New Robed Cultist parts featured are out NOW in resin,
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Hi there, Staffer Liam here with another Conversion Corner blog post!
Recently I have been putting some time into playing some skirmish games with my games group at my FLGS, and we had just picked up and started playing Frostgrave when I was made aware of a resin release we had coming at the studio that made me want to put aside my old war band of miniatures and build a new motley crew of treasure hunters.
That resin release was none other than our brand new redesigned Robed Cultists !!
Robed cultists is a range of resin models that we have been selling for a long time that while it was popular, we can never turn down the opportunity to redesign and improve on old products when inspiration gets its clutches into the CAD team. The Robed Cultists was one of our monthly Digital Patreon bundles we did back in January 2023 that a lot of folks seemed to love, and was one that made 100% sense to release in resin too. So, I got my hands on some of the resin products being manufactured for release and decided to get to work on making a warband !
For those that are unaware, Frostgrave is a fantasy tabletop skirmish game in which you choose a wizard from one of ten schools of magic, select spells, and hire a warband to overcome wandering monsters and solve scenarios in order to capture treasure. As it is a campaign based game, you could be playing with your war band of models over several dozen or more games as they gain experience and level up getting stronger and finding new and exciting magical gear to help fight off other wizards and their warbands. Robed cultists definitely lend themselves thematically to a fantasy style game, so I grabbed a bunch of the new resin parts and a plethora of other bits from our Regiments range and started to work out and put together my team.
As I was using Robed models, I wanted to choose a school of magic that made sense for the style, so I of course went for the summoning school. And what kind of summoner and their apprentice would they be if the models didn't have some sort of representation of their skills on them! So once my Wizard and their Apprentice were built, I grabbed some Birds to use as their summoned familiars. They needed a slightly flashy way to show being summoned from the ether so playing around with different bits I settled on using some of our small flames which I thought if painted right could suffice to show the magical energies being conjured.
With the leadership of my war band sorted, I then sat down to work out what kind of specialists I could afford to hire from my starting old funds, and then how many Thugs and Thieves I would need to fill out the rest of my ranks. As your starting funds are quite limited (your wizard has yet to have scavenged any treasures, so they can't hire everyone !) I decided on adding an Apothecary, a Marksman and an Infantryman and filling up my other spots with a bunch of Thugs.
The Frozen City is a dangerous place, so having an Apothecary as a healer on my team felt like it was a necessity. This was a fun model to make as we had a bunch of existing products I could use to make a cool looking themed fantasy healer. Things like Plague Doctor masks and bottles and vials from our Burning Rose Accessory Pack. As I needed a staff, I grabbed sone of the 2 handed weapons from our Burning Rose range, and just shaved down and trimmed off the weapon parts, and used one of the Robed Cultist banner arms so I had an arm I could position as such that they were standing casually holding it.
And a Marksman made total sense, cause who wouldn't want some sort of overwatch on their folks as they are dragging bountiful piles of loot through the dangerous streets. This one was a super simple build, I used a combination of a Renaissance Rifle stock Arm (right) and a regular Robed Cultist Arm (left) - as the marksman has some Heavy Armour I wanted there to be a representation of that somehow on the model without being fully clad in it. And the Crossbow they use plus their Quiver was simply taken from our Crossbow sprue !
The last non-regular member of the team to then build was the Infantryman. These folks are soldiers that are slightly better armed and trained than your average Thug, and as such wade through the monsters and rival war bands using superior skills and more importantly the reach of a 2 handed weapon ! We had a lot of choices when it came to 2 handed weapons in our Burning Rose range, things like Greatswords and Polearms. But i couldn’t resist using a Halberd as it offers great damage potential as well as decent defence uses too, so it made sense my soldier would be armed that way as there’s a lot of danger on those streets !
With those 5 models built and ready, I just had the bulk of my war band's foot troops left to go. These folks are your normal run-of-the-mill mercenaries, here with your wizard to make a quick buck under the sway of promises of treasures and riches they couldn't even dream of. And since they are your cannon fodder and hired muscle, they tend to be armed looking like as much. As my Wizard is a person able to conjure up and summon magical beasts and creatures, I felt like the Thugs they find on the streets to come with them on the hunts for riches would be amazed and in awe of their power. So much so, they would possibly think the creatures that were summoned were effigies that gave them all power to overcome the challenges ahead. So surely a “Cult” like worship would end up happening amongst the ranks, so to represent that the new Animal Skull Cultist Masks made the perfect choice of heads for the Robed Cultist Bodies, so I totally had to go with that when building them. Their weaponry and equipment was easily represented by using bits from our Regiments range such as Arming Swords and Renaissance War Hammers and adding a few accessories like our new Books and the incense burner from the Robed Cultist Banner Arms sprue I used earlier. And to add a little bit of atmosphere to the model, I used some of our Small Smoke Effects to show the incense burning within.
And with that, my warband was complete ….. Or so I thought !! I then remembered that its best to have everyone supplying a host of objective tokens to mark out the treasures you will able be fighting over. Remembering that its a frozen desolate city of ruins your people are scavenging through, i instantly thought of using something to mark out Grave sites because any good fantasy adventurer knows the best loot is always hidden away in tombs and coffins !
Luckily, we sell a range of Grave and Tomb stones, and some perfect accompanying Candles to make them spooky, so it was a simple enough task to throw together some thematic markers I could use in my games.
Painting up my Warband after I was done was a nice breather from my normal dark and gritty schemes I have been doing as of late, and I found it a real joy to paint the Animal Skull Masks as they had quite of lot of sharp detail to them which really made it easy make them stand out quite a lot against my colour palette.
Now they are ready for adventure, i cannot wait to get them to the tabletop and start digging me up some magic items and taking down some pesky monsters !!
