WarbossD – Burrows and Badgers – A beginning

Freebeast Warband lead by Orlando the otter.

Orlando – Otter – One-handed weapon, bow, 5 broadhead arrows – 51 pennies

Brother Bertrand – Mole monk – Mages pouch – 30 pennies

Sister Celina – Mouse nun – Mages pouch – 24 pennies

Brave Magoo – Mole mercenary – Two-handed weapon, heavy armour, healing potion – 30 pennies

Lieutenant Dorcas – Tortoise – One-handed weapon, light armour, heavy shield – 36 pennies

Warband total 300 pennies

Rogue Warband lead by Black Magraw

Black Magraw – Raven mage – Staff, Mages focus – 40 pennies

Scurvy Jack – Black rat – One-handed weapon, pistol – 33 pennies

Little Kenny – Mouse burglar – One-handed weapon, light armour, rope and hook – 24 pennies

Sly Sylvester – Fox – Pistol, 5 superior black powder – 43 pennies

Reg the nose – Beagle – One-handed weapon, light armour, scent masker – 30 pennies

Warband total – 298 pennies

The models are great. Just enough detail to bring them to life but not so burdened with fiddly components that they became a chore to paint.

Recently I’ve been using Army Painter Quickshade to produce great looking models quite quickly and I wanted to go with this for these models. Being metal models the shading step will also make the base coats extremely robust to wear when handling the metal models during highlighting.

The brown earthy tones of the ‘dip’ technique should really suit the natural colour tones I am planning of using to make thew models feel grounded and ‘real’. Although in fairness I only ever apply with Quickshade with an old brush as I find the dipping technique often lays the shade on way too thick and pooling is a real problem.

Another advantage for me is the Vallejo Model Color range of paints that I favour have many subtle tones of brown, green and grey which mean there are many ways to differentiate models parts without resorting to exotic and off the wall colour schemes.

To begin I wanted to just lay down neat base colours and then using an appropriate shade over the top.

The images above show the base colours used for the represented models, and I think give the general idea. While some of the browns and green would probably stand a coat of strong tone I will generally use soft tone to avoid over muting the red and orange tones on some of the models.

Unfortunately there is no obvious entry point for Burrows and Badgers currently, e.g. a two player starter set. Fortunately the staff at the BNB booth at UK Games Expo were really helpful.

Basically the advice I got was, buy any number of models but not more than ten in total and no more than two ‘huge’ models. This would give me enough to make either two small starter warbands or a single regular warband.

My good friends David S. and David W. helped me to pull together nine models that frankly looked like they would be cool to paint.

These nine models, a core rulebook and a couple of terrain pieces came to just over £100. Shoppers at UKGE were also given a free mouse burglar promo miniature so this made my starting pool of models ten.

A couple of days studying the rulebook and I broke this down into two 5 model warbands worth 300 and 298 pennies respectively.

Otter – 1-hand weapon, bow, broadhead arrows x 5

Mole monk – mages pouch

Mouse nun – mages pouch

Mole mercenary – 2-hand weapon, heavy armour, healing potion

Tortoise – 1-hand weapon, light armour, heavy shield

Raven mage – staff, mages focus

Black rate – 1-hand weapon, pistol

Mouse burglar – 1-hand weapon, light armour, rope and hook

Fox – pistol, superior black powder x 5

Beagle – 1-hand weapon, light armour, scent masker