Another step closer to finishing up our two armies! I finished up a second set of Storm Ogres and he finished up another set of Gators.

I went with a different color scheme this time for sanity’s sake and I managed to solve a faster way of painting them. I drybrushed a triad of browns across the whole mini, then came back with a different, lighter brown for the flesh areas for a final drybrush. This allowed me to avoid painting pants, belts, wood, and fur. It saved an immense amount of time and really didn’t harm the final product. As I look at them here, the only issue I have is I need to touch up the gold trim on their shirts–the coverage wasn’t quite right.

My son wrapped up another set of Gators, bringing him up to nine in total. In Dragon Rampant, that’s basically most of an army if you want it to be (three units of nine). In Age of Fantasy, I’d probably make him paint another three so he can have two six man units. We’ll see where we go going forward. I’m leaning much more heavily toward Dragon Rampant so these army projects don’t continue to take half a year to complete.

That said, I don’t regret this project. I’m happy to have a large ratman army. I really like the style of these sculpts and I’ve enjoyed painting them. I hope to use them in a variety of battles. I’ve got a Dragon Rampant game tentatively scheduled this month with a buddy of mine and these rats will definitely see carnage there. Looking at it from that perspective, with the number of rats I have, I could make a large variety of lists for Dragon Rampant or even field two players’ worth of rats for an event game. We’ll see where this takes me.

For now, it gets me and the boy a step closer to complete 2,000 point Age of Fantasy armies. Left on his list is two infantry units and a dude on a tyrannosaur (rad as hell). On mine is a holy statue carried by monks, a cool rat-bike, and an epic leader on giant squirrel. Fun projects, to be sure, but they’ll likely take us all the way to the end of the year. The shift to Dragon Rampant shrinks the army sizes considerably–which I greatly welcome, because it will enable us to pump out a few more options with much less effort.

Of course then I introduce my son to the classic problem of the hobbyist: more projects than time. Dwarves, elves, demons, treefolk, and we haven’t even touched scifi! Poor little guy doesn’t know what he’s about to step into.