Welcome to Far Future Friday, where I take a crack at painting different sci-fi miniatures in 15mm - and show you how to, too! Today’s post centers on the Crimson Fists, 40k’s original poster boys, as seen on the cover of Rogue Trader and the third edition Space Marine codex. Although I never really picked a Chapter when I played 40k, I decided on Crimson Fists for this initial 15mm Friday because of the awesome sculpts of Pizzagrenadier. I’m using his Bad Ass Tyrant’s War Beakies (scaled up to 15mm) for all my Marines for when I play 15mm 40k.

The paints

When it comes to painting Crimson Fists, you’ll need only a handful of paints: a blue for the armor, a gunmetal to undercoat the bolter casing/magazine, and a red for that trademark crimson fist.

For the blue, we’re attempting match Games Workshop’s Kantor Blue. For this, I use Golden’s Pthalo Blue (Red Shade) from their High Flow Acrylics range as a more cost-effective option - a dropper bottle of Pthalo Blue is $14.75 USD for a 4oz/118mL bottle, while a pot of Kantor Blue is $4.55 USD for a 12mL pot.

You have a couple options for the gunmetal: I typically AK Interactive’s Gun Metal, but you could also use any other silver metallic (or even a dark warm grey like Pro Acryl’s aptly named Dark Warm Grey).

The crimson color can be anything from Army Painter’s Crimson Hand Red to a standard Alizarin Crimson from the acrylics aisle. I used Golden’s Napthol Red Light.

The process

Start from a grey primer. If I’m priming with a rattlecan, I use Colour Forge’s Standard Grey. If I’m using an airbrush to prime, I use Stynylrez’s standard grey primer.

From there, basecoat the entire model with Pthalo Blue (Red Shade), except for the hands, pouches, grenades, bolter casing, and any visible cabling. Don’t worry too much if you get paint on any of the aforementioned areas - we’ll be going over them with other paints anyway. Especially don’t worry if you’re using an airbrush for this step, because you will get paint in areas that you don’t mean to.

Paint the bolter case in your preferred gunmetal color. If you feel like being extra fancy, you can repaint over everything except the magazine, the ejection port and the little front divot in a warm grey color to simulate the fact that there’s a plastic/metal case overtop of the bolter’s innards.

If you’re painting non-veteran Crimson Fists, paint only the left hand red. If you’re painting veterans, paint both hands red.

Paint the pouches using a light brown/leather brown color (I think I used Army Painter’s Leather Brown), and then paint in the pouch buckles using the same gunmetal color you used for the bolter. Paint any fragmentation grenades on the marine’s belt using a medium or dark green. I used AK Interactive’s Medium Green.

Drybrush the coils on the back of the backpack with the gunmetal, as well.

When it comes to basing, I went for as simple as possible. A quick coat of Army Painter’s Dirt Spatter on the base and the rim makes for a simple enough base. If you want to go fancier (not really needed at this scale, IMO), you could paint on some PVA/white glue and flock the base with some static grass and rocks.

And that’s it, our Crimson Fists are done. These two guys took me about 20 minutes total for both of them, so it would be pretty easy to get a whole squad done in an evening - especially if you batch painted or used an airbrush.

Hopefully this tutorial helps you get your Crimson Fists army on the table faster!

Happy painting!

So in my last post, I talked a little bit about the different miniatures ranges you can use to build the heroes, minions and monsters you’ll need for your games of DEMIGOD. This week we’re going to take a look at the different quests included in the DEMIGOD core rulebook and how you can build some truly awesome terrain for each one.

The Minotaur’s Maze

Of the six core quests in the DEMIGOD rulebook, this is probably the most challenging one to build terrain for, solely because a 3’x3’ maze is such a pain in the behind to build. When it came time for me to build mine, I did it two separate ways. You can build or buy your own blocks and assemble the maze by hand, or print/buy maze sections and assemble the maze that way. If you want build your own blocks, Black Magic Craft makes an excellent video on making your own out of XPS foam. Alternatively, you can buy appropriately-sized bricks from a variety of Etsy sellers - I used Gravik out of Ukraine.

When it comes to printing or buying maze sections, there are a couple options. EnderToys makes a series of click-together dungeon tiles that would let you get a maze together rather easily. While they do come together quickly, their main disadvantage is that they limit you to using only 28mm-scale models - the walls are too small for anything else.

As for printed options, I initially used these miniature modular stone walls by QT_studio over on Cults3D. They have the advantage of being rather large sections of wall (the long sections are 1/16th of an inch shy of 4 inches long). However, because they’re not exactly 4” long, the missing 1/16th of an inch really adds up when you’ve got a three-foot long section you’re gluing together.

The Garden of Statues

I’ll be honest and say that the board I built for The Garden of Statues (which I took to Fall In 2024) is the only board I’ve actually built for DEMIGOD. It’s not the best representation of what a DEMIGOD board could be, and there’s a lot I could do better to make it look more like what a DEMIGOD board should look like.

So what would I do differently?

