Miniatures For The Mummy's Mask Adventure Path (Pathfinder)- Part One **SPOILERS** (update 5/15!)

Okay, okay- I know that the title of the blog clearly identifies its focus on modern and post apocalyptic minis and all that, but I'm about to run the Mummy's Mask Adventure Path for Pathfinder, and I've gone just a touch insane over making minis.

Now I need to confess right off the bat that I absolutely do not need to get any new minis to run this game.  I have scads and scads of mins.  I have oodles of minis (each oodle being equal to 2.3 scads.)  I have TONS of minis (almost literally, since plenty are lead.)  When my two Bones Vampire level boxes arrived, they huddled together for comfort, being so outnumbered in this strange new environment (it's cool now, they've mingled and made new friends.)

I may not have every creature in the module, but I have 'close enough' matches to accurately represent the type and size of each encounter and still maintain a semblance of accuracy.  So there really was no need to take any special steps to prepare for this adventure path.

Buuuuuut...

The fever is upon me.  It started simply enough; "I don't own a sandling mini.  I bet I could make one.") And before I knew it, I was making and converting every mini in the first module, even ones that I already had acceptable minis of.

Sigh.  Obsession.

So here I have posted photos of my OCD modeling project.  This first batch are all from the first 'dungeon' of the first book in the adventure path.  That means THAT THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY! YAARRGGHH!



SERIOUSLY: ACHTUNG!  SPOILERS BELOW!  IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING THIS MODULE AS A PLAYER, DO NOT LOOK AHEAD.  Go look at cute pictures of cats or something.

You have been warned.

 

The first critter the PC's will face is your basic scorpion.  Many of you may recognize this guy as a 'dust scorpion' from Reaper, which is now part of the Bones line.  This was perhaps the mini I was most excited to see rendered in Bonesium, as I frequently need hordes of size small/medium scorpions in fantasy games (especially when you have a summoner on the team) as well as being useful for other games (they will see extensive use in my Fallout game...)

The next foe the party will encounter is a trio of tiny animated objects, in the form of carved statuettes that are part of a military diorama in the first tomb.  This meant I needed some smaller than life size Egyptian themed figures.  That's where Arcane Legions came in.

Arcane Legion was a sadly doomed attempt to cash in on the tabletop mass fantasy wargame market, by appealing to more casual gamers.  The price point on starters was quite low, and minis were available prepainted or not, and the rules were designed to be easy to learn and play.  But it failed.

This is great news for jackals like me who wait for games to be marked down so that we can swoop in and pick up plastic minis for cheap!  However, I had learned that the game is in a 25mm scale, and it was a hard 25mm (close to a 22mm or so.)  There is simply no way one could use Arcane Legion minis next to regular sized minis (let alone Heroclix mods,) as the Legion minis would be dwarfed by the 28mm ones.

But I had a plan!  Years ago, when game stores started dumping their Arcane Legion sets, I decided to pick up two infantry starter sets, one Egyptian, the other Han Chinese.  The Han Chinese troops looked like the famed terracotta warriors, and I just knew that one day I would have an army of those things in either a D&D  or Cthulhu one shot, and being a little bit shorter would not matter, as the actual terracotta warriors were not that tall (under six feet.)  And the Egyptian troops would be painted to be ushabti (tomb guardian statues,) so being shorter also would not be an issue.

Unfortunately, I did not realize quite what the size difference was, so my terracotta warriors are about half sized, rather than simply the shorter end of life-sized like the real thing.  They will still work, but all the PC's will feel like NBA stars.  Worse though, I did not realize that the Egyptian set was mostly mummies.  There were a few human archers, and some Greek and Roman auxiliaries (dressed in obvious armor,) but all the melee guys were clearly desiccated forms with screamy mouths.  They would never do as ushabti, and unless I had a tomb full of halfling mummies, they were otherwise useless.  So I sat on them for a few years.

When I saw I would need some little armed ushabti for this adventure, I got them out and looked again.  I decided to use two of the archers, and realized I could convert a couple of the Greek auxiliaries by trimming off their crested helms and using putty to create nemes-style head cloths, then swap out the Greek xiphos blade for one of the khopeshes that the mummies carried.  Paint them appropriately and voila!

The paint job is rough, not just because they are really small and I'm lazy and only using them once; I also wanted to represent the models as the looked.  The guy in back with the ridiculous eye is intentional, if one looks at the source material (including the picture in the module,) one will see what I mean.

Here is a shot of them with a Bones mini for scale.  Perhaps more 'small' than 'tiny,' but still a preferable size to work with.  I added a fourth just for fun.



