his face and the highest points on his body, and of course no self-respecting bat-demon-thing would be complete without some blood effects.
Plus, I started Qulathis the Exile, one of the other heroes, before dinner and have made this much progress on her already.
FINALLY did some more painting tonight! I'm working on the Vargskyr from Warhammer Quest, the huge bat/demon thing that's the first of the big bads we need to kill in the campaign and I want to make sure it's actually properly painted before we kill it. 😅 The Vargskyr itself is done, I just need to do the basing for it. I'm making good use of the box of skulls I got for Christmas to make a much more interesting-looking base, and I've included one of the skeleton warriors to give a sense of scale of just how enormous this thing actually is.
I also didn't realise I hadn't done any of the Warhammer Quest miniatures since August. 😬 Just haven't been in the painting headspace I guess, but hopefully this'll get me back.
We had another visit from @wobin today for more Warhammer Quest!
We're at the point where we need to fight the first big bad before we can level up to Level 2, and it's a two-part quest. The first, which is what we did today, was similar to our previous one where the map is built as you go and you have to stay ahead of the Suffocating Gravetide, and it represents fighting your way towards the big bad's lair. We did that quite handily this time, and player of the match definitely goes to my dwarf Dagnai Holdenstock who is an absolute close combat BEAST when he inspires. I don't think he missed a single attack roll once he inspired.
We didn't have time to do the second half, so we packed everything away and will do it when @wobin is back from his trip to Japan. It's a "Hunt" journey type, but the map is fixed and so are the specific hostiles you encounter as well. Very keen to see how this goes, especially because your characters keep all of their current statuses when you start the second part (so two of our four champions are inspired, and the other two are only one point away from it).
We had @wobin over for Warhammer Quest and a barbecue today!
The Warhammer Quest journey type was "Scavenge" so we could get some gear and currency to level up, it was a similar kind of deal to the others where the map is pre-made, but oh my god I don't think I've EVER seen as poor rolling as @wobin had today. At one point he spent all four of his activation dice making attacks without hitting a single thing, and that was rolling the equivalent of a 3+. 😫 I think he made one single attack successfully, and ended up getting wailed upon by a Kosargi Night Guard which mean he had three grevious wound counters and so had to rely on one activation dice and whatever spare Destiny dice we had left. In the previous game we'd upgraded his character with a piece of equipment that let him attempt to recover wounds on a 4+ instead of a 5+, and literally every single role he made for this he failed. We had @yayKM roll two of them, and she made one success and failed the other.
Thankfully, nobody ended up dying and we did actually get a good stash of stuff and have some good upgrades for the next game, but oh man.
Our Warhammer Quest adventures continued tonight, and HOO BOY was this one rough, mostly due to having an absolute SHOCKER on the dice rolling!
We played a "Deliverance" journey type, the story is that there's an evil all-consuming spell, the Suffocating Gravetide, wandering the streets that you need to outrun, and you need to warn the citizens of Ulfenkarn as you go so they can get inside and stay safe. The token that represents the Gravetide moves along one board section at a time and you need to stay in front of it or else you take two damage, and the board section that it was previously is destroyed along with any hostiles. The board itself isn't laid out ahead of time unlike the other journeys, instead you build it as you go by pulling from a deck and putting the appropriate tile down that's shown on the card along with any hostiles. There's a "Nightfall" token that moves along a track, and if you've taken enough turns and it gets to the end, all of the enemies are empowered and are significantly nastier (it represents night falling and all the undead becoming more powerful). We got fucked on that twice by rolling on the event table at the end of the turn and ending up on the "Move the Nightfall token one further space" and ended up having to fight the empowered hostiles much earlier than we otherwise should have, and we also had two "You don't get any Destiny dice at the start of next turn" results too (the Destiny dice are a pool of extra dice that the heroes can use in addition to their normal activation dice).
The "Warn the citizens" bit is an action that requires an activation dice result of 6 so if you've rolled really poorly you might not be able to do it that turn, and to be successful in the mission requires eight warnings. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been too bad, but as I mentioned before we had just dreadful rolls for like everything. As an example, @yayKM rolled five dice that would require a roll of 3+ to be successful attacks, and only succeeded on one of them. There were also multiple really bad rolls on defence AND attempting to heal wounds, to the point that we weren't entirely sure we were going to succeed in the mission without everyone being taken out of action.
As it was, we made it by the skin of our teeth, of @yayKM's two heroes one had taken three grievous wounds (out of a maximum of four before you're out of action) and the other had two, and one of my heroes also had two grievous wound counters as well. We had a final fight where we needed to get past a group of hostiles, and JUST BARELY made it by having @yayKM's extremely witchhunter manage to just limp into the final board section and trigger the last warning we needed to end the game. And just as a final "Fuck you", the roll on the very final event table at the end was dreadful too and all the heroes had to discard their treasure cards.
We had @wobin over today for a game of Warhammer Quest and it was excellent fun!
@yayKM and I had previously planned to do a Deliverance journey type for our next game since if you're successful it reduces the fear level of the populace of Ulfenkarn (if it hits 10, you lose, and we were currently at 7), but we hadn't actually done that other journey type before and for introducing @wobin to the game we figured it'd be easier just to do a Hunt since that was what we'd played all the previous games so far and were familiar with it.
All the characters levelled up which means they get some additional traits, but it also means the hostiles we face next game are more numerous too!
Tonight I finished my favourite miniature of the Cursed City box, Gorslav the Gravekeeper. I didn't realise until I was painting it that the headgear thing is actually a bunch of bones poking out of the top!
Got another set of skeleton warriors finished, plus the first of the bosses, Watch Captain Halgrim! The gravestones in the front are markers used in the game that the Deadwalker zombies can spawn from so you need make sure you destroy them quickly lest you be overwhelmed.
I also took the opportunity to add some of the new blue/white grasses to the bases of the heroes for some more visual interest.
We played our second game of Warhammer Quest this afternoon! Another success, though it was looking a bit dicey at one point. The journey type we were playing was a "Hunt" where you need to kill ten hostile champions before you can finish it, but very thematically the zombies have no champion-type miniature in their groups so they just serve to slow you down. Play of the game went to my dwarf who single-handedly decimated a horde of hostiles (you'll have to excuse the lack of fully-painted miniatures because I ran out of the painted ones and had to resort to the half-painted ones I'd been working on earlier in the day).
Once you achieve the completion condition for whatever journey type you're playing, you need to retreat to the extraction point and once your heroes are all there, THAT is when the game ends. Today we had a classic movie feel because one of the last hostiles to spawn was one of the really nasty boss types, we ended up being able to avoid fighting him but it was a rush to the extraction point before he caught up with us!
Next in the seemingly never-ending flood of painting, we have a Kosargi Night Guard! He was surprisingly quick to paint since there's not too many little details, but I think my favourite part is the basing. Rather than trying to create a spot for a pool of swamp water, I just loaded up the base with the muddy ground texture as normal, painted it, and then carefully put the swamp water in the hollows where water would naturally collect anyway.
(The skeleton warrior next to him is the one from a couple of weeks ago and is there for scale since there wasn't any other way to really show how large the Kosargi is!)