Shadows of Brimstone: Tentacles done!

Finally I finished the first batch of Tentacles from Shadows of Brimstone. If you haven't any idea what Shadows of Brimstone is about, you can check my unboxing of the two core sets where I give a first impression of the content and style of the game.
I decided to go with a two color scheme since the game has normal and brutal monsters and by giving the tentacles different colors I can differ later in the game between the two.
After forcing myself through those miniatures (more of that later) I can give you also a first and short review of the miniatures.

The tentacles come in one sprue for each core set (therefore I have two because of the two core sets I got). The sprue contains two of each tentacle type, therefore it was easy for me to decide to make a purple and a green tentacle batch. I just could resist to make the purple ones with yellow sucker cups, but maybe for the second patch :)
The miniatures are made out of hard plastic but as I had the sprue in my hands I had the feeling that there was still some abherent left from the molding process. But since I never had problems before with plastic kits I spared me the step of cleaning and drying everything. That would be my first bad luck here, but to that one (and all the other bad luck) a bit more later...

If you take a closer look on the sprue you can see directly the first problem I had with the position of the sprue pins. For the short tentacles they are completely on one of the main details of the miniature and it is nearly impossible to get this cut out and cleaned up with either keeping some of the leftovers or with destroying some of the details. Unhappy Paradox0n here... Otherwise there are nearly no moldlines. Therefore I tried my best and cleaned them up, removed some of the leftovers from the sprue (especially at the bottom of the base where no one can see it) and made them ready to be primed.

Since it is already pretty cold and damp outside I decided to use my trustworthy airbrush primer from Vallejo (which I reviewed already some while ago) instead of using a 2K priming. After a short airbrush session I had all of them primed and only had to wait until the primer was completely dried (very important with those acrylic polyurethane primers).
So after some hours I got back to them and took again a closer look and was shocked when the primer started to peel away at touch! Double checked but it was really dry so the first time some abherent  on a plastic kit caused me trouble. You never stop learning. Luckily nothing really bad happened and the damage could be repaired in only some minutes and thus I could start painting them.

From here on I have no pictures as the finished miniatures because from now on I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Therefore I will rant a bit just to feel me better afterwards (hopefully). So if you don't want to read any further, I can totally understand it. If you continue: You have been warned!

After the problem with the peeling primer was solved, I started with the base colors of the tentacles. Here I had a problem with one of the Vallejo colors, since it had pretty much seperated and I had problems to get pigments and solvent together. But that didn't work until I had all greens laid down. Since it gave a pretty awesome wet look, I didn't care too much :) Then I drybrushed the tentacles and reworked some of the depth with washes. At this part I found another modelling error on the tentacles. They weren't completely round but had some kind of kink which showed up after the drybrushing. Nothing I oculd do here without reworking half of the miniature so I bit my knuckles and continued painting.
After one of my brushes conked out, my black ran out and my cats grabbed two of the tentacles (nice smelling pet toy aren't they?) and I had to search them in our flat I was near at throwing them out of the window.
But after I got all together and had some days of a break I continued to paint the base and had the feeling the modeller just found out after sculpting the tentacles that they also need a base and just modelled some stones and glued them on. There is no clear distinction which I would have expected if those tentacles burst out of the floor/ground...

Am I still so enthusiastic about the miniatures of the game? At the moment no. The overall modelling is nice and sharp, but the tentacles molds have some serious problems. The division of the molds run through important parts of the miniatures which kill the overall nice modelling here. If the QA didn't see that or if Flying Frog is too inexperienced in moldmaking I don't know.
But at least the are from a much better material than the first Decent miniatures. So you don't have to fear that you are bending the miniatures when touching them.
I still think for a board game they are quite OK, but I wouldn't compare them to good tabletop miniatures at the moment. Have to see if the other miniatures of the game will fare better.

But enough ranting, the result is quite OK and I think they will look fine in the game. Don't you think?


So long,
Paradox0n