In the nick of Toad

So I’m going to a tournament, in approximately 12 hours time (from time of writing this) of my beloved GodTear! Now in a standard match of GodTear you use 3 warbands, small group consisting of 1 “champion/demi-god” a handful of followers (anywhere from 1 to 6) and a banner/flag. But to add an extra interesting layer to a a standard tournament you take 4 warbands and then pick which 3 to use after see which scenario you are going to play and which 4 warbands your opponent has. This is actually a rather head scratching part of the game, and possibly the bit I’m the weakest at, but it its interesting!

So for this tournament I chose to take 3 warbands I’ve used before and feel I understand how to play (and have painted), but wanted to add a different 4th warband in. And I’m happy to say this warband is fully painted, now, like just now with ~12 hours to go, perhaps I need to be more organized!

So please let me introduce Halftusk Warden of the Stonekin Isle and the Froglodytes, this chap is a rather large troll type “champion” with lots of health and some nifty regeneration abilities, he has a fair few healed over scars on him to sure this, he also has some rather big fists that he is fairly good a knocking people over with. He is also a Guardian, or blue champion and hence why I have gone with that base rim colour and the hair on the model. With the model having so much skin on show I want to try and do it a little more interesting than a standard skin colour, so I went for a very “over shadowed” off white and its come out close to how I had in my head which is always nice! I really enjoyed painting him, he seemed to flow well and took less layers than I expected, a really nice model to do

His banner (the great tusk) however I must say I found rather dull, I did the rows of mini skulls a different colour to the rest of it to try and get some interest but it is about the most boring banner so far from GodTear which is a bit of a shame but not a massive issue. I did enjoying playing with the base of it, attempting to do volcanic rock (the black bits) from cork with bits of a more sandy look with some light shrubs, to give it a volcanic Island look to go with his title “Warden of the Stodekin Isle”

The 3 Frogodytes where great fun to paint, but to explain why I have painted them the way I have I to give a little background on GodTear. So basically all the old Gods of the world died when everyone forgot about / stopped worshipping them, however they did not die quietly. They fell to the world like comets or “GodTears” and cause mass devastation when then landed, but the power of the old Gods is still in the stones that fell, but its simply to powerful for most mortals and kills them. So where each GodTear fell you have a sort of “radiation zone” so to speak. Now some individuals can touch these GodTears and not die and actually grow in size and power, basically all the champions in the game, and they are now all fighting to get more to go from demi-God to full Godness.

You may be wondering what this has to do with frogs, well in the game the follows, the normal people can not go on the areas of the board where a GodTear is, which fits in with the fluff as the power there would be too much for them and they would die, but the champions can. Now the frogs interestingly are an exception, they are the only followers (so far) that can go on the areas of the board that have GodTears on. In game terms this is interesting as everyone is trying to get them and the Frogs just get in peoples way! But from a model point of view I thought perhaps that is why they look like they do, the have been near this power, they have not grown with it like a champion would but it has sort of warped them. And hence I chose to paint all the little growths different colours, as the residual power of the GodTears affect their flesh.
Now I was rather worried how this might turn out when I thought about it but it actually seemed to work first attempt. All I did was a base colour over the whole model a grey/brown followed by a brown wash, and when this was dry I simply did the bumps randomly with different contrasts paints, sticking to the brighter colours. A simple drybrush all over, some extra details on the face (including doing all the eyes different colours) and done.

Anyhow I best leave it there and pack these models up for tomorrow, I’ll try and get some photos of the tournament and put a post up on it.