My Rangers of Shadow Deep Project by thedace

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste”

I needed some Zombies! Can you believe, a tabletop gamer for years and I don’t own any Zombies.

Luckily there are plenty options for Zombies out there.

I decided upon the Box set of 18 Living dead peasants from Fireforge https://fireforge-games.com/living-dead/364-living-dead-peasants.html

These models look lovely, they are not overly detailed but I think look better / cleaner for that. There were lots of build options too.

Above are a few examples of the Zombies painted up.

A group shot above of the Zombie Horde under a spooky moon.

Now, The deserted village in the forest needed some suitable buildings.

I had recently seen a Star Wars table on the OTT site with some fantastic looking “beehive” buildings.

I asked the question, who makes these and Gerry confirmed they were from a fantastic company called Fogou.

Off I went to their site ready to buy some of these “Beehive” buildings when I found something more suitable.

There was a Battle at the farm set of ruined buildings which were ideal for what I needed.

Primed in grey.

I scraped a few pencils for pigment (I don’t have any proper pigments)

I applied a dark tone wash to the stonework which I then salted before it dried.

I then dry rushed on some Vallejo wolf grey and dry rust.

The moss/slime was done using nurgling green, green wash and vallejo green ink.

I created a little birds nest at the top of one of the buildings.

I made this using straw painted brown with a strong tone wash.

The bird is from the Firelock Zombie peasants box.

A very helpful aid was the Gerry can video on painting stone.

The first scenario of the game is set in abandoned village in a forest.

I set about finding some scenery to represent this.

I had a few trees knocking around that I had bought from Wish previously. I drilled a small hole in some wooden bases I had, inserted the tree trunks and then clipped them to size.

I then painted the bases with some GW Agrellan earth (cracking paint) washed with some army painter strong tone.

This gave the effect of a forest floor with ridges of cracked earth representing roots.

Next I needed to add some cobwebs to these trees.

I found some Halloween decoration cobwebs complete with spiders on Amazon for I think £1.90.

I simple tore some of this and pulled it through my trees creating the below effect.

I needed a ranger and the other players in the group were asked to find a character that best suited what their ranger is in their mind.

In Shadow Deep your ranger does not automatically have to look like Aragorn.

You could just as easily have a spellcaster as a Brute wielding an axe. Also there is nothing to stop you taking a traditional looking ranger.

So, I was in my local games store and on the shelf he had a number of blisters of D&D characters (2 per pack) “Nolzurs Marvellous Miniatures”

At £5.00 for the 2 pre primed minis I thought “why not”

I decided upon the elf mage pack as pictured above as I thought the chap to the right would make a great looking magic using ranger.

The quality of the minis were ok for what is £2.50 each, there is however a little bit of bend in the staff.

A bit of paint was needed next and here is the finished product.

I’m afraid there are no WiP shots as I got the model painted quite quickly.

Happy with the end result of a magic using ranger.

I think his magical flame came out well and this was done with various shades of green wash and inks.

So, just a few days after downloading the rules I got RoSD to the table and it didn’t go that well.

The problem was that i’d not prepared properly, I’d only quickly read the rules and this proved problematic when you have 3 people needing to know what to do, mechanics of the game to look after, and creatures stats to look up.

This was aggravated by the fact I had a digital copy of the rules which took longer to look through than a book and no quick reference sheet.

We finished the first scenario but it was a clunky affair.

I had work to do….

Why did I want to get into Rangers of Shadow Deep?

I go to my local games shop most Thursday nights. Sometimes we will play a boardgame or two, sometimes an RPG and sometimes a miniatures game.

There were quite often 3 of us in our group. This is fine for most boardgames and RPG’s but a lot of miniatures games just don’t play right with more than 2 players.

I know you can technical play with more than 2 players in a lot of systems but you always get the feeling that’s not the way it was designed.

I accept that there are exceptions.

So I wanted a game that was designed to play just as well with 3 players as it would with one.

I asked the collective –

https://www.beastsofwar.com/forums/topic/miniatures-games-that-are-great-multiplayer-3-or-more/

Many helpful suggestions here for which I am very grateful.

I decided to go with RoSD as I am a fan of Frostgrave https://www.beastsofwar.com/game/frostgrave/ and it is created by the same chap.

Publishers description of the game –

Rangers of Shadow Deep is a solo and co-operative tabletop miniatures game, in which players create their ranger, gather companions, and play through a series of missions in their fight to hold back the darkness. If their rangers survive, they will grow in power and ability, and be sent on more difficult, dangerous and intricate assignments.

At the time RoSD was either available as a PDF that could be printed for you or on Kindle. I have Kindle installed and the price was right so I opted for that option.

I had a quick read through the rules and suggested a game to my friends.

To be continued…