 Back view.  Those shields are actually snipped off the ends of some of those safety covers you stick into power outlets when you have small children.

Moving on through the tomb of Akhentapi, the party will face a sandling, an old school critter from the original Fiend Folio, now found in the Tome of Horrors Complete.  It is a size large critter composed of sand, that strikes forward like a snake:

The one on the right, officer, that's him!

I did not have a mini that specifically fit this description, but it seemed a snap to make.  So I did:

 

I started with a paper clip armature, bent into the general shape.  Then I molded the body around the wire using some really cheap plumber's putty (the kind that is no good for sculpting and smells like cat urine.)  Once that was set and sanded, I painted it with white glue and dipped it in sand.  Then I drybrushed the hell out of it and called it a day.  It did not turn out stellar, but damn if it isn't a sandling.

Giant spiders are a staple of low-level adventures.  But one does not find many actual spiders in the deserts of Egypt (or Osirion, the Pathfinder world equivalent)  Thus the module features solifugids; the so-called sun spiders that do roam the deserts of that region.

One of these guys.  They are actually the basis for the 'Frostbite Spiders' in Skyrim

 Unfortunately, nobody makes a solifugid mini (although one is on the way from the Tome of Horrors Kickstarter in which I did not participate, sadly.)  But that's fine, because you can just use a spider mini and be done with it.

Unless you're obsessive.

Using the Bones giant spiders as a base, I used putty to elongate the abdomen and add overlapping plates.  I then used more putty to sculpt oversize chelicerae in the front.  I'm quite happy with the result, and with being the only person in the world (as far as I know,) who possesses a pair of solifugid miniatures.

The prey for these hunters are mining beetles, which are advanced fire beetles.  This being an Egyptian-themed adventure, of course I had to paint them like scarabs.

The carapaces turned out swell, using metallic blue craft paint and a bit of pearlescent green from Martha Stewart of all places.  I'm not thrilled with the oversized mandibles however.  My wife said they looked like extra legs, so I felt I had to pick them out with another color somehow, so I went with red, like on a stag beetle.  I think it looks a little cheap, so I may trim them off entirely.  The eyes also really need to be on the side, so I may mod this mini further.

One interesting encounter in the first dungeon is an animated sarcophagus that attacks the party.  I happen to own a nice sarcophagus mini in pewter from an old vampire mini.  But it cannot stand on its own, so I decided to make another version.  I've begun experimenting with casting my own minis (a post on that is in the works for someday,) and this seemed like a good candidate.  So I made a simple (one side) RTV mold of the lid and the lower section separately, and then used it as a push mold with more plumbers putty.  The bottom did not turn out well, but I was able to add more putty to the lid part to make a solid version out of the plumber's putty.  I then filed down the 'foot' end of the sarcophagus so it could stand up.  Then I mounted it on one of my new clear bases (I'm excited about using more of these,) and I had an animated object fit for a pharaoh:

 


No self respecting tomb is without traps, and one of the ones in the module summons a swarm of flesh-eating cockroaches.  Cockroaches?  In an Egyptian themed adventure with mummies?  Nah.  Those are scarabs, man.  I will be using the stats for the roaches, but how can I not use the scarab swarms I got from the Bones Kickstarter?

Here again the metallic blue and pearlescent green paints shone through.  I made sure to use a variety of mixed colors to avoid them looking too uniform.

Now, the last critter in the first dungeon is a monster I have no mini for, but have long wanted one; an iron cobra.  Of course, I could just use any old snake mini of the appropriate size (got plenty of those,) or modify one and repaint it (granted I would have one less snake afterward,) or simply go online and purchase one (surrendering my hard earned money needlessly.)  Any of these were viable options.

Buuuuuuttt....

I've been dabbling with sculpting my own minis, starting with making more and more elaborate modifications to existing minis.  This seemed like a good opportunity to sculpt a mini from scratch (like I did with the sandling, but more elaborately detailed.)

To begin, I created a rough armature of the shape I wanted out of a paper clip.  Then I used some plumber's putty to bulk it out into the general form of the snake.  Then I covered that shape with green stuff to give the specific details.  For the armored plates, I added them one or two at a time, in order to create the overlapping effect.

In the end, I was pleased with the result:

There are a few rough spots here and there, but not too shabby if I do say so myself.  Now I simply had to paint the thing:

 

 

So there you have it: all the minis for the first dungeon of the first module of the adventure path The Mummy's Mask.  Still plenty more to make, but I do love a good challenge.

**Update!**

Well we finally ran the first tomb, and here is how it looked using Dungeon Tiles:

I made some alterations to the original layout, but you can still see the outline of the dungeon.  The party barely made it out alive, but they had a good time.