The first thing is that I would have a larger temple setup as a centerpiece. The few ruined columns I have don’t make nearly enough of a good center area. I’d recommend something like the Sarissa Precision temple or the Tartarus Unchained Temple of Athena by Gadgetworks.

Once I had the center temple built, I would add some subsidiary buildings such as a fountain or animal enclosure. If you want to get some fountains for your own board, Sarissa Precision makes a set of fountains perfect for 28mm. Or you can use the Kobold’s Craft video below to build your own.

Typically, Greek temple buildings sat inside of a larger area called a temenos, which was demarcated by a dry-stone wall called a peribolos. There exist a number of rollers to make your own stone walls out of XPS foam, but I’ve found that the most realistic way is to get a bag of pea-gravel from Home Depot or the like and start gluing. Once the stone wall is completed, add some olive trees around the outskirts.

If you want to see step-by-step how this new board will look, tune in next week!

The Island of the Cyclops

For the island of the Cyclops, you’ll need to cut an island from a large enough block of XPS foam, then attach it to your board. Once it’s attached, flock it with some sand and then paint the surrounding area ocean colors - blues, greens and blacks. If you want some inspiration for island colors, you’d do good to Google the Cyclopean Islands - they’re the islands off the coast of Sicily that Homer based Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus on. If you want a more hands-on tutorial, Play On Tabletop over on YouTube has a great tutorial wherein he builds a board to replicate Scarif from the Star Wars universe: all of these techniques can be transferred to your Island of the Cyclops board.

The Boar Hunt

The board for “The Boar Hunt” is a little more free-form, described only as “a destroyed Greek town”. But what does that look like in practice? You’ll want a lot of broken columns, a destroyed temple or two, amd maybe some broken sections of road. Ancient Greek dwellings varied: depending on the wealth of your citizens, houses could range from two to twelve rooms, with those rooms split between multiple levels. Many dwellings had a central courtyard. An example layout is below.

One or two of these, suitably ruined and combined with some other scatter terrain (such as this set) should stand you in good stead.

The Colchian Fleece

The layout for the Colchian Fleece is a pretty simple one. Multiple groves of trees (olive or otherwise) ring a central tree upon which hangs the fleece itself. You can get 28mm trees from a number of vendors, or make your own using a metal armature and some different kinds of flock. As for an actual Colchian Fleece model, I quite like this one by Steve Barber Models, just because it looks like a proper centerpiece.

The Centauromachy

A board for the Centauromachy quest is a little unique. Why? See that Athenian house lineart further up the post? The quest takes place entirely inside the central courtyard of a really, really big Greek house. So think fountains, trees, stuff like that. Essentially, you don’t really have a “centerpiece” here - you have a lot of smaller terrain pieces that impede player movement, but there’s not necessarily one terrain feature that unifies the whole board. If you wanted to, you could build your own Greek palace and put it off to one side of the board, letting the courtyard sprawl out from the interior and across the rest of the board.

So that’s how to build boards for the different quests you’ll encounter in the DEMIGOD core rulebook. If you’ve got any Qs about building your own board, feel free to shoot me an email at chris@no-name-games.com.

Since releasing DEMIGOD in November of 2022, I’ve received several questions on where to get fitting miniatures to represent your heroes, minions and monsters - so much so that I’ve actually put a whole channel on the DEMIGOD Discord just to address the question.

DEMIGOD is a skirmish wargame set against the backdrop of Greek mythology, playable with as few as four figures on the board. It is manufacturer agnostic and the rules are flexible enough that you’ll find equivalent models for almost every model in the book in the catalogue of any company that makes an “Ancient Greeks” range.

With that out of the way, let’s talk manufacturers. There are a TON of miniatures manufacturers out there, and many of them make miniatures that would be compatible with DEMIGOD - perfect for representing your heroes, minions and monsters, but I’m just going to talk about the ones I’ve used for my own collection.

Heroes and minions

Since your heroes and minions are going to be constantly rotating through your warband, it’s important to have a lot of them! Let’s take a look at the best ways to fill out your adventuring party.

Victrix

Victrix’s multipart kits are the absolute bang for your buck when it comes to building a DEMIGOD warband - so much so that they’re one of two manufacturers (the other being Warlord Games) that I point to when people ask what they need to get started with DEMIGOD. In addition to your bog-standard hoplites (perfect for your demigods themselves as well as, well, hoplites), Victrix produces a variety of kits that build almost every kind of minion you’d want to hire in DEMIGOD.

Now, for the purposes of a small-model-count game like DEMIGOD, the Victrix kits are a little overkill. The newest hoplite kit contains 48 figures, which is enough to build 16 warbands at the minimum warband size.

Additionally, the new kit seems tailor-made for skirmish games. Each sprue comes with seven different bodies plus a variety of different arms and heads, allowing you to create a warband that is dynamic and characterful even if your weapon choices are limited to swords, spears and shields (and a severed head!).

The peltast kit will fill out your ranged troops - giving you, as the box itself says, a range of peltasts, javelinmen and slingers. This gives you a variety of ranged options, from long-range slings to the peltast’s spear, which can cripple an enemy model as it attempts to close.

