It's taken awhile (the expansion released on 4/17/13), but Super Dungeon Explore's Von Drakk Manor is now fully painted and ready for the game table! My main hold back in painting them all was due to the Forgotten King kickstarter and the need to paint the Pumpkin Patch and Rattlebones all at the same time. But now the 2nd expansion pack for SDE is finished and it's time to move on to Forgotten King loots and new projects! Hype!
The Heroes!
The heroes of the Von Drakk Manor set are some of my favorites. Von Wilding gets a bonus vote, thanks to being based on Castlevania. But the Sister of Light also gets a big fav, thanks to her being based on one of my old D&D clerics. Plus it was really fun painting up her book, she even has the holy symbol of Kelemvor (the Forgotten Realms god of death) on the back of her tome. The Celestial Herald was also a fun challange and I learned a lot about painting white with her wings.
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| Von Wilding and his shapeshift form, Von Wilder. Von Wilder ended up really glossy looking... I don't know why though, because I only sprayed him with matte varnish. |
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| Sister of Light and Celestial Herald. The Sister of Light is based off of my D&D 3.5 Cleric, Mara Greycastle. She's one of my favorite SDE minis. |
Pumpkin Patch Spawning Point!
The Pumpkin Patch Spawning Point is made up of tricksy witches, a necromancer, skulls with bat wings and a giant spider. It's a single spawning point, but I had to wait for the Forgotten King KS to deliver, thanks to my inability to accurately mix the same colors twice. The best part of this spawner are the Dust Coven Witches, who can polymorph heroes into Miserable Toads.
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| Pumpkin Patch Spawning Points. |
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| Dust Coven Necromancer. His eyes were originally sculpted with little dots in the middle. I didn't like it, so I ended up green stuffing them and painting my standard chibi eyes on him. |
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| Skullbats! I really like the grin on the one to the left. He's got attitude. |
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| Curse Coven Witches, watch out for their Transmorgrify ability... or you'll get turned into... |
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| Miserable Toads! Painted after my favorite types of tree frogs, except the red one. Which is based on the icon I used for Giant Frogs in D&D. |
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| Crypt Spiders. These were a pain to paint. I needed to break them apart in order to get proper coverage. Without doing so, I would have had some pretty bad bare sections between the stone slab and the spider. |
Shallow Grave Spawning Point!
The Shallow Grave Spawning Point features all of your skeleton warriors. Theres a couple champions, some standard skeleton fighters and a pair of mages. In the original release for SDE 1.0, this set also included the Rattlebones, but now they've been given a different role in SDE 2.0 and are no longer spawned from this point.
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| Shallow Grave Spawning Points. I'm really happy with these. The glow from the cracks turned out really nice. |
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| Dust Mages. Both of their scrolls have different runes on them. |
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| Dread Knights. I'm really happy with these guys. I went all out on the rust effects and think they work great on them. They feel ancient. I'm especially happy with their shields. After a bit of work, I was able to get a decent paint peeling look on them. |
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| Boneheads. The guy on the right is my fav of the two sculpts. I think because it's more dynamic. They have the hyper rust treatment going on too. |
Rattlebones!
Star of my most popular post ever written for this site (ahem
How to Paint Bones), the Rattlebones are new a new monster type called Creeps. They only come out from Shallow Grave tile effects or when creeps are spawned from Explore Cards.
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| Rattlebones! Because of this little guy, I decided to write my fist ever tutorial. Which as of this writing is over 1,700 views, which blows my mind. They are a great sculpt and even though I had to paint 16 of them, it didn't seem to drag on. |
The Bosses!
The bosses of Von Drakk Manor have to be my favorite in the game, based on aesthetics. It goes back to Castlevania, again. Death Spectre is not only a really cool mini, but he's also kinda a dick in combat, and he's just the mini-boss. Von Drakk himself is a shapechanger, and can freely swap between his normal form and into the man-bat that is Nocturne. Some folks worry that Von Drakk is a little squishy.
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| He can drain life, he can inflict massive damage and his ghostly essence can teleport out of danger... He's Death Spectre! This guy is super cool. He's my favorite of the mini bosses in the game, so far. I did have a few issues with him clouding up after the first matte spray. But that's fixed now. |
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| Von Drakk and his shapeshift form Nocturne. I'm really pleased with the mottled skin of Nocturne and Von Drakk himself tuned out really well. But, he had a slight issue as well, and if you look closely, you can see that the matte finish crackles after it dried. That was a huge bummer. |
Anyway, that's it! Von Drakk Manor is all finished and I'm not 3 sets down. But, I still have all of the Forgotten King stuff to paint up yet, and I'm 9 minis away from finishing the set of stuff I'll be taking to U-Con.
Once the U-Con SDE stuff is finished, I'm not sure if I'll jump right into Forgotten King or not. I'll let Lady Inspiration decide that one...
