Hobby Update: Undead Barrow Wight

Up now is a bit of a wildcard hobby update for me, a Barrow Wight Warlord for the Undead! One of my major friend groups in the ought’s was incredibly nerdy, and we all pulled each other into a number of our respective nerdy hobbies, including MTG, board games, a few online games, WHFB, and then we all jumped into D&D5E in 2014 as a group. The DM duties fell to me, and because we started this before any modules were released, I just made stuff up, throwing out a lot of hooks, and then developing the ones that piqued their interest into little arcs and an ongoing adventure that lasted 5ish years. 

One of the longer-term threads that never came to fruition was Skullbuddy. The party found some children's toys themed like Demi-Lich skulls, which would float around the child. This one was “defective” though, and had a technicolor flame. This was actually a real Demi-Lich, but with amnesia, and despite some meta-gaming concerns, the party failed every arcana check to identify it as a threat in any way. That floating, sentient skull became Skullbuddy, and for a few sessions it acted a bit like a familiar to the party, and became a way for me to help out and provide hints or reinforce details . After a time, it and some armor disappeared from their hideout. Skullbuddy was going to be a big-bad down the line, with the amnesiac Demi-Lich coming to his senses and picking some old schemes back up, but schedule conflicts eventually derailed the whole campaign. I assembled him at the time, but with the campaign ultimately collapsing, never painted him up. June is upon us, and this seems like an auspicious time to paint up this old techicolor model. Happy Pride!

A pretty fabulous Barrow Wight.

The mini is an old Reaper mini, with a plastic headswap and then some very old greenstuff flames, which are not well-done, but we’re keeping them as a testament to my original efforts many years ago, and because I am a smidge lazy, and didn't want to redo it. 

As-was, rediscovered a few days ago.

Painting-wise, he was primed, and then the armor was painted black, with a dark metal drybrush, coming at it from the top. The flames were painted off-white and then hit with Speed Paints, allowing each color to dry before painting an adjacent color. Unsure what to do with the cloak given the techicolor flames, I blindly started experimenting with with some very neutral grays and browns, and then that idea evolved into an attempt at a burning / cinder kind of effect. It looks alright. I think I need some reds instead of yellows to sell the lesser intensity, and probably need to have a sections burning rather than just edge highlighting, but the yellows are sporadic enough that this looks fine and I'm not going to futz around with it anymore. 

As-now, from the back, with the cinder cloak attempt.

On the table he looks very weird, and I feel like Mantic is just messing around with design space here instead of making a streamlined, purposeful unit. He’s ostensibly a very important Wight, but has Strider, as well as better Def and a little extra CS for being a character. Instead of a Large Infantry characters, he’s a Height 2 infantry hero, and a combat hero, though he’s only got 4 attacks. That stat changes and such are peculiar, and he almost feels more like a Barrow Wraith than a Barrow Wight.

The biggest weirdness of him though is an innate Host Shadowbeast 5, though the spell has changed with 4E. He can target himself, cast into combat, and even cast it while engaged, which are all neat twists, but the extra attacks are not a flat result like in 3E, and instead are linked to the successful hits from the spell. So, we’re looking at 2-3 extra attacks most of the time? So… 235 pts for a 5-9 attack combat individual? That doesn’t seem particularly great, but it is hard to judge. Host Shadowbeast seems to have dropped off, but maybe there is something there, now that Disordered is gone and the caster can keep it going turn after turn, and Magnilde has consistently surprised me with her Speed 7, so he might have some tricks in store as well with Fly. We’ll try him out sometime soon!