Stuff what I been painting

In the run up to Christmas, I though I’d introduce my 10 year old son to some RPG action. I’m old and never progressed beyond AD&D 2nd edition so I dug out my old rule books and we set about creating some characters. My son opted for a fighter, liking the idea of running around with a Katana to beat up the monsters, who duly got named Yo. I plucked a dwarf cleric who my son named Gromli and I also created an Illusionist/Thief called Veron. This small party of three covers all of the bases.

My son has never played an RPG which is great news for me, as I don’t have to think too hard about coming up with adventures and encounters. The old tropes for me are fresh for him. So, we started our adventuring life in a tavern, as that’s where all good adventures start and off we went.

Just to get to grips with the mechanics, the tavern owner had some problems with some giant rats in the cellar. We duly dispatched these before being asked by the captain of the guard to investigate some strange happenings in a local cave. This all went well and my son really seemed to be enjoying it, really getting to grips with the story and his character, Yo.

Next up, we headed for a ruined temple complex to assist a Knight who was searching for a lost holy hammer. There, we encountered a Rust Monster, which I thought would be amusing to see how my son dealt with this as his sword and armour disintegrates. After losing his sword, he said “So my katana has just turned to rust? And the monster is just eating the rust on the floor?”

“Yes, that’s right.” I replied. “What do you want to do next?”

“I’ll pull out the metal spikes that we bought in the village and throw those on the floor. Does the monster start eating those?”

The little sod worked that one out quickly! But I’ve yet to try a mimic!

My son is quite a visual learner and it quickly became apparent that having some miniatures to focus on while playing would really help his experience. I’m aware that there are some out there who, incorrectly, believe that miniatures should not be used in RPGs. But then why own miniatures if you aren’t going to use them?

To get what we wanted, we hopped over to Hero Forge and got to work. Here’s the models of Gromli, Veron and Yo.

I got my son to work on painting Yo. It’s the first miniature that he has painted fully.

Gromli got a standard paint job, at least for a dwarf cleric.

I thought I would try some OSL for Veron. I’ve never tried this before but I’ve always wanted to. For this attempt, I painted the model in its base colours first, then shaded and highlighted as you would do for any model without OSL.

To create the shadows, I then glazed a midnight blue over the areas that I thought would not be getting light from the torch. After each glaze dried, I added another glaze but slowly reducing the area to the most shadowed parts.

I took the opposite approach for the areas that would receive light from the torch, using a yellow/orange glaze and gradually building this up. I think I may have slightly over done this but overall, I think it looks OK.

And here’s the three merry adventurers together.