Continuing the production line of Reaper Bones monsters which work at 15mm scale, here’s the Faceless Horror to act as some horrible beastie from another dimension.
Splashed it with random flesh colour speed paints all over before the dull task of picking out all the eyeballs and teeth. Didn’t have a big enough base for it, so green stuffed four washers together with a couple of magnets, and covered any gaps with the basing mix.
Click here for the other sessions.
Side Expedition 3D07 May 2026
Adventurers:
With a few more adventurers willing to adventure this week, and having obtained the services of a cleric for some protection from the undead, the party decided to once again return to the gatehouse.
After scouting around the dwarven-built level to find little sign of activity in most of the corridors, trying and failing to get through the great set of double doors which would lead down to the Snake-Armed Goddess’ temple. The dwarven senses suggested that the doors had been heavily obstructed rather than merely locked.
With the false door which killed Edward having been dealt with, the group decided to head down to the copper mines. Noting evidence of foot traffic down there leading to the crevice dropping into the underground lake, they proceeded carefully. Of greater immediate concern was the absence of living bats in the once-infested chamber; now there were just some broken stone bat forms littering the ground.
As they tried following the footsteps through the corridors, a cry of alarm came from the rear of the party: an enormous flea-like creature was bouncing off the walls and cannoning into the back ranks. Noting his retainer, Goizane, suddenly stiffen beside him as it leapt upon her, Hartley desperately tried fending the creature off as it continued its attack. Alas, the ricocheting movement foxed the bard, and the monster punctured his skin and instantly turning him to stone.
The adventurers quickly sought to reform into a formation that would protect their less-armoured companions from the enormous insect. Larribia pinned it to the wall with a well-placed arrow before Maistlyn’s arcane bolt blew it into tiny particles.
Dusting himself off, Firstleaf Levitated himself and sunk down into the crevice, dragging himself along the great cavern’s ceiling to get an idea of what has happening on Tassach’s hidden island. A flung torch lit up a hive of activity, many animated rotting bodies chipping away at the stone to give the impression that the tower had grown downwards into the ground. The elf returned with his findings.
After carrying his two stone colleagues back to the surface on a Floating Disc, Firstleaf did one final scouting run on the dwarven level, this time using his ethereal armour to bypass the blockade double doors. He slipped through the great statues laid across them and into Roak’s chamber. The place had been trashed, the great statue lying broken on the floor and the great mosaic ripped from the wall.
The elf also noticed a hitherto unknown door propped ajar, popped through the make sure the coast of was clear and then led the party to the other side of a wall where they found another secret door linking the rooms up.
The secret room had also been vandalised, but the party gathered up some torn shreds of a painting, hoping that they wouldn’t be missed and possibly a source of information were they to be pieced together back in safety.
Noting down the location of this route around the barricaded doors, the party returned to the surface to begin the arduous task of carrying two statues back to Fourtower Bridge.
GM Notes
Throughout my miniature gaming life, limited space has been as much an obstacle to the hobby as financial cost. My childhood bedroom had just about enough space once the bed had been wedged in for a 2′ by 4′ playing board my dad hinged to the wall, and hobby storage amounted to whatever I could fit underneath that. Subsequent housing gave me a few more square feet to play with, but it all still had to double as a bedroom or workspace; I could only pile boxes so high, and it was a pain to access everything.
Scaling down from the more mainstream (for fantasy and sci fi gaming, at least) 28mm miniatures to 15mm addressed these problems. I can fit four 15mm minis – based on 12mm washers – in the same space as a single 28mm figure on a 25mm base, and the substantially shorter average height means that it’s a lot easier to find containers to keep them in. My favourite for a while now has been this biscuit tin:
I’ve taken to magnetising all my minis so I can use a tin’s walls and lid as well. However, even this efficient arrangement is starting to feel cramped for the fantasy collection after the last few months’ productivity.
So I rescued a case for cassettes that my in-laws were throwing out, and happily discovered that a shallow tin case for colouring pencils fit snugly as two halves. I haven’t yet glued them down so as to retain flexibility for now, but the option remains. Just have to remember to store the case horizontally.
This was the case I was using for storing scenery, but that collection too has outgrown its container.
If you ever find yourself passing through Chesham, Buckinghamshire, consider popping into the Workaid Shop. It’s a charity that stocks second-hand tools and crafts goodies, and is an excellent resource for scratch building. There is also always a good selection of toolboxes and containers, and I picked up a couple of these solid metal cases. Tore out the foam and packed away the plastic inserts for later projects to leave me with a magnet-friendly storage solution.
