Work in Progress - Fantasy Gladiators

I picked up some Reaper Bones Barbarians a while ago after seeing a great conversion on Facebook that I wanted to echo - the original was created by Rusty Painting - check out his blog for more great work!

Here's the first, based on the original conversion - I'd bought some of the brilliant Gladiator helmet sprues from CP Models for a Post-Apocalyptic Gladiator project that I also have planned and they were obviously perfect for this project! They're nice and chunky which suits the Reaper figures brilliantly! I also decided on a weapon swap and the best that I could find was this Tomb Kings khopesh which fit nicely with the posing of the figure. After a bit of drilling and gluing he was done apart from a little gapfilling.

The CP Models head sprues - check out their range!

This was the second Reaper Bones model - one of the chunkiest helmets seemed to suit this base figure nicely, as did a shield from Hasslefree Miniatures that has been in my bits box for years, plus the full arm and spear from a Warhammer plastic Marauder Horseman. 

Finally, and possibly my favourite - I had a spare Heroquest Barbarian with a broken sword - I carefully removed the head with a jewellers saw for a clean cut, replaced it with a perfect Gladiator helmet and replaced the broken sword with a scimtar from the old Warhammer plastic skeletons.

These have all since had gaps filled with putty, sand added to bases where required and they're undercoated - I'll be painting them in the next few months. I plan on eventually using them as a random encounter in some fantasy skirmish games and I'm still on the lookout for others to add to bring them up to a usable warband-size!

Thanks for reading - comments and questions are most welcome!

Gladiatorial Battles (with Playmobil)

Bit of an image-dump post, some pictures from a recent games night using Playmobil gladiator figures! We used the wondeful Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset with some modifications (particularly taking into account the fact that we could remove shields and weapons, so for example, a combatant with a shield ignores the first "knocked down" result, but loses the shield...this can then be recovered with one action when out of combat).

 "We who are about to die, salute you!"

 Two fairly matched gladiators go at it, with a fallen velite in the background...

Winner of the first round

My barbarian from Gaul takes on an Egyptian Warrior.

Things get interesting with the introduction of a bear...

And they don't exactly turn out well for the Dimachaerus

All in all, a fun evening!