The last kit I’d recommend from Victrix is their “Greek Unarmored Hoplites and archers” kit, which gives you 48 hoplites in tunics and eight different archer options - perfect for novice demigods with not a lot of coin to their name or a minor hero of Apollo, the god of archers - or even just an archer minion himself!

About the only thing I’d call out with the last two kits is that the detail on them feels a little soft when compared to the new hoplite kit. Hopefully we see a re-release of these kits with some better detail!

Wargames Foundry

Metal miniatures manufacturers that also hail from Great Britain, Wargames Foundry (WGF) is the brainchild of Cliff and Brian Ansell. For those of you who are Games Workshop grognards like me, Brian Ansell is also one of the founders of Citadel Miniatures, which later became part of Games Workshop.

All of WGF’s kits are 1 to 3-piece metals: depending on which kit you get, you’ll have to attach a spear, a shield, neither, or both. In terms of the spears themselves, I recommend replacing the included spears with the NSS102 spears from North Star Military Figures, Artizan Designs, or Crusader Miniatures - they’re a little thicker and fit the models’ hands better, although they do need trimmed to size.

This makes them really fast to get onto the table - there’s not a ton of assembly required. At the same time, the poses tend to be rather generic, and some of the hoplite poses take a little finagling to get the spears to sit properly.

Almost all of the sub-ranges under WGF’s “World of the Greeks” range are suitable for DEMIGOD - in fact, the only range that I’d say isn’t suitable is the Thracians, and even then only because they don’t fit the “hoplite aesthetic” of the rest of the range.

Perhaps my favorite kit is WG162 “Herakles and the Argonauts”, which features 5 models with swords and shields plus a sixth representing Herakles himself - perfect for a Major Hero plus several Minor Heroes and the Hero of Legend, Herakles!

3D Breed

The newest addition to my collection and the only non-physical hero/minion models on this list, 3D Breed’s “March to Hell: Rome” range is perfect for games of DEMIGOD. Not only do they have a sample hoplite, but the whole range should get your DEMIGOD warband pretty well stocked.

You can find STLs for Jason and the Argonauts, plus hoplites (both in armor and tunic), psiloi (slingers), peltasts and Cretan archers. There’s also a separate, smaller range for Spartans that’ll give your warband a little flavor with Spartan hoplites and an STL for Leonidas himself - perfect for your Major Hero!

Monsters

When it comes to the monsters that stalk through the annals of Greek antiquity, a 3D printer is going to be your best friend. While there are a couple metal and plastic miniatures out there, (WGF has medusae and a kit that includes Theseus, the Minotaur, and some pillars, while Reaper’s metal Bloodhoof miniature is a particular treat), the vast majority of Greek monstrosities are found in the land of liquid resin.

The Medusa by ArtOdyssey over on Cults3D was the one I ended up using for my demo game of “The Garden of Statues” at HMGS Fall In this past year, and it’s probably the only one I like out of the ones I’ve found - that is, it’s the only one that isn’t gigantic and doesn’t come with added weapons.

There’s one other model I’d like to call out, just because of how awesome it looks: the Cyclops by “clynche art” over on MyMiniFactory. One of the Discord users printed it and posted a picture that came out looking so awesome.

There are way more options than these when it comes to models that mesh with Greek antiquity. One of my goals when I wrote DEMIGOD was to let my players step into the sandals of some of the heroes of Greek mythology, so go forth and find the models that speak to your hero’s soul!

Buy DEMIGOD from No Name Games.

Introduction

The year is 480 B.C.E. The place, Thermopylae. Across the narrow pass stands the thousands-strong Persian army, ready to bring Greece to her knees. With you stand seven thousand Lacedaemonians, Mantineans, Tegeans, Thespians, Phocians, Locrians and others - Greeks all, ready to stand against the menace invading their shores. News has also reached you that the main Spartan army is on its way: all you have to do is hold off the Persians as long as possible.

The Forces

The Greeks have 45 ranks of hoplite infantry. Six of those ranks are Spartans, and have the following special rule:

Spartan Courage: Spartans are not pushed back when they take casualties.

The Persians have 60 ranks of infantry and archers, including five ranks of Immortals, who have the following special rule:

Constant Strength: If the Immortals do not lose a full rank by the end of combat, replace the lost models at the back of the unit.

Setup

Play the game on a 6’ x 4’ board. Deploy the Greeks up to half the table’s width forward of their board edge, with a wall placed halfway into their deployment zone. Any units immediately behind the wall get +1 Push when being charged by units beyond the wall.

Deploy the Persians up to 12” forward of their board edge.

The game is played for six turns.

Victory Conditions

The Greeks score a major victory if there are still Greek units on the field and Leonidas is still alive by the end of the sixth turn.

The Greeks score a minor victory if there are still Greek units on the field by the end of the sixth turn.

The Persians score a victory if there are no Greek units left on the field by the end of the sixth turn.

If you’d like this scenario as a PDF, you can find it here.