Probably won’t be long before I need to find an even larger container or crack out the second metal case, but for now it just about works for the current terrain collection. This and the cassette case slot in nicely in a cupboard with the various travel boards and gaming tiles I’ve accumulated.
Click here for the other sessions.
Side Expedition 3C26 Apr 2026
Adventurers:
Lacking confidence in their ability to tackle a possible undead stronghold without a cleric, the party decided to investigate a trio of sinkholes Firstleaf had noticed on his scouting run many months ago. They dangled the dwarves down into the misty depths before starting to explore the man-made corridors.
Noting the presence of bovine dung caking the floor, they prepared for a possible minotaur encounter while they examined several sturdy metallic doors along the way. Lacking anything that might fit the unlocking mechanisms, they pushed on.
A loud bellow around a corner confirmed their suspicions, and they quickly readied to receive the charge of the snorting humanoid bull just before it crashed into their ranks. Zorion was impaled on one horn, but otherwise the adventurers’ defences held and they inflicted enough hut on it to send the beast fleeing back from where it had come, chasing it down and dispatching it. As it fell, the mist cleared.
Further exploration revealed the corridor network to be fairly contained, running around and between six independent units. Not all of the doors were closed, and one room turned out to be a giant weasel den. Spotting two tempting chests amongst the animals, the party charged in with spells and blades, killing the enormous animals and plundering the containers’ coins and gems.
Then Firstleaf activated his ethereal armour and took a tour of the remaining rooms, seeing some had been wrecked and empty, but also noting an interesting lamp and spear of evident value in two of the locked ones. There was also a scrawny man who had, with his late companions, been unable to clamber out the sheer walls to the surface. He claimed that he’d found a funny-shaped piece of amber which had allowed him to unlock this room, but that he’d been unable to retrieve it for use in the other doors.
The party helped hoist him back up out, handed him all the weasel pelts to carry and escorted him to safety, their packs sagging with the weight of all the coins they were lugging back.
GM Notes
Click here for the other sessions.
Side Expedition 3B16 Apr 2026
Adventurers:
Keen to see what had been left festering in the gatehouse, the party made their way along the familiar rising cliffs. En route they spotted a collection of shadowy forms flitting literally from tree to tree; there were no corporeal bodies in sight, merely humanoid-ish absences of light. They ambushed and dealt with them quickly enough with sufficient magic at their disposal to harm the figures, but wondered what it meant for the occupants of the gatehouse, in which direction the shadows had been travelling.
The adventurers carried on their journey to the ruin and performed their due diligence, checking the entire building for signs of change (nothing except a sneaky snake trying to take a chunk out of one of the retainer’s ankles from beneath some rubble) before heading underground and doing the same around the former rat-infested corridors, conscious that whatever had dispatched Grutz and his companion was still unaccounted for.
Heading down another level, they noted that the great double doors leading to the entrance to the Snake-Armed Goddess’ lair were shut with a large patch of the surrounding mushroom carpet now clear away from around it, but of more interest was an apparently new door occupying the corridor to the stairs down to the copper mine.
While most of the party listened at the double doors, Edward curiously pressed his own ear to this unexpected feature. Suddenly part of the woodwork warped and merged into a limb which heavily walloped the cleric. He tried to scramble back but the door reached out and wrapped the pseudopod around his waist while another emerged to continue the beating.
Feeling his foot stick to the door as he tried to kick himself away, Edward frantically tried loosening his laces and armour to slip from its grasp. Several of his comrades rushed in to help while those with ranged weapons tried shooting over his head to at least distract the false portal, but soon the cleric was hanging limp and lifeless in its grasp. No longer needing to worry about their companion’s safety, the party hurled a barrage of flaming oil flasks at the mimic from a safe distance and destroyed it.
Sadly collecting Edward’s magical items (and his body too, of course), the adventurers hastily made their way out of the dungeon and back to safety, wondering what they might do with a place they suspected to be full of undead now that they’d lost their cleric…
GM Notes
Another of the familiars from Reaper Bones’ 28mm Pack 2 proves to be a good 15mm fit. Got some secondary sexual characteristics just so that the adventurers know they’re being burned alive by a lady elemental.
Done very quickly with speed paints, layering over sequentially darker colours out from the white hot centre.
Click here for the other sessions.
