They stir, but do not wake…

So, weekly progress starts with the cultists and the Serpent Men. Just a few finishing touches required here and there, and then basing. Serpent Men just need basing really. Cultists need cult glyphs and skin shading, along with inked spellbooks.

 Tsathoggua, the Formless Spawn, and the Wizards. Wizards got a lot of progress this week, as did the Formless Spawn, which are now nearly done save for basing and the last stage on the teeth.

Mother Hydra, something I have completed this week. The flesh is about 17 different stages of layering, washes, highlights, and glazes.

The scales were metallic blue, with a wash of Secret Weapon Stormcloud, followed by a thick coat of my iridescent blue-gold paint.

And another angle on Mother Hydra, better showing off the hair (painted to be like kelp), and the gill slits down her side. Most unwholesome.

The fins on her arms were painted the same way as the scales.

From N'kai, and the Abyssal Depths (WIP)

So, another week down, and some more painting done. Also got to play a 3-player game of Nemesis on Tuesday night (the Intruders won).

So, on to the painting. First up are the cultists. They just need speelbooks, faction glyphs, and some skin. The example cultist on the left has albino skin, which I think is most fitting for the cave dwelling Sleeper faction. The Serpent Men in the background just need some more runes on their cloaks, and then basing. They're actually the closest models to being complete.

The Formless spawn. Full OSL on the mouth and teeth of the finished model, and ready to apply the orange candycoat after shading and drybrushing the rest of them.

Wizards, who have rather more paint than last time. I finally decided to go with a naturalistic scheme, and have the riders orange robes be the tie in with the faction colour (along with the bases, that is).

The blue OSL from the beasts maw may or may not extend across the base, I'm not sure yet.

Tsathoggua, flesh and fur done, and 'arm rocks' glowing like the Formless Spawn. Said rocks also need an orange candycoat to knock the colour back a bit.

This is Mother Hydra, my other painting project for when doing so much orange/bronze/gold drives me nuts. I've gone for blue-green metallic mer-scales, with an unhealthy swarthy but greenish flesh.

The 'hair' is going to be painted like kelp, but only has a shade layer down right now.

Another view of Mother Hydra. The gill slits down her side will be painted pink inside, to look as much like fish gills as possible.

She's meant to be most unwholesome, and in-game serves as a maternal counterpart to Father Dagon's crippling influence.

Stirrings in lightless N'kai

With the recent move I've found a lot more time to be painting. It's quite good actually, and means my Sleeper forces are progressing apace.

The cultists so far. The one on the left is nearly complete (spellbook, basing & glyph required), the others are in various stages of having the finishing touches done.








This is the Formless Spawn, just one for now as I try to figure out how best to integrate black and orange into a unified scheme. Most of it is reverse highlights (highlighting as if the light source was underneath) using mixes of black and orange, then an orange candy coat, and some OSL for the mouths.

The Wizards in the background haven't seen much love, but I'm still working out a hybrid scheme for them and their bonded creatures.

The back of a Serpent Man's cloak. It may be a bit hard to see the ophidian runes (really just Futhark, with some angles changed to soft curves) around the edges, but the Sleeper glyph in the middle helps set off the block colour wonderfully.

The big gribbly himself only has some basic colouring for fur and flesh, but I plan to do the 'rocks' on his arms in the same way as the bodies of the Formless Spawn in order to tie them together.

New Year, New Yig

So at the end of last year I didn't get a lot done due to preparations for moving house, and all the crap involved with that (and a number of screw-ups and damages along the way, most of which came from the moving companies).

Anyway, onto the new year, and I've already completed one monster this year: Yig, Father of Snakes.

This is the father of snakes. In Mythos lore he turns those that have displeased him into snakes, specifically spotted snakes. As such, a number of the snakes making up his 'head' are spotted, speckled, or use patched patterns found on vipers and pythons.

The other snakes are far more colourful, ranging from deadly coral snakes and the infamous black mamba to the relatively harmless milk snake and the emerald tree boa.

I figure the father of snakes should represent as many families of snake as possible…









The view from the back of Yig. The plates were given a heavy drybrush of khaki over over a german green-brown base, followed by a wash of chestnut ink, then another moderate drybrush of khaki and a highlighting drybrush of buff.

The scales had the base, but were given a highlight of 50/50 khaki/buff before the wash. The belly scutes (more visible in other pictures) were painted buff, then given a shading wash of 3:2 stone:dark sepia.

A low angle view showing off what puny mortals might see.

The rocks were painted much like the back plates, but used desert yellow for the heavy drybrush, and a wash using the same mix as the belly scutes for the recesses, then a very thin wash to knock back some chalky highlights.

They break through…

So, it's been a while since my last post. A long while. In that time a lot has happened. Most importantly for the blog, I've completed painting another faction for Cthulhu Wars. In this case, Opener of the Way.

