I painted up a batch of Frostgrave Cultists to use as henchmen last week and was pretty pleased with them.  Pleased enough that I had to do more!

This is the original batch of 7.  2 crossbowmen, 2 two-handed weapon guys (infantrymen), 1 scarier two-handed weapon guy (templar), 1 dual-wielding guy (treasure hunter), 1 jackass with a stick with nails in it (thug).

On Thursday, I ran them with some painted Bones wizards as Wizard & Apprentice, which was okay except the scale and style was all wrong.  So: new wizards:

The Apprentice is just a Cultist model; the staff is brass rod and a Skaven skull. The Wizard is an Empire Battle Wizard (still one of my favorite kits) with a head and staff top swap.  Nothing fancy, but it doesn’t have to be, does it?  The Skaven stuff is incidental: I needed spooky evil looking bits and as it turns out I have a lot of Skaven bits.

I’d planned on making their hoods and mantles purple, to make them stand out from the henchmen, but decided that would make them too cartoonish.  I think the brown is almost as effective without being stupid looking.

I’ve built another seven henchmen, but just painted these three with the wizard: a sword-wielding guy (thief), a sword and bowman (marksman or ranger), and a spear and dagger guy (treasure hunter).  I’ve got two archers and two men-at-arms that will have to wait until after the big NOVA push to get painted.

I’ve definitely started to prefer the face’d heads over the hooded heads.  It’s a shame that the models with faces are in that next, tbd batch.

Observation: there are no right-handed dagger hands on any of these Frostgrave kits.  It seems like there’s a strong motivation to take a lot of thieves, but you kind of can’t build them with the kits.  Lots of off-hand daggers, but then even worse left-hand options.

Here’s another group shot.