Building Armies

So what happens when you play table top games and war games and have a 3D printer at your disposal? Well, first you go through all sorts of problems to get it to work. And then it works for a bit and you run into all sorts of new problems. All the while you are printing off as much as you can of various bits and pieces of all sorts of things.

The Orkish Necro and his apprentice.

Of course, along the way, the people you play a game with, start talking about other games. So, you end up, without thinking of what you are getting yourself into, printing off some minis for a game you didn’t know you wanted to play.

Yeah, I ran into a concept of something I would like to do for the game Frostgrave. Well, before I realized where I was with everything I had a small army for the game plus extra minis for switching out as I desire and what not. The problem I had originally, I only had a goblin shaman. I liked the look of it but I needed something more for the whole idea of the team.

Before you know it, the war room is filled with new models that need paint.

One thing led to another and I ended up finding and printing a bunch of fantasy styled orks. I wanted this team to be some what of a mashed together cluster of oddities. So as I dug through thingiverse, I found all manner of stuff to meet the needs.

Stylistically, the grouping doesn’t quite match. But I like it like that. My main drive was to get the sizes right so I didn’t have super small goblins and super huge orcs. The finished minis need to fit within a 28mm gaming framework.

Of course, I don’t have any bases for all these minis, and those are fairly important. So a few runs with the printer and I have more than enough bases for all of the models. Amazing what you can work your way through if you have the tools to do what you want.

And if you didn’t notice in the pictures, everything is at base coat level. Yep, I haven’t gotten much farther than that since I am still printing out stuff for use in all sorts of places. And that is the problem I realized with all this. I have a ton of stuff to paint again. I remember at one point I was down to about 12 minis that still needed to be painted. I’m well over triple that now. And that doesn’t take into account the terrain pieces I have been working on.

It’s that age old feast or famine. And I have so much in front of me right now I don’t know where to begin. Most of the minis now aren’t even glued to there bases. I’ve reached a point where I find it easier to print a mini without a base as well as get it painted before I put it on a base.

I guess we are at a point right now where the lockdowns are working for gamers. Since we can’t really play in stores and such right now, we have all this free time to paint our minis. Yeah, cause that’s going to happen. The list of things I still want to print out is actually longer than the number of things I still have to paint. It’s a vicious cycle that may never end. Probably could help to get another printer or two. But then what do you do if you ever run out of things to print?

Anyway, I actually picked up the hardcover edition of the Frostgrave 2nd edition rule book. I may actually have to learn how to play this one at some point.

Gaming, there is always something to be done to advance your hobbies…

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