Wardlings

A while (quite a while now that I think of it) I spoke briefly of WizKids pre-painted Wardlings line.  The core concept of the Wardlings line is pre-teen adventurers packaged with animal companions/familiars.  As much as I'm generally not a fan of pre-painted figures I really liked the idea of young, but not childish, heroes and the animal companions fit very well with some fantasy books my daughter was reading at launch time.  After two rounds of quality releases the line was pretty thorough and they definitely needed to make a change to continue expanding.  My thought was that they would start adding demi-human characters but I got swerved and instead WizKids started adding monster/encounter packs.  This was very clearly a better choice.

The funny thing for me is that when I initially bought into the Wardlings line my thinking was that I would use the characters as PCs and NPCs in games with my daughter but my first 2 "monster" packs are for conventional games I play with my adult friends.

First up I got a treeman.

There are a ton of really good Treeman figures out there across a ton of price points and cast in every material miniatures are made from so it can be hard to come up with a unique take but WizKids did!  For starters the foliage is denser than normal for these types of figures but works really well and adds some colour to spice things up.  The other significant addition are the small woodland creatures living in/on the Treeman.  I don't know why, but for me the 2 cardinals and the bunny really add to it for me.  Alongside the Treeman I based up one of the animal companions that came packaged with a young Druid figure.  I thought this was a cute little woodland or fey creature.  I might use it as a Blight or it might be useful for my upcoming Old Margreve game.  We'll see....

Next up two ghosts.

As soon as I saw this pack I thought it would be perfect for many Ravenloft adventures and in particular might be good representations of the two kids in the Death House.  For a change (for me) when using macro photography, I found these figures were cooler than I initially thought when I saw the pictures.  The miniatures are translucent with some slight shading, but, and this is cool to me because it's sort of backwards from how painters normally paint ghosts, the eyes are solid paint and are the only non-translucent part of the miniatures.  I think the effect is really interesting and a change from the norm

Well there we go.  I can't claim to have painted these.  I really just based them and they're good to go.

-Jay