Frostgrave - Cultists

I have been banging on for a few years now about starting a Kill Team solo/narrative campaign. And it will probably not come as a shock to you that I intend the forces of Nurgle to be the adversaries in this campaign. Kill Team doesn’t have a massive model count so it would certainly help the immersion if I had a variety of enemies to fight rather than the same ten Chaos Cultists. I’ve expanded my range of enemies by doing things like converting the Cawdor Gang to the Dark Gods and even earmarking Age of Sigmar miniatures for use. In many ways, the problem is that Games Workshop miniatures are a bit too characterful. What I needed was some generic looking mooks that can be thrown to the slaughter in game after game. 

Fortunately, you can buy Frostgrave miniatures by the bucket. You can get a box of twenty Frostgrave Cultists for not too much money. While they are fantasy miniatures, it wouldn’t take much work to make them look like they belong in the 41st millennium. As with the Frateris Militia Anvil Industries came to the rescue. I used the Scrap and Renegade Rifles with their corresponding Raider Arms to give a bunch of them autoguns. I didn’t do too many as I wanted a nice mix of weapons in the group. By chopping off a few hands I could then give some of them pistols, either from the Anvil Industries Renegade range or from the Necromunda Cawdor and Hive Scum box. I filled most of the rest of them with options from the box the cultists came in, although I did snip down a bow to replace it with a scrap shield. Lastly, there are the options in the Frostgrave Cultists box to give some of the models skeleton or zombie heads and hands. The former didn’t interest me much but I did make four zombies. I figured they would be useful at some point in my campaign. Lastly, I stuck them all down to 25mm bases so they would be a similar height to the rest of my Warhammer miniatures. 

From there it was the usual slapchop adjacent painting scheme. I started by priming them with Colour Forge Standard grey before picking out any skin with Two Thin Coats Dwarven Skin if they were alive and Two Thin Coats Griffon Claw if they were a zombie. After which everyone got a zenithal highlight of Liquitex Titanium White acrylic ink through my airbrush. 

With the underpainting done I could start slapping down some actual colours. As these would be Nurgle aligned I started by painting the clothes in a combination of Garaghak’s Sewer, Militarum Green, Creed Camo and Army Painter Speedpaint Desolate Brown. From there I washed all the live skin with Kroak Green to give it a sickly appearance and the zombie skin got a coat of Army Painter Speedpaint Malignant Green. 

For the remaining details I painted the leather, such as the gloves, pouches and boots with Gore-Grunta Fur. Any wooden details, such as weapon handles or stocks, I painted with Wyldwood. The weapons themselves, I painted with Ratling Grime. A couple of the zombies still had hair, which I painted with Black Templar. For some finer details, I dabbed a bit of Athonian Camoshade into any open mouths to make them a little darker. Likewise I added a small amount of Scale75 Instant Colour Arcane Purple into the eye sockets to give them a more sunken appearance. To finish the models off, I gave them a drybrush of Pallid Wych Flesh, being careful not to hit the weapons, in order to bring out the texture of the clothes a little more. For the weapons, I drybrushed them with Necron Compound. 

With the models done I moved onto the bases. To start with I heaped on the Vallejo Thick Brown Mud, I needed enough on the base to hide the small Frostgrave “puddle” bases the models are on, otherwise they would stick out like sore thumbs. I did a pretty good job of this, there’s only a couple of areas around some edges where you can just about make out the Frostgrave base. I left the texture paste to dry for a few days, as I had put a lot of it on and it had been cold here. Once I was sure they were fully dry I gave them a wash of Athonian Camoshade. Normally I would give the bases a drybrush of Tyrant Skull at this point but I had heaped so much thick mud on that I was worried there was a bit too much texture you know? So I moved onto adding some Geek Gaming Scenics Base Ready Forest Floor, and then some static grass. Using dollops of PVA glue to fix it in place. Lastly, I added some puddles of gross water with AK Interactive Swamp Water gel and painted the rims of the bases with Warboss Green. 

Zombies

And with that they were done. I’m pretty pleased with how they’ve turned out, generic enough to be killed without a second thought but still with enough character of their own.