The Narrative Potential of Simple Miniatures

My current work-in-progress is a set of models for Frostgrave. I should be having my first game of it this weekend, but its been on my radar for a while.

I very rarely attempt freehand, but I’ve done a very simple quartering of the shield here. I've been using red as my spot colour for the warband, it's been the secondary colour on clothes, sashes, and so on. Pink is something I had only splashed on the wizard as something to make him stand out a bit as the leader.

In my narrative of how this warband formed, I had decided that the Wizard was a pretty dodgy type and that the Knight (you can tell he is a Knight because he has a hand weapon and a shield) was his brother who had started out on this venture because it was quite obvious that the smart one in the family needed a bit of muscle to protect him but was fast having second thoughts after spending some time in the company of the warband that built up around them. The models I picked are not ones that inspire a sense of brave men of noble cause.

While painting the shield, and wanting to do something to stop it being a solid colour, that story expanded to include a noble house fallen on hard times and its two scions seeking to restore its fortunes. The Knight (names are hard, I have a few days to settle on some!) is still worried that his brother is somewhat deranged and is considering alternative options.

I'm finding that the narrative is flowing really easily from these models, in a way that I don't find happens when putting together Warhammer models. Lots of Games Workshop's games have books that encourage you to name your units and give them bits of personality, but today's models leave very little scope for customisation that isn't a basic paint job or mixing kits that weren't intended to work together so require cutting and filing. Their posts are dynamic and lovely — at least if you aren't building a horde army where you have forty models with ten poses between them — but it makes me nostalgic for the Good Old Days™ when kits consisted of half a dozen sets of legs, the same number of torsos, and a variety of heads, weapons and arms that you could mix and match.

Frostgrave has a range of official miniatures but the book isn't shy about encouraging you to seek out whatever figures speak to you. I've been using the official ones because they do speak to me, not least because they hit that nostalgia spot I just mentioned.

Here is an example of a typical Frostgrave model kit, this one is the Knights. There's a selection of bodies, shields, a plethora of weapons (including swords, axes, flails, bows, and so on), more heads that you can shake a stick at, and an assortment of pouches and other gubbins.

Building these models instantly throws choices at you. Some are practical (the equipment choices determine the type of warrior in the game and thus their stats and cost) while others are cosmetic (such as the head choice or which one-handed weapon you equip a Knight with). The choices multiply when you start mixing kits as there is a lot of cross-compatibility between them.

From these choices narratives can blossom and I love that.