Monthly Archives: September 2015

Citadel C18 Night Horrors – Ghoul and Golem

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Dating from 1986 (Ghoul) and somewhere between then and 1988 (Golem), these two models originally hailed from Citadel’s Night Horrors range that started off as a kind of Gothic Horror/Hammer Horror/Cthulhu-esque range that covered everything from Ghosts, Ghouls, Vampires, Witches, Werewolves, Mummies, Headless Spectres, Wights, Devils, Demons (no æ!) and everything in between. Most of that stuff got rolled into the V̶a̶m̶p̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶C̶o̶u̶n̶t̶s̶ Undead army and as such was replaced fully in the early-mid 1990’s with official models wearing big hats, but despite some rough sculpts in the Night Horror range, others still hold up very well today.

Citadel C18 Night Horrors - Ghoul and Golem

C18 Night Horrors – Ghoul and Golem

These two models are in the upper-mid tier of those models in my opinion. They’re still decent models today, though nothing amazing. They’re not embarrassingly bad either, though. Which is always a bonus. The ghoul was probably the first non-skeleton undead model I ever painted, and served as a bit of a template for models through to this day. Using Citadel’s “Rotting Flesh” paint, shaded with purple for an unnatural and horrible effect. I’m sure I got the idea from an old ‘eavy Metal article (remember when Blanche and co used to write about their painting techniques?) or at the very least, some pictures in ‘eavy Metal. The ghoul is pretty much as I painted him back in the 1990’s, with some touching up and maybe some updated blending.

Citadel C18 Night Horrors - Ghoul and Golem

Rear View of the Undead Night Horrors

The Golem is a much more recent one. Well, started a year or two ago and finished this year a couple of months ago. I followed the same palette as the Ghoul and decided to paint the “stitches” as staples, because it just seems a bit nastier. I may have been planning to use the Golem as a Blood Bowl player at one point, but clearly never got around to it. No great loss!

These two will be rolled into Undead Army units at some stage, but they also sit happily in reserve for any kind of Fantasy Roleplaying or D&D-style boardgames.

Who Let The Dogs Out? Zombicide Dog Companions

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I’ve been waiting ages to use that awful pun. I just had to finish the last of the six Zombicide dogs first.

Zombicide Dog Companions, American Bulldogs

Moog and Gapard, the American Bulldogs

The American Bulldogs were the first dogs I got finished. I attempted to pretty much match the dogs up to their appropriate artwork, but also did their collars and leads in slightly different colours so that players could have a secondary colour thing to latch into visually. Also, six black collars and leads would have been boring.

Zombicide Dog Companions, German Shepherds

Martens and Bismuth, the German Shepherds

After finishing the Bulldogs, the others sat on my desk for literally months until I managed to force myself to paint the German Shepherds. Martens is easily my favourite paintjob of the bunch.

Zombicide Dog Companions, Blue Heelers

Lucien and Cherry, the Blue Heelers

And finally, I finished the last of the Blue Heelers. I didn’t mind doing Cherry, the ginger-brown one, but Lucian was annoying as all hell to do.

Despite the fact that they all came up pretty decently, I really didn’t enjoy painting the dogs. I’m not sure why, but I kinda just lost interest in them after the Bulldogs were done, and at that point they became a chore. It might have been the smaller size, or perhaps trying to match the colours closely to the figures’ cards. I’m really not sure.

I’ve seen people clip the stands off the dog models and glue them directly to their bases, but my group tends to play Zombicide a lot, and as a result, all of the models get a lot of handling. This means they need to be and stay especially robust – no flimsy models wanted here, and if I did the clipping I’d be concerned that their leaping poses with few contact points simply wouldn’t hold up to the amount of play that we do.

They provide a very powerful buff in the game. Our group no longer really bothers to give the Dogs much in the way of commands or orders except for occasionally early on in the game if someone lacks a decent melee weapon. We also use them for the extra search action, but mostly we use them for the bonus dice to melee attacks. We’re about to finish the Season 2 campaign done vanilla-style, excepting the addition of a few extra survivors so the 4 of us can play with 2 characters each, but once that’s done, we’ll be combining everything together and there’ll be some really nasty melee-centric characters. 2x Claw Hammers with 2x American Pitbulls and the Gas Mask? 14 dice melee per action that can take out any number of Vanilla, Toxic or Berserker Walkers, Runners or Zombie Dogs and the Pitbulls’ damage of 2 as backup for Fatty duties? Ouch!