Roll out the Barrel…. Conan’s Adventure Pack Barrels

Like a fair few other people in our hobby, I backed the Conan Kickstarter a couple of years ago, and also like many of us, I had my first wave of stuff arrive recently. Now I only got around to taking the stuff out of the shipping boxes last week, and frankly, I haven’t had the time to look further into the actual boxed game or the equally huge “Kickstarter Extras” box. Boxes. I got two King Pledges… 😉

Conan’s Adventure Pack. Sans Barrels…

What I did do while I was cleaning up in the War Room and making space to put the Conan stuff onto one of the shelves was notice how nice the models in some of the add-on boxes looked. Specifically, the “Adventure Pack”. The models looked really fine, baby. That is to say that they looked very finely detailed. Much moreso than anything I’d expect to get from a boardgame, and moreso from a kickstarter boardgame where the usual reaction to the models is “yeah, these are pretty decent” or a sadly unsurprising disappointment. After seeing Subedai get busy with some of his Conan models, I thought “why not?” and opened up the adventure pack to paint the contents as they looked like they’d paint up nice and quickly.

Monolith Games Conan board game Adventure Pack Barrels

…and here are Conan’s Barrels.

So that’s what we have here. Barrels. I haven’t started on the other stuff yet, but the barrels are pretty nice for what they are. I usually paint my barrels up in the standard, admittedly boring way that most of us do. Dark brown wood, metal hoops. Job done. Nothing wrong with that, but with posts by Dagger and Brush on building trees with realistic bark colours resonating in the back of my head, I decided to paint these ones so that they looked a little more …realistic? worn? aged? So they would look like they’ve been left outside in the elements for their time. Faded, stained wood and rusted metal.

Monolith Games Conan board game Adventure Pack Barrels

Conan’s barrels. Stacked. Somewhat..

Primed white, base coated with Vallejo Skeleton Bone coloured primer and then drybrushed with Reaper HD Arctic Grey. Hoops painted with Vallejo Plate Mail Metal coloured primer and then painted over with very-thinned Vallejo Model Air Light Rust and Orange Rust. The whole thing then washed with 50-50 Army Painter Soft tone wash and windex, and then with Citadel Nuln Oil Gloss. Gloss Polyurethane varnish, followed by Testor’s Dullcote. I’ve got that down here fo rmy future reference in case I end up with more of these barrels or want to recreate the exact look. It’s annoying when you paint everything that you have of some kind of scenery, and then find more somewhere, and then can’t remember exactly how you did them. I found some more of those Confrontation walls recently, and so now instead of having painted them more or less instantly, they’re just sitting there. In fact, I’ve lost them again somewhere. Bah.

Monolith Games Conan board game Adventure Pack Barrels, Stonehaven Dwarf Berserker, Reaper Miniatures Dwarf Pathfinder, Eureka Miniatures Beowulf

Norsemen and their Norse Dwarf cousins discuss the best way to provide scale shots for barrels.

After checking the Kickstarter details, I see that each core pledge box comes with an extra 5 chests. Add those to the 5 in the accessories box and I’ll have 15 chests to paint up. They’re pretty finely detailed, but the thing stopping me from blasting through them now is working out how to paint them. Wood? Iron? Bronze? It’s bloody exhausting!

Vikings, þrjú!

The next post of my small Viking project. A couple of weeks ago, when I got up on the morning of Christmas Eve 2016, I decided to paint up some Vikings, and see if I could get them done by Boxing Day. I very deliberately selected four figures. Two of them were the berserker pair that, while now part of the Foundry catalogue are ex-Citadel models from the truly Oldhammer days. Before everything was All-Warhammer, All The Time, Citadel has small ranges of Normans, Vikings and Feudals under the Fighters/F4 category. When Bryan Ansell resurrected Wargames Foundry as a Historicals company while purging the historical ranges from Citadel, he moved a large number of moulds across that he deemed appropriate. The two berserkers here were amongst the models who made the trip, and as such, are still available today.

Citadel F4 Fighters Norse Vikings, Wargames Foundry Viking Berserkers - VNS003

Erik and Thorir the Ex-Citadel Foundry Vikings.

I actually owned both models back in the day. Erik, the model with the 2-handed daneaxe was broken at some stage, losing the axe and chunks of both arms – while Thorir, gazing at the sky, was simply lost to time. I notice that there are a couple of other old models that I always liked still available in the Foundry ex- range, so I’ll have to do another Foundry order before too long to pick them up. I should point out though that all of these models, like my other painted vikings in the above-linked posts came courtesy of the Cannon man from work.

Citadel F4 Fighters Norse Vikings, Wargames Foundry Viking Berserkers - VNS003

These two were painted very quickly, and done on time. While painting them, I noticed the shield boss on Thorir’s shield. This was unfortunate, as I’d selected all four figures based on getting them done quickly, so the two old-school models that were mostly flesh and pants, and the other two that had a good amount of armour and chain on them – and no shields amongst them! So…. erm.

Citadel F4 Fighters Norse Vikings, Wargames Foundry Viking Berserkers - VNS003, Eureka Miniatures Beowulf the Geat

It took until the first days of 2017 before I got around to painting the shield. I decided on using muted tones for it, to go well with the muted and earthy tones I’d used for both berserkers’ clothing and gear. While I didn’t get the shield pattern perfect, I’m happy with how it came out nonetheless. At the same time I also fished out the model who is the Warlord for the moment – Eureka Miniatures’ Beowulf the Geat – and added some small freehand ravens to his shield, which makes a vast difference to the model in my opinion. I can’t fathom why Nik’s Beowulf range doesn’t have “Viking” keyworded anywhere in it. I’ll have to ring him and point it out since it can’t be helping his online sales. I know that technically, Beowulf predates Vikings by several hundred years, but when you’re selling miniatures…

Vikings with Daneaxes

The next pair of Vikings are essentially “just some guys”. I’m not sure of their manufacturers, though I think it’s pretty safe that they’re from different ranges given the difference in sculpt style. If/when I find out where they’re from, I’ll update. In the meantime I have nothing particularly interesting to write about them.

Vikings with Daneaxes

I used a little more in the way of the colour palette on these guys, but still kept them quite muted.

28mm Viking Miniatures Warband

All together now….

Finally, a group shot of all my completed Vikings to date. There are quite a few more where they came from!