Vessel of Judgement Commission - Part 1

So James, one of the guys at my LGS who plays Menoth, Retribution, and now also Khador, got a Vessel of Judgement and wanted me to paint it for him. He magnetized it up so that it wouldn't be such a pain to transport.

So here are all the pieces minus the priesty dude. I might have knocked his head off, so I'll have to go back and pin that so it can't happen again.

Now, with the magnetization, it should be easier to paint since I can just pull the people out of the way. It turns out that the magnets hold okay together, but not really strong enough to be able to move the base just by holding the top of the Vessel. To fix that and to keep the chains onto the buff dude, I put in some pins for this thing. I pinned the chains to the Vessel, and they'll also glue in to the buff dude. I put two little pins into the back wheel section so that the magnets holds the piece close, and the pins keep the pieces aligned. This way, a little sheering force won't knock the piece off. I also put in a big pin that runs from the bottom of the base, through the large wheel section to the pipes section. It's fairly snug, so now just holding the top of the Vessel can pick everything up.

As you can see, I have tile on the base, just done by using a lot of GS, some water, and a piece of screen. The rest of the base will hopefully be suitably deserty.

So when it's put together, it'll look something like this:

As for the actual painting, James wanted something like the studio paint scheme. Seeing as I've never actually painted anything Menoth before, and how large this model is, I opted for using the Army Painter Skeleton Bone Primer to get everything in the right shade. This is where I'm at so far after a thin layer of bleached bone on top of the primer (plus a couple washes on the base and buff dude).

It looks like the white color shouldn't be too hard to build up from this, which is nice. I'm going to try and finish a quick basecoat of the bleached bone all over the white sections of this model before busting out the metals on this bad boy.

SDE Denizens, Round 1

I was able to get some more painting done last night and decided to crank out some denizens. These guys are brutal in the game, as long as you still have your egg clutch on the board I don't know why you would want to spawn kobolds unless you had no denizens left to spawn.

Charmeleon...err I mean a whelp.

Wyrmling

Hatchlings

My favorite model so far, the egg clutch spawning point

The entirety of my painted SDE set

I'm finding that I can keep to my painting goals fairly well. There were some gaps in the Whelp and the base of the Wyrmling that I would have liked to fill but I told myself this is a board game, get over it and paint them! So far the minis are quick and fun to paint so I don't see myself losing interest any time soon. Queue 3 months of silence about painting SDE...

SDE Paladin WIP

I started working on my first SDE mini last night. I'm coming at these minis differently than usual. Basically the look of the overall set is more important than the individual minis. Meaning, I'd rather have a fully painted set than a few really stellar models. With that in mind I'm trying to keep the paint techniques and style simple. For example:

1) I'm only doing a basecoat and rough highlights. This will allow me to move quickly but I think it will also add to the pixelated 8-bit feel.

2) I'm not doing NMM but I'm not using metallic paints either. Metallic paints take a long time for me and I think they'll stand out oddly against the cartoony feel of the minis. In Legend of Zelda Link's sword doesn't shimmer and shine. It's a brown stick but you still know it's a sword. So my steels will be grey and my golds will be yellow but I think you'll still be able to tell that it's a sword, not a grey stick.

3) Paint the heroes, dip the mobs. Yes that's right this will be my first foray into dipping. I plan on painting the heroes, drakes, mini-bosses and boss by hand but all the kobolds are getting dipped. I just need to decide what color their skin will be so I can get that color primer for Christmas. At this point I'm thinking blue.

With all that said here's my Paladin. I'm calling him a WIP because there's some touchups I'd like to do (stray paint etc)but in the interest of getting everything painted I'm moving on.

Super Dungeon Explore Boxing

There are plenty of Super Dungeon Explore unboxing videos and reviews out there so I thought I'd just do a boxing post in which we all admire the box that SDE comes in. Sounds like fun right!

Here is the box in all of its glory. The first thing I noticed about the box was how big and heavy it is. Quite the impressive product based on girth alone. If you squint you can see a fully grown man standing to the side of the box, engulfed in its shadow as the sheer awesomeness of SDE overshadows him. I have to say the cardboard is a little thin, if you run you hand across the box you can feel the corrugation. But in the less than 24 hours that I've had it the box has held up admirably.

Like many boxes this one has 4 sides. Here are some pictures of those sides (with bonus uncropped knees if you're into that sort of thing).

The box also has a back which details the contents of the box and gives a description of the game. For those of you who like to read the last page of a book first you may be tempted to skip right to the back of the box, but don't let that distract you from savoring the box in its entirety.

A unique feature of this box is that it opens to reveal objects stored inside of it. Here we can see what awaits us when we fold up the lid of the box:

So there you have it, a complete box review of Super Dungeon Explore. What's that you say? You want me to press on further into the labyrinth mysteries of this box? Well the people have spoken!

The first things that will greet you upon opening the box is the rulebook and two (count them two!) sheets of double sided counters:

After that we have the 5 double sided dungeon tiles and the adventure tracker:

And below that we have a plastic tray with dice, cards and a big ol' bag of minis:

And a short while later the Heroes are assembled:

And there you have it. My Super Dungeon Explore experiences to date.