Byron's Quest #1 The Trial - January Rank and File (384 points)

 

This month the Quest begins! We open the quest book to Quest #1, The Trial.

This is the introductory quest to Heroquest. It introduces each monster type and throws the players into a modestly difficult dungeon in which players who do not take the game seriously will most assuredly lose at least one party member. 

Since it is my object to paint the miniatures from 3 copies of Heroquest (I also got a copy of the Return of the Witch Lord too...) rather than merely those of a single game, I have decided to paint up all of the miniatures needed for a given Quest as my monthly entries. The tricky element is that each quest uses a different assortment of miniatures, and it was difficult to make the final numbers add up to 3 whole boxes over 4 rank and file months, but I found a combination of quests that gets reasonably close. 

The Trial contains the following monsters:

6 Orcs

4 Goblins (5, accidentally miscounted at the start of the month)

1 Fimir

4 Skeletons

2 Zombies

2 Mummies

3 Chaos Warriors

1 Gargoyle.

This is for a total of 384 points. 

Now, the astute among you will quickly realize "Wait a minute! Heroquest doesn't have points!" And you would be correct. However, the ultimate goal of this project is the creation of a Warhammer/Heroquest Army and I won't be daunted by such inconsequentialities. Instead I have written (still WiP at this point) my own Armylist compatible with 4th and 5th edition. This army list borrows the appropriate points calculations described in Warhammer 2nd ed (and carried forward until Tuomas Pirinen got his hands on Warhammer in 6th ed.) and should, therefore, be fair and balanced. In future posts I will share my progress toward a full Army of Zargon bestiary including characterful rules for the army, the various types of minions, as well as all of the named baddies in the questbook. 

Onto the miniatures! Undoubtedly what we all immediately scroll down to see and pass all of the pointless text that we all include as a formality. 

The wizard enters the first room and encounters 2 orcs!

A Fimir and Goblin guard the weapons wrack

Two chaos warriors guard an empty chest. Terribly let down to a deadly fight. 

Two greenskins up to no good. 

Goblins minding their own business, still need to be ruthlessly murdered by our "Heroes"

this is the goblin I forgot to count. :(

Skeletons!

The guardian of Fellmarg's Tomb denies passage

Fellmarg's tomb about to be ransacked by righteous heroes. 

The final battle against Verag, the foul Gargoyle. 

Additional notes on the project
The bases are done old school, they are just sand and cereal box cardboard. However, to get the right layered effect on the stones the carboard was repeatedly folded one direction so all the creases were parallel. I then opted to paint the rims a light grey. I made this decision because I wanted to match the lighter stone color of the game board and late 80s/90s game boards. (Compare the brightness of the original Space Hulk to the later 3rd and 4th ed Space Hulk tiles.) Sadly, I think this ended up making the bases look a tad wintery rather than stoney.

I painted every model with the same "primer" of Incubi Darkness. All shades were a combination of the midtone and incubi darkness, and all highlights were a combination of the midtone and lighter rotting flesh color (Foundry's Cadaverous Flesh Light C). The hope was to give everything a unified hue despite the variety of monster types and that some lacked the central Burgundy/Khaki color scheme.

Finally, I aimed to give each model a strong shadow effect so they look like they are coming out of the grimy dark into a sickly light. This is the first time I have tried object source lighting. I don't think I will do this again for another army, though I will continue it for the duration of this OWAC.