Two Bad Squiddo resin historical figures - Jeanne de Clisson and Mata Hari

I've had these two for absolutely ages, but I only got round to washing and cleaning them up when I started work on the North Star resin Necromancer and Apprentice in early March.   

First, Jeanne de Clisson, both front and back. Her white coif doesn't show up well in the first picture;

Jeanne de Clisson was born in the Vendée in 1300. She was a member of the noble Montaigu de Belleville family. She married four times, but it is her third marriage to Olivier IV de Clisson that led to her fame. Olivier was executed by the French King Philippe VI, le Fortuné. As a result, she took up arms against the French Crown. She sold off the Clisson lands and raised a force to fight French forces in Brittany. She later took to the sea as an English privateer with a fleet of three ships, attacking French vessels and killing the crews.

I've chosen to paint her in green because I like the colour and I didn't want to just do another standard Jeanne de Clisson figure. In green, she becomes a more flexible figure for all kinds of gaming.

Mata Hari, born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1876, is best known for having been executed as a German spy in 1917. She is portrayed as an archetypal femme fatale but her life was really terribly sad. Her marriage to Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutch officer serving in the Far East was a miserable thing. He was a brutal alcoholic infected with syphilis, which he passed on to his wife. Both their children were born with the disease, from which both of them later died. After divorcing MacLeod in 1903, Margaretha moved to Paris, becoming an artist's model and exotic dancer. She claimed to be a Javanese Hindu princess and became the mistress of a prominent French industrialist, Émile Guimet who was a devotée of Oriental Art. Mata Hari was a promiscuous woman and ended up as a courtesan rather than a performer. As a Dutch citizen, Mata Hari was able to cross borders freely during the war, the Netherlands being neutral, and she was recruited by the French Deuxième Bureau as an agent. She was charged with getting close to senior German military figures and she may, or may not have become a double agent.

In any case, the French government had her arrested, tried and executed as a German spy, although there doesn't appear to have been much in the way of evidence.

I've chosen to paint Mata Hari as a kind of generic femme fatale figure, who could quite easily be a Temptress in fantasy games, a seductive priestess, a mystic or something else.

I am pretty pleased with how she has come out, although I think that I could have done better with her face. I will have to do a spot of touching-up to improve that. I've stuck to green again but with lilac as a foil. Even her hair is lilac, which I think gives her an otherworldly feel.

Twenty Heavy Infantry for Xenos Rampant

I think that Heavy Infantry are an essential for most games of Xenos Rampant, especially if you are the kind of player who likes to stand back and shoot. I have finished two squads and each 10-man squad can be split into two 5-man fire teams;

The top two fire teams represent an Increased Size squad with Heavy Weapons and the lower two fire teams are an Increased Size squad who could be given Armour Piercing ammunition or some other useful characteristic. Each fire team (apart from the first) is led by a junior leader, marked by a yellow shoulder tab and the first team has a senior leader with two tabs. He's the guy with a pistol, talking on the communicator.

The first squad has one team with rocket launchers and a second team with one rocket launcher, three assault rifles and a junior leader with a flamer.

In the second squad, each fire team has two men with assault rifles, one with an LMG, one with a sniper rifle and a leader with a machine pistol-type weapon. 

To be honest though, the weapons are all assumed to do the same thing in the rules, it just appeals to me to make them look like they have different roles. 

They represent the kind of regular troops who make up the military of a typical planetary garrison, the marines of an attack ship or the dropship forces of the army of a Republic (Old or otherwise) or an Empire (maybe Evil, maybe not). They could also be the kind of grunts who are sent off to take on wave after wave of killer bugs, maybe even triumphing against all the odds.

My next figures will be various kinds of lighter-equipped squads, some looking more formal than others.

I've also finally got round to priming my spiders.

A Xenos Rampant Recon Team

One of the troop types for Xenos Rampant is Recon Infantry;

These come as a team of five troopers who have some useful skills and characteristics. They have no movement penalty in rough terrain and they can be classes as Snipers, which gives them a longer shooting range. They are also classed as Hard To Target, meaning that enemy troops have to be within 12" to target them.

These five were made using the Stargrave Mercenaries II plastic set. Although they aren't all wearing identical uniforms, I've painted them in a pretty standard palette and given them all sniper weapons.

I like that the Stargrave box sets have a huge variety of heads on the sprues. Some of the non-human ones are excellent.

I'm pretty pleased with the progress I'm making on my Xenos Rampant project. Next, I will have some "regular" infantry finished off.

