We are playing some DCC scenarios, DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics) is a new game with an old soul. It has a charming retro flavor from the old school D&D, but it goes further than other retro-clones. If you are in your forties (or more) and are missing those old days of crazy playing D&D almost daily, this is your game!
Past week we played “Old God’s Returns”, a kind of Christmas tale, where a really bad guy, a Christmas party pooper do nasty things (kidnaps kids!).
The name of this guy is Tapjar, and on their ranks has some little helpers and other creepies. Of course, there are no miniature models exactly like this on the market, so, I decided to make some changes in order to get the right stuff on the table.
First changes, on the scenario. The adventure describes the little helpers (Tontuu) like a kind of evil gnomes, I didn’t find gnome miniatures looking as evil as required, but I stumbled on some nice gremlins from Reaper Miniatures these could work really nice. They have pointy hats, huge knives, and huge badass smiles. These miniatures are really tiny, by far the smallest stuff I painted recently, on the photo they are based in 28mm bases, so you can guess the real size.
Second change the Ice Demon, in the scenario it has the shape of a praying mantis, but I decided to replace it by the Reaper Ice Toad, it’s a nice model and IMHO has more relation to water than a praying mantis, and it’s a miniature very fast and easy to paint, shame isn’t a bit bigger.
Last step is Tapjar itself, I decided to go for a conversion, the base model is the Cave Troll sculpted by Ben Siens, I picked the one from Bones range, since these plastic models are much cheaper and the plastic makes them really suitable for conversions.
I beheaded the troll, pulled a wire and started to sculpt my own head based in the scenario art. Tapjar is described as a decaying supernatural creature, humanoid and tall, with a reinder head holding an impressive rack of antlers. He is mangy, dirty and patches of skin tear apart exposing their skull. So I went for a kind of zombie look, thinking on a paint stage with blueish purple tones halfway between frozen and rotten meat with patches of decaying fur, all very nasty. The rank of antlers is like frozen and its the source of an aura looking like the aurora borealis, so I added some basing sand resin to work it like a kind of frozen ice when painting.
A couple of crappy cellphone pictures of the conversion
And some pics of the final model painted, click on the thumbnail for bigger images.
Basing it’s a resin base from fenrys or epsylon( I don’t remember) and Galeforce9 snow.
My 28mm 