This is the entire faction. The standard six cultists, plus assorted monsters, and of course a Great Old One.

 Only a little thing, but the power and Doom markers are important. In this case, for the Doom marker (the coin) I've gone for a heat discoloured metal look. I chose Titanium to model it off (instead of another metal) because Titanium has an interesting oxide gradient, from straw, to brown, to purple, then on to white. For the obvious reason I stopped at purple. The colours were achieved using a combination of washes and Vallejo transparent colours.

The cultists, and once again I've given everyone a different spellbook, and have tried to paint the Opener symbol on everyone's robes. Not too clear in these pictures, unfortunately.

 Another shot of the cultists. Of note is the variation in skin tones. As Opener can start anywhere, I decided their cultists should be a multi-cultural bunch, including light, dark, middle eastern, and Asian skin tones.

The mutants. These are the basic monsters, and I've tried to do them justice by combining techniques used on both the cultists (skin tones) and other monsters (tentacle shading).

Opener's units are special in that once a particular spellbook is acquired, they can upgrade through successive forms, culminating in the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth.

These guys are the Abominations. This is what mutants turn into when they survive a battle with the aforementioned spellbook. They're also pretty good in combat, and contribute to another spellbook that lets you rain hellfire upon any location on the map.

Another picture, highlighting the tentacle shading, and other wrongness—like extra eyes where no eyes should ever be. 

 The Spawn of Yog-Sothoth. These guys were interesting to paint, being mostly smooth surfaces on one side, and convoluted masses on the other. The tentacles were shaded as for the Abominations above, and then given a light coat of iridescent blue. Said light coat turned out to be stronger than expected, but I like the effect.

These are the backs of the Spawns. Simple shading on the purple, combined with a tar/slime trail on the bases made from 1:1:2 vallejo transparent blue:transparent red:water effect. These are some of the strongest combat monsters in the game, and costly because of it. When upgrading—if they choose to—they instead explode into as many mutants as you have available, allowing the upgrade chain to begin again. 

And here we have the great gribbly himself (itself?): Yog-Sothoth, the key and the guardian of the gate. He's unique in game terms in that he also counts as a gate, allowing monsters to be summoned through him, meaning a bodyguard is never far away. He can also move gates (friendly or enemy), along with Abominations and Spawns, allowing Opener to completely restructure the map if he wants to.

Another view, showing off the 'universe orbs' Yog-Sothoth is composed of. It took several stages to paint each orb, starting with rich purple, then using a drybrush to flick white paint on to create stars, then washes for nebulae, followed by a thin coat of vallejo candy black, and another thin coat of iridescent purple.

The veins were the old GW Hawk Turquoise, highlighted with vallejo off-white, rather than straight white.

The upper tentacles (blue-silver/red) were painted with a basecoat of medium grey, then a wash of GW red ink, then liberally coated in iridescent blue to give a shifting purple/pink appearance. The fleshy bits were painted to look as unnatural as possible—for why should something so large and strange have human flesh anywhere? The flesh is also to tie into the flesh colours of the other monsters in the faction, which were at one point quite disturbingly human.

The base is painted to resemble dark granite, inspired by the mention of the rocky hills in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". This was done with a very dark grey base, drybrushed with GW Adeptus Battlegrey, followed by Army Painter Uniform Grey as an even lighter drybrush.

The glowing symbols were done using simple OSL techniques, starting with a thinner than usual paint, then highlighting only the centre of each symbol. The 'tar' effect is the same as was mentioned for the Spawns.

And now, for those that stayed that long, the next item on my list: Sleeper

The Winter has come

So, I have (finally) managed to finish painting my Windwalker, using a ton of different techniques from two brush blending and wetbrushing to snow basing.

So, this is everyone (and thing) for the Windwalker faction. The shades of blue I had to mix, and mix, and mix again…

Anyway, I tried to keep the colours pale, and the palette somewhat pastel, to offset the very bright splashes of spot colours.

 Cultists; once again with unique spellbooks. My attempts at painting the Windwalker symbol on their tabards seem to have come out well enough.

 Rhan-Tegoth, the lesser of the arctic nasties Windwalker can summon. He's moderately expensive, but doesn't even need a gate. He's also pretty much unkillable.

For his colouration I was inspired by the electric blue crayfish.

 The ice age. Windwalker has a spellbook that casts a map area into an ice age in order to impede your opponents. This is just a fancy marker for that.

I used a combination of blending, drybrushing, glazes, and washes to get the final effect—shared with Rhan-Tegoth's base, above.

 Ithaqua, the arctic wind. Okay, I'll admit, if I could I'd have made this guy transparent—he's meant to be ectoplasm/personified wind. A lot of drybrushing was involved here, and some subtle two-brush blending for the 'breath' which I was hoping to make look like the borealis, or maybe a nebula.