Twenty more Xenos Rampant Cultists

Here are my next two groups of Cultists for my Xenos Rampant ongoing project;

I've tried to keep some colours common across all three units, hence the red hoods and purple trousers on this second group. These are armed for a more long range shooting role than the first set and are led by a figure without a hood and carrying a spear, as well as some kind of energy pistol. He also has a shield. My idea with him is that he represents a kind of Prophet/force commander for the cult, maybe even with psychic powers that he can transmit via his spear, which is really a kind of psychic energy weapon or beacon. I think that these are probably more suited to being a unit of Light Infantry, as they lack the armour of the previous lot. They probably ought to have the Guerillas characteristic to boost their armour value when in cover.

Now, my third unit;

These keep the overall "red hoods" theme but are mainly dressed in grey, again linking them to the unit above, colourwise. I think that these are also suited to a Light Infantry role, possibly with an upgrade to having Heavy Weapons, seeing as one has a rocket launcher and a couple have what look like heavier support weapons too. The guy on second front left with the backpack is wearing what looks like a pilot's helmet and is carrying a comms device. He is an alternative force commander figure if I decide I don't want a psychic force commander.

So, there we have it. Three units of Cultists who will form the core of a force which follows some strange occult belief system, perhaps worshipping strange Alien Gods or powerful xenomorphic beings, or maybe just dedicated to destruction and death for its own sake. Who knows?

Next, I'll be working on a couple of units of disciplined fighters who can represent the military of an Empire, Republic or Dictatorship or maybe just a well-armed and equipped Planetary Defence Force.

Some Cultists for Xenos Rampant

Here is my first group of 10 figures to use as Cultists in Xenos Rampant;

These are all based on the Frostgrave Cultists plastic box set with weapons from the Stargrave Troopers and Mercenaries boxes. I'm a big fan of the plastic cultists set and they work well as members of some kind of weird sci fi cult or as space pirates who want to keep their identities secret. This group are clearly wearing some kind of body armour and half of them have pistols and blades so could be used for troops with the Assault Doctrine characteristic or maybe as Berserk Troops. The flamer being carried by the guy on the front right seems well-suited to close combat and assaults.

I've given them a purple-based colour palette so they could be used with the Cultist figures I painted ages ago (back in 2019) for Saga: Age of Magic, who would definitely be Berserkers or Primitives as they have no shooting capability. I like the idea of a Xenos Rampant force that has fanatic troops who just want to get close up and personal with sharp or pointy objects. I could also use some of my daemonic figures, based on Ghost Archipelago Snake Men as Lesser Xenomorphs. They could be given a ranged attack based on spitting toxins. I've not played Saga: AoM in ages, so it would be nice to see them on the table again.

I've got 20 more of these guys to show you, but I'll put them up separately in two more posts, in a day or so.

North Star Frostgrave Necromancer and Apprentice

Back in February, Nick Eyre at North Star announced a painting competition. The objective was to paint the new Frostgrave Necromancer figure. Of course, I had to give it a go. I bought the figure, who comes with a nice (well, nice if you exclude all the necromancy stuff) apprentice. They arrived, I prepped and undercoated them and then I caught Covid and didn't feel much like painting for a few weeks. Finally, I got back to painting and today I finally finished them and even got them varnished, because it stopped raining and the sun came out. Here are my finished efforts; Necromancer front and back, ditto for the apprentice and then both of them together.

He is a pretty dynamic figure and, being a resin cast is beautifully crisp. I decided to do a fairly simple base to portray a blasted heath with clumps of dead grass. The tufts are by Gamer's Grass. Overall, I think he looks OK.

Here is his evil sidekick. He clearly graduated from pulling the wings off of flies a few years ago.

Annoyingly, I noticed a stray piece of ballast on the strap of his bag after uploading the photo. It is gone now, but doesn't really matter because it is the main man who matters for the competition, which I am not expecting to win anyway. It is the taking part that matters.

I think they have come out reasonably well. Certainly good enough for gaming purposes, which is the reason I paint things in the first place.

Here they are together;

Ten Elite Infantry for Xenos Rampant

 Please scroll down to see all ten figures;

These figures are, obviously, Games Workshop 40K Space Marines, but I won't be using them for Warhammer 40K.

I bought a box of 10 plastic Space Marines for £10 from someone at the club ages ago, because he didn't want them. My original plan was to paint them up and just sell them on, but I never got around to doing it. 

Once Xenos Rampant came along, it seemed to be a pretty simple thing to paint them up and use them as Elite Infantry for those rules. It also had the other advantage of me not having to spend any extra money on more figures.

I haven't used any 40K Space Marine heraldry on the figures, neither have I painted them up as a particular chapter, although I suppose there is a very slight nod towards the Dark Angels in the basic colour of their armour.

I put them together so that there are five figures with heavy weapons and five more suited to getting close up and personal, if required. That will give me two Elite units for Xenos Rampant.

I'm reasonably happy with how they look and they will do the job perfectly well for XR, with the support of a few units of more standard heavy, light or recon figures.