Hordes of the Things - 10mm Wizard and Hero

I very quickly prepped and primed most of the Coppelstone Castings 10mm Fantasy stuff that arrived the other day and then got painting them. I finished up two of the elements I'm making out of them - a Hero and a Magician...

Hero and Magician! 

I have other Hero and Magician elements that I'm making out of the assorted packs of miniature, and most of those will have more than one (usually at least three or four) miniatures per base! These ones for various reasons ended up on the bases on their own. 

Barbarian Hero

This one struck me as looking a little like Conan the Barbarian. While Conan was known to sometimes adventure with companions, there weren't really any included in the pack, so I decided to just do this guy on his own, which I thought was kind of funny... It does make him look like a bit of a super badass if he's out there all on his own taking on entire units of enemies... 

In the second edition of Hordes of the Things it has a number of army lists for the various kingdoms mentioned in the Conan series. It suggests using a system similar to a postal campaign once run by Tony Bath where there is only ONE Hero element available in the campaign - Conan - and he is diced for each year. 

That got me to thinking and another option for a campaign involving a wandering barbarian that devastates entire armies could take some inspiration from Groo the Wanderer - have him available to be "summoned" by any player much in the way that Gods and Dragons are summoned to the battlefield with the expenditure of 6 PIPs... at which point he arrives at a board edge and can be activated by the summoning player... until the opponents spends 6 PIPs... at which point the thick-headed barbarian gets confused and starts fighting for the other side! 

Magician

This wizard came in the Evil Characters pack and is clearly inspired by Sauruman... There were some Orcs in the pack and a dire wolf and I was tempted to add them to the base. OR I thought I could use him as a necromancer to lead the Undead army and put some skeletons - or one of the spare skeleton command elements on his base. But then I decided I wasn't particularly fond of either of these ideas. I had a better idea for a necromancer and... do Orcs really need an old white human dude to lead them!? Ultimately I decided he should just be a generic wizard dude and could be included in any of the Generic Medieval (Human) armies... though one of the less-than-ethical ones and maybe he's a little bit evil... 

Also with this figure, as with most of the others from the Coppelstone packs (which are mostly miniatures that are clearly inspired by Lord of the Rings characters!) I was initially tempted to paint him in white robes like Sauruman... but then decided I didn't NEED to do that. I'm not planning to play a campaign set in Middle Earth. This guy isn't going to BE Sauruman. So I didn't need to take my inspiration for painting schemes from him! 

Hero versus Magician... Someone's going down! (it's a mutual instant death situation - unless the roll is tied - Hero adds +5, Magician adds +4, if the Hero's total is higher the magician is destroyed, if the Magicians total is higher the Hero is Ensorcelled!) 

I'll probably have more of these characters rolling off the workbench over the next few days/weeks... I am, at this point, COMPLETELY DISTRACTED from the other things I was trying to get done - assorted sci-fi minis for a Five Parsecs from Home: Planetfall campaign and the last few things needed for Warhammer Quest: Cursed City - WHICH WE ARE ACTIVELY PLAYING RIGHT NOW!? 

Ah well... I find that trying to FIGHT where the inspiration is taking me just means NOTHING gets done... so I'm going to work on these and see if I can't get enough done to actually PLAY Hordes of the Things!