Painting a female archer

Introduction

The moment I saw this Kickstarter, I knew I had to have some of those miniatures. I waited a while for it, but it was worth it. The first one to be painted is the female archer, to be used in our games of MAGUS.

Light skintone

Menace in the Zarek Valley - Hunger Games

The adventurers carried on towards the next village: Travensburg. At this session, we started with only 3 players, with 1 additional to arrive later in. As such, I allowed for the characters present to take a shortcut through the forests, while the "idle" characters drove the carts the long way around.

Painting a female Frost Giant

Introduction

A proper giant miniature I have from Reaper. The gear and clothing have a distinctly Eskimo feel as opposed to the Viking culture the Frost Giants posses in the lore, but I do find the sculpt charming.

Menace in the Zarek Valley - Witch hunt

After a few days of riding the wagons, the party arrived at the outskirts of the first village they intended to visit: Naola, to the south.

Happy blogversary - 400 posts reached!

With my last post published, Ender's crafts has reached 400 posts. Real life duties kept me from writing a longer celebratory article, but at least I got around to updating the blog header text - it is quite out of date as of now.

For posterity:

I recently got into wargaming and PnP RPG-s. As these are quite expensive hobbies, I've tried some home-made and low budget solutions - this is where I will share my ideas and work.

New version:

Documenting the winding journey from beginning wargaming and PnP RPG-s, through low budget solutions, to a growing collection of painted miniatures and a veritable chronicle of games and campaigns.

Of course, the blog isn't going anywhere. Let us continue with the DnD adventures in the Zarek Valley!

Menace in the Zarek Valley - Intro

The plot hook was simple. With such a disparate party of adventurers, there was only one thing to tie them together: a desire to go... somewhere. As such, they met unwittingly in a large city to be hired by a travelling wizard as guards on a trip to a far away mountain range: the Spine of the World.[1] I left no time for making acquaintances. In a condensed travel montage, the adventurers were forced to move at a brutal pace set by the elderly wizard. Was he truly elderly? After leaving the city's outskirts, he seemed to move with way more alacrity than his supposed age allowed. So maybe. Maybe not.

After a couple weeks of grueling travel, the adventurers reached a mountain range - at this point, they were way too tired to care which or where. The wizard did a disappearing act, and so the party was left in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do.

Menace in the Zarek Valley

As I looked up the pictures from our very first session, I realized... that it was two (2!) years ago. Well, I've gotten old.

We had previously finished our 4E adventure in May 2016. After a short break, we planned to get back into the game in July. It needed some preparation, though.

Storm King's part 14 - Slay the RED DRAGON!!!

Our DM invited us over for this session (we usually take turns on who’s hosting the game night)[1]. We knew it was his birthday and he wanted to share a few drinks with us ON THE HOUSE.

Painting a female Storm Giant

Introduction

Our Storm King's Thunder campaign features more than 3d printed giants! I do have a couple of proper minis, including this one from Reaper. The description says it's a cloud giant, but the campaign is centered on prominent Storm Giants, so... ssshhh! (Although the players first met this mini as Zephyra the cloud giant.)

Gemstones (red and green)

The idea is to go from a dark base color to a light spot on the lower end of the gemstone, then a white spot highlight in the upper half. This gives the illusion of a translucent surface.

Storm King's part 13 - Fireball at 150ft

We decided before the game that we will play a prank on the players that missed the last session when we managed to solve the puzzle (Solid and Ren). Let them also solve the puzzle and see the HELL we’ve been through the last session. We won the DM to our side so we started the session in front of the puzzely portal again.

Painting an evil sorceress

Introduction

After painting Jace, I decided to do Liliana with the same "dark magic" motif.