Painting Runebound: Fall of the Dark Star

When I first saw the Fall of the Dark Star scenario pack for Runebound, I was not impressed. I honestly cannot remember my hesitation, but suffice it to say I did not buy it. Fast forward through the other expansions, dozens of plays with my boys, and rumors that the game will never be reprinted nor receive other expansions, and I ended up buying Fall of the Dark Star on the secondary market. Now, my Runebound Third Edition collection is complete.

Does it matter? Well, not really, but my boys and I played this PvP scenario once so far and really enjoyed it. The other competitive PvE scenarios often end up with an anticlimax, where no one is able to defeat the Big Bad and everyone loses. With Fall of the Dark Star, there will always be a winner. It suffers from the kingmaker problem, where a player who cannot win the game can fairly easily affect who does win, but that's with us: it felt like a big battle royal, which is all we really wanted.

Here is Zyla, the hero (?) from the scenario pack.

I started painting her in November or December, and then she sat on my desk half-completed until today. I had not even picked up my brushes since then. Part of the reason was that the three almost-completed figures on the table were uninspiring. Zyla's sculpt is OK, but I'm finding myself tired of painting the FFG-boardgame-scale miniatures. They look good within the game, but the scale doesn't fit well with other games. When I used Elder Mok as my apprentice in a Frostgrave campaign last Fall, he just looked tiny compared to everyone else, especially the oversized Ajax sorcerer from Massive Darkness, which was my wizard. 

The other reason you haven't seen any painting updates from me is my teaching schedule this semester. My MWF class meets 4-6PM. This means that I get up, make a cup of tea, and am "at work" from around 7:30AM. 4PM feels like quitting time, and in a normal semester, it might be when I'd pull out the paints for an hour's painting before dinner. We're just a few weeks from the end of the semester, and I feel like I still haven't figured out how to manage my work and free time this semester. Maybe it's pandemic fatigue, or maybe I just need to ask not to be assigned such late classes in the future.

Anyway, after a long delay, there's a finished figure. She's very blue and purple. The card art has her holding a green ball of magical energy, which provides some much-needed contrast. The sculpt does not include this, which is sensible, and I did not feel like trying to mold one myself. It leaves her a bit monochromatic, but at least there's some good differences in depth between the near-black, the deep purple, and lighter periwinkle wings. Incidentally, the card art does have her as eyeless with some kind of face mask or helmet on. She's a weird one.

Next painting post should be up soon...