Upcoming Project: Dungeon Fiends

This is the Dungeon Fiends Starter set by Creative Sculpt Studio. I picked it up from their Kickstarter, though they're now available from retail.

I got these assembled while my wife was away over New Year, and I've now managed to get some photos of them before I start painting.

I picked them up for nostalgia reasons, so decided I wanted to go for an old school feel to the bases as well. I ordered some resin hexagonal bases from Fenris Games. Appropriately, I went with the "Dungeon Labyrinth" design.

There's a good selection of monsters. There's two zombies - one of a peasant or lower class corpse, while the other is a better armed and armoured figure, perhaps a guard or noble's retinue before his demise?

I had a bit of a dilemma for the cave troll miniature. This is clearly a more trained one, sufficient to wear some primitive armour and wield a weapon. The standard D&D stats for trolls have them all as large or above, so I had to consider if I'd find a larger base for him. Given the size of the model, I decided to stick with the hexagonal bases. I might come up with some fun rules and background for a slightly smaller troll, or just place him across four squares depending on how I need to use him.

The bug man is a fun weird model that isn't a typical D&D monster, but he should be an interesting monster to homebrew. The text for him suggests he might be a cursed noble, but there's plenty of options you could use.

The sentient slime is another interesting weirdness that should be a fun challenge for players. It's an opportunity for a weird paint job too.

One of my early hobby memories is reading "Best of White Dwarf Scenarios 3", which included an advert for Games Workshop's Adventurer's Starter Set and Monsters Starter Set. I never bought the miniatures, as I'd picked the magazine up as a back issue as it was, but there's a strong nostalgia feel to that.

This hobgoblin could definitely imagine being in a similar release or set at the time. It's not a style I've painted much, so I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

I'm less of a fan of the wraith sculpt from the set, but I'll see if I can come up with something that makes me like the sculpt a little more when I'm painting it.

Finally, we have the giant mutant snail. It's got a weird mouth and an eye stalk, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it pretty horrid.

I'm going to be treating these as a little "mini project" rather than as a set of individual miniatures to paint, because they have a bit of value to me as a set, even though they're going to have individual paint schemes.