6 : First Frostgrave Figures

Osprey Games and Nick Eyre’s North Star Military Figures jointly produce a comprehensive range of Frostgrave miniatures to help play out the scenarios in the Frostgrave rulebook and supplements. I ordered some and the first to arrive was a box of plastic gnolls.

Gnolls are something I first became aware of when they appeared in the Frostgrave supplement, In the Breeding Pits. Their back story is that they are predominantly underground creatures that rarely appear above ground. As a regular player of Rangers of Shadow Deep – another tabletop game by Joe McCullough – my ranger character had brought an end to too many gnolls for me to remember. As a designer of tabletop scenery, I now had official Frostgrave miniatures to stand alongside my scenery and give them a real sense of scale. The North Star figures could be described as true 28mm, certainly in contrast to ‘heroically’ larger miniatures, with the figures generally 28mm to the eye.

Not long after I got hold of my first Frostgrave figures, I was extremely lucky to find a good number of brand new boxes of Frostgrave plastics second hand in a charity shop. My collection multiplied somewhat in one stroke of good luck!

All the Frostgrave (and Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago, for that matter) plastics are, apparently, compatible in that their arms and heads are all interchangeable. This created a certain amount of excited planning as I certainly had enough boxes to experiment with! I wanted to have a go at creating some of the typical Frostgrave warband characters by swapping pieces about.

I assembled a couple of the gnolls first. Rather than using super glue, I used a plastic welding glue, brushed on with an old paint brush. The pieces fitted together well. I was especially intrigued by the weapons held in two hands – paws, perhaps, in the case of the gnolls!

I painted up my first gnoll using mostly a series of browns. I used a very light green for his eyes. I primed him first with my favourite primer colour, khaki, before giving him a wash with one of Games Workshop’s contrast paints. Khaki, however, is more suited as an undercoat for warm colours and I wanted to have a shot at giving my Frostgrave miniatures more of a cold look. So for my next batch of figures the plan was to use a grey undercoat instead.

The next ‘big reveal’ was, of course, to get my first figure together with my first piece of scenery to see how well they matched.