Frostgrave - First Steps

One of my latest acquisitions was Frostgrave by North Star Military Figures and Osprey Publishing. Frostgrave is a Mordheim-style skirmish game. The background is pretty simple: a bunch of wizards hire some soldiers and go adventuring in the ruins of a long-lost legendary city.

Today, I'll just want to share some pictures of the miniatures for the game.

Up first, the Chronomancer and his apprentice. Chronomancy is the youngest of the magic schools and considered to be a short-cut to power. Of course, with great power comes great resp... eh, risk.
As masters of time their spells are all about slowing down and hastening. If they are really ambitious, they can even try to store some time for later use.

Next a pair of Soothsayer. They are specialists in awareness and mind control, revealing secrets and making their opponent forget spells.

Last, but not least, Witches. Curses, potions and controlling nature is their speciality, and if all goes downhill, they can shoot some poisoned Bone Darts at their enemies.

Wizard have access to a lot of different henchmen, called soldiers.

Thugs are the lowest in the food chain. They are just some rabble armed with hand weapons. I made two groups of Thugs from the plastic Soldier kit:

To make them a bit more distinguishable I arme one group with swords and one with axes. This is a purely cosmetic choice because weapons do not grant any special rules.

Thieves are faster than Thugs, but only armed with a dagger. I built two, and decided to make them twins:

Archers are the cheapest way to add some ranged attacks to your warband. They fight as well as Thungs in close combat, but also have leather armour:

Infantrymen have two-handed weapons and leather armour, making them better and more resilient fighters than Thugs. Their two-handed weapons give them a bonus on damage, too :

Men-at-Arms have leather armour and shields, giving them a very good armour value. They are armed with hand weapons:

I also received some metal miniatures as rewards for pre-ordering the game, i.e. a Knight and a Templar.

A knight is an excellent fighter and with shield and mail armour he has the highest armour value of all soldiers. But he also costs five times as much as a Thug.

 The Templar changes the shield for a two-handed weapon which makes them the best damage-dealers in close combat. Next to him a metal treasure marker:

Talking about treasure markers, the pre-order deal came with five generic and three special treasure markers, too:

The weapon rack is broken due to a bubble in the resin, but nothing that won't be easily fixed.

My first impression is very good. The miniatures are well designed, although the plastic Soldier kit has a distinct lack of useful left arms, making it necessary to use parts from the bit box or to have some repetition. This is a general problem of this box, for example three of the four Thugs with axes are converted in some way.
On the other hand, the set was designed to be compatible with Fireforge Games boxes, and mixing the Frostgrave soldiers with a box of Foot Sergeants will give you an excellent base to build you warband(s). Alternatively, Gripping Beast's Dark Age Warriors or Arab Foot Soldiers shoudl work fine.

My plan at the moment ist to build and paint two warbands (I always try to get two forces for each new game, it is much easier to get people to play that way ). One of them will have a black and red color scheme, the other one (most likely) white and blue.

Here is a WIP of the two Thieves:

The faces need some more work...