16 : Stone Golem

I made myself a stone giant! I think I’ve pretty much always wanted to put together or make a rocky elemental or stone golem type model out of scraps. I was sure that it must be a fairly simple thing to do. And, indeed, it was

I started with a 50mm round base. I laser-cut myself a raggedy one in my Frozen City style. I made a simple stickman with wire and glued the ‘feet’ into holes drilled into the base. It was then a simple process of gluing on broken cork pieces. I used an old cork coaster and some much more superior cork bark. I glued on the pieces to give the appearance of individual rough boulders and stone slabs that were being animated like a string of beads rather than a stone-carved sculpture. By the time I had something looking like a rock monster I only had to texture the flat parts of the coaster pieces and cover over any wire armature that was still showing. I used my favourite filler: tile grout. I also used the grout to create a texture over the base. All that was left was to paint my little giant.

I used a Payne’s Grey emulsion paint undercoat. Over this, I drybrushed a series of greys using cheap acrylic paint before highlighting with white. The white was used liberally, just as with my Frozen City Ruins models. I then added some light blue detail and a wash of Payne’s Grey before finishing off with some further white frosty highlighting.

It is pretty easy to throw some scraps together to create a stone monster model that assumes some vaguely human form – that looks like a pile of rocks that have magically sprung to life. For my monster, I didn’t want it to look too symmetrical or regular but also not too lopsided. But I didn’t want it to look too solid or static, either. I wanted it to look like lots of rock pieces that could move together and put up a fight in human form. Because I painted it in the same colours as my Frozen City models, you could say that I would be happy if it looked like it could emerge from the ruins themselves! That should be enough to scare the adventurers!

Next thing was to check the stats of my new monster in the new Frostgrave rulebook. It’s classed as a Large Construct. There are some changes from the original version of the rules. The Fight stat has been increased from plus-three to a hefty plus-four. Also, it is now classed as Strong so it does plus-two damage. However, it’s Will is still zero. What could they be saying about my golem? That he don’t have no brains? Well, yes, almost for sure.