Monsterpocalypse – Task Master

Sometimes a change of “scenery” can help get you going in our hobby and that was the case for me this week. I decided to work on another small part of the ongoing Kaiju diorama and was pleasantly surprised to wrap it up in time for another weekly update. Since I got a late start on the hobby week by posting on Monday, I wasn’t sure I’d manage. Let’s take a quick look at this little guy with the only other miniature for this faction I’ve painted thus far.

While the Task Master is certainly bigger than the Spitter, its still pretty small but with some nice details. It was enjoyable to work with pinks and purples again as well. I don’t think the pinks come out quite right in these photos compared to how they look in-hand so I’m curious what the bigger miniatures will look like. These miniatures are so small that my camera doesn’t do as well as normal too. Here’s a quick look at Task Master next to a Vault dweller. It might be wider but its otherwise quite small.

Its worth mentioning that I really enjoyed painting something Lovecraftian again. I’ve talked about it before but I cut my teeth painting Mansions of Madness: Second Edition miniatures when I got back into the hobby roughly 9 years ago and so that will always bring me a bit of nostalgia. I reckon that I’ve certainly improved since then though picking better quality sculpts doesn’t hurt either. Man, those were some rough ones but I didn’t know any better back then!

Other than that, I can share that I bought a couple of minis for potential “mini-display” projects. They just shipped so I won’t have them until next week and I won’t spoil what they are just yet. I will tease you a bit and say that one is Fantasy Japanese and the other is traditional fantasy. The big question is the sculpt/miniature quality. There’s reason to think it will be good enough but I’ve also been disappointed by these miniature lines in the past so time will tell.

Truthfully, I’ve been looking around at all kinds of miniatures for ideas this week and some of my initial ideas have proven harder than I expected. The first is Roman stuff. I’ve looked over Warlord Games Hail Caesar line and to my overly discerning eyes, everything is old and outdated. The minis look a bit small and they definitely lack in detail. Here is an example of some sculpts inspired by the show Rome. While I know that scale mail like that was very much in vogue in the 2000’s (and I’m sure other periods of miniatures), it is really hard to do anything interesting with it using NMM.

Fortunately, there is a higher quality alternative for Roman miniatures. Victrix Miniatures are not lacking in detail at all and look to be high enough sculpt quality for dioramas. The only issue is that while they’re not quite mono-pose but aren’t as flexible as I would have expected for a plastic kit. That really limits what you can do diorama-wise to pretty predictable battle scenes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that but it isn’t as exciting to work on as I’d like. It is also easy to painting a ton of miniatures when trying to create a decent scene which is a trap, I can’t afford to fall into right now.

Moving on from the Romans for now, there are some nice looking Egyptian and Greek sculpts from Crocodile Games. They’re not as detailed as Victrix and you can tell that they are hand sculpted using the traditional means. For some of you readers, this might make you feel a bit nostalgic for the olden days. I remember metal miniatures well and I understand to some degree why people like them for gaming. They’re sturdy and feel good on the table. They are not so great for display painting because the surface tends to be rougher than plastic or resin. They also tend to have poor eye and even face sculpts which make those a lot harder to do well with. Here is an example of a Greek mini that has some real strengths and weaknesses.

This miniature looks perfect for some kind of post-battle scene and channels Hector very nicely. However, the concerns I listed above have kept me from pulling the trigger so far. This one is very inexpensive $10 so I’m not out much if I decide to pick it up, though I am a little gun shy as I’ve almost uniformly been disappointed with metal miniatures’ quality.

Crocodile Games’ Egyptian stuff is less human-like and leans into fantasy more so it might work better though finding Egyptian terrain/basing bits is not as easy as you might expect. I’ve found a few interesting pieces but some of them are going to be hard to get and expensive since I live in the States. So Egyptian stuff is TBD for now and I can always resort to The Old World’s Tomb Kings (which I am a big fan of) if I decide ultimately to not pursue Wargods of Aegyptus. I will get to this setting one day as I’d love to bring the visual splendor of Ancient Egypt to life.

And by Crom, there’s one other idea I just had yesterday that might lead to something one day. I think Conan would be great in a 28mm/32mm display project as you can show him in an environment against some foes. There’s tons of larger scale Conan minis and some of them are nice but they mostly show Conan glaring at someone or something. I don’t know a lot about Avatars of War, though its pretty obvious that they were trying to be Warhammer alternatives back in the day, but they made some cool Conan/barbarian minis which are still available via 3D printing. So who knows, perhaps the Cimmerian will be captured in a diorama down the line if I can work out an impressive enough scene.

So that’s where things stand at the moment. Plenty of ideas, though if talk is cheap than display painting ideas aren’t much better. I’ve had tons of them over the years, more than I can execute in a lifetime probably so we’ll see what I can actually manage. There will certainly be some experimentation needed here as well but hopefully I’ll figure out some miniatures that work well for me and create some interesting art from all of this in the end. I look forward to revealing more next week and I have no idea what I’ll be working on next week either so there will be surprises all around!