Not, not that Muriel, though when I looked up the name of this thing, it’s what immediately came to mind and still won’t leave – despite not even having seen the film(!) Anyway, another D&D monster from the board games I’ve got, this time one who is a named character/villain in the lore. Apparently, Murial’s potted backstory is such: “A capable fighter in his youth, Muiral was recruited by Halaster as a bodyguard but soon he started studying under Halaster as a wizard. He learned to magically graft materials together. When Halaster broke off all contact, he descended into madness, grafting his torso onto the body of a giant scorpion to better engage in combat.”

So… okay. The more I see and read about these D&D monsters, the less silly Warhammer lore appears by comparison. Bombastic and overblown, for sure, but wow this D&D stuff is silly.

In the artwork I was able to find of Murial, he appears to be depicted both with green skin/carapace as well as brown. I clearly said “fuck all that” and went for a eye-meltingly bright, boiled-lobster-red. This did leave me with a little obstacle to overcome in that I wanted to make his face pop just a little, and if I’g gone for browns then a blend to flesh tones would have been simple, though it appears to have still come out okay with a red-to-ruddy-fleshtones approach. And with all this red, the eyes just had to be yellowy-green, natch.

This model is actually one of the more recent in my collection, oddly. I only picked up the Dungeon of the Mad Mage box last June, making this model an absolute newbie in terms of how long I’ve had it before adding paint to it, though it’s still long enough to qualify for Ann’s “Neglected But Not Forgotten” painting challenge. One reason it even took this long is because I prefer to sculpt some basic flagstones on the bases of the larger D&D models, but getting in between all those legs…. so instead, it sat on my desk for months, primed. That was until the other day when I got distracted from my previous distraction for Swordmaster’s Monster March painting challenge – so this figure also marks the first of my (hopefully many) submissions for that painting challenge…