 These are Gnoph-Kehs. Their spellbook allows them to inflict a free kill if they get killed in battles. Berserkergang, and it gets very messy.

Also, getting blood on fur to look even remotely right is really difficult.

Last up, the Wendigos, cannibalistic monsters that can drive out enemies with a fearsome howl. Their spellbook also allows them to be spawned from other people's battles, provided at least 1 kill was inflicted.

Mid-winter Cthulhu-mas [Onslaught 2 Unboxing]

So, a couple of days back I got my Onslaught 2 kickstarter for Cthulhu Wars, rounding out my collection (no, it's not *everything* in the range, but it's close). So, without further ado, some pictures.

This is the Tcho-Tcho faction, who play quite differently to the others: They only have a single monster type, but they get 3 High Priests (which the faction abilities revolve around). Their Great Old One, Ubbo-Sathla, is actually free to summon—if you do so in the Doom phase. The faction as a whole is very powerful in the early game, but loses steam in the late game due to reliance on those High Priests for so many abilities.

This is Byatis, the Toad of Berkely. It can't move, but it's got good combat dice.

Byatis's unique spellbook allows it to sucker in nearby enemy cultists to capture or kill, so not moving isn't so terrible then.

Tzulscha, the great leveler. Tzulscha's signature ability is to grant you a bonus Doom, Power, and Elder sign if anyone has more than you.

Tzulscha's unique spellbook turns the normally costly Ritual of Annihilation into a source of power instead—but the ritual grants you no score as a result.




These two are the Great Old One Nyogtha, the serpent twins. Even while separated across the board they can still act in concert—whenever one takes action, the other may perform the same action for free; and if one is engaged in battle, the other gets to declare a battle for free.

Nyogtha's unique spellbook allows the second 'head' to be reawakened on the cheap if it gets killed.

This is Gobogeg, a complete unique Great Old One. He can only be summoned late game, but is incredibly powerful both in battle and outside of it. In battle he can cause all units involved to suffer damage if they haven't already got a damage result. Outside of battle, any time a Great Old One is awakened, the owning player gets a 6 power refund.

Gobogeg's unique spellbook is very meta: Whoever controls him at the end of the game gets to choose all factions, expansions, and so forth for the next game.

These are the Dreamlands surface monsters. Shantaks (the winged dragon-esque things) are super mobile—they can move anywhere on the board(s) in a single action, and carry a cultist with them for free.

Gnorri's (snake demons) are Doom generators. More of them in play, more bonus Doom points.

Moonbeasts (toads?) are disruptive little buggers, and when first summoned are placed on an enemy spellbook, negating it for a turn, or until they pay a Doom to remove it.

Underworld monsters for the Dreamlands. Leng Spiders are not major dice, but they convert 2 Pains to a Kill in battle, which has some interesting uses.

Gugs (the gorrilla-esque monsters) are cheap, major combat dice—but they're clumsy, and cannot capture Cultists.

Ghasts are horde monsters, good only for capturing Cultists or soaking damage. That said, when summoned, you always summon all 4 at once.

 The Yuggoth map. Like Earth, it's a contiguous map with wraparound left and right edges. On the left board is the slime sea, where Slime Molds can be summoned. One the right board is the Green Pyramid, where the Watcher slumbers. The gameplay dynamic seems like it will be quite different from both the Earth and the Dreamlands maps.

Yuggoth monsters. The six Slime Molds are only minor combat dice, but they can change allegiance depending on who controls the slime sea overlook.

The Watcher is much like the Bhole from the Dreamlands—just much scarier. If the Watcher is awoken, he attacks the Green Pyramid area, once per player in the game, and cannot be permanently killed.

A size comparison between map types (something I'd not thought to photograph last time I did an unboxing). On the left is a 6-8 player board for Yuggoth's Green Pyramid. On the right is the 3-5 player board for the same region.

The 3-5 player board is 20" x 20", the 6-8 player board is 24" x 24", it might not sound like much, but it increases the play area per board from 400 sq in to 576 sq in.

 Next we have the final part of the Onslaught 2 Kickstarter: The Omega Rulebook. This has all the rules, FAQs, parts lists, and so forth for every expansion. It also includes a free bonus expansion for having unique High Priests (just ability cards, no models).

The book itself is an excellent resource (as it should be), the rules layout is clear and easy to understand, while there are also lavish illustrations and artworks throughout, along with pictures of all the shinies. (Sadly no gallery of painted sets—but hey, can't have everything).

 One of the artwork spreads, showing both line and final painting of a 3D gate model.










Art/summary page for The Sleeper faction, showing Tsathoggua, tips on stopping Sleeper, and their victory/epilogue brief.