Side Expedition 3A09 Apr 2026
Adventurers:
Curious about the mysterious door at the bottom of a cave tunnel, the party returned to the bandit lair. Stopping by the odd tentacled statue to get a closer look, they found some correspondence seemingly written to it, addressing the female form as Nixthisis and promising to find her in Stonehell, a centuries-old, cursed former prison several days’ travel away.
Filing that away for later, the adventurers sought out the door, but found it to have vanished from within the circle of smeared blood on the rock wall as if it had never been there. They spent ages searching for some way to summon it back, culminating in some of Elixabete’s fruitiest dwarven pejoratives flung its way, but it was all to no avail.
A distraction presented itself in the form of a bandit stumbling across them, baulking and fleeing back into the darkness. The party gave chase and cornered him in one of the low-ceilinged areas. He attempted to make a break for it and, when Elixabete and Negu attempted to stop him, let out an inhuman screech which strangely filled them with an immense sense of elation, scurrying past the immobilised pair.
Another shriek had the rest of the party struggling to avoid collapsing in hysterics, but enough of them held it together to immolate the figure with burning oil. As he collapsed on the floor, he faded away into a sticky black substance.
After a return to Fourtowers Bridge to briefly recover, they returned again to the door. No further luck on that front, so they did a quick circuit around the cave system, losing Katixa to a surprise attack by some enormous shrews, and then departed for the gatehouse, wondering if the walking corpses of last week had been making their way there.
Having not heard from their hairy scouts for some weeks, they made their way to Grutz’s lair, only to find him and the other captive from the battle in the Snake-Armed Goddess’ temple lying in their makeshift beds with their necks broken. Drawing parallels with the manner in which they’d found the halfling Dingbury’s corpse months ago, they quickly exited and returned to safety, pondering what they might have left festering in the gatehouse.
GM Notes
With my terrain collection is still light on buildings, I put together some more houses to join the two previous efforts, sticking to the same core of cork tiles and coffee stirrers. This time I built the basic frame of the building first with business cards and electric tape to strengthen the structure and give those 5mm thick bits of cork some support.
Finally remembered to coordinate the tile pieces so that the more textured side was facing outwards on all the walls.
Click here for the other sessions.
Side Expedition 2Z26 Mar 2026
Adventurers:
There was much deliberation as to where the party wished to direct their energy this expedition. Their explorations last week suggested there being greater depths to the bandit lair, there were untrod paths in the sword-filled temple and it had been several months since their last attempt to deal with the four-armed statue under the gatehouse. Fearing coming across the god Gladio again, and reasoning that the gatehouse had lain comfortably dormant so far, they opted for dealing with the caravan-robbing brigands.
Their jaunt through the woods was interrupted by a migrating collection of zombies stumbling their way east, but they were straightforward to eliminate. After determining that their coin bags had long since been cut from their belts, the adventurers continued on to the bandit caves.
There was no sign of activity in any of the known chambers, so the party delved down new corridors, the taller members forced to stoop in the tight quarters. Other than a peculiar statue with too many tentacles to which they gave a wide berth, the adventurers found little of interest throughout the cave network: it appeared to have been emptied of valuables.
Some scrape marks along the ground indicated that some heavy objects had been dragged across it recently. Following those marks brought the party down into a small area with several burnt corpses and a wooden door set into the stone.
Noting the blood smeared in a circle around it, they warily opened it and found themselves in a cosily-furnished room: a few comfy armchairs upon a luxurious carpet surrounded by walls of books. After flipping through a few of the readable ones – treatises on printing presses – they poked their heads through another door, finding a gaggle of skeletons mopping around a large furnace with pipes leading up into the ceiling.
Making the most of the fact that their presence didn’t appear to have been noticed, the adventurers hastily withdrew from wooden-panelled rooms back out into the caves and the outdoors. This bizarre collection of chambers would require more debating back in safety.
GM Notes
Got gifted Alternative Armies’ Holt the Treeman (among other minis) in the Bedroom Battlefields discord’s Secret Santa a few months ago and, realising my collection lacked any woodland spirits or monsters, grabbed a few Reaper Bones miniatures to accompany it. Two vegepygmies transformed tree spirit warriors and one of the familiars from Pack 2 became an animated tree stump / plant elemental. Each got doused in speed paints of varying brown and green hues.
Picked up a pair of Reaper Bones Lemures to act as oversized ogre-like beasties, bloated enough to fit in with the human-sized pestilent creatures. Stuck with the same paint scheme, but the colours came out in slightly different shades. Possibly user error, possibly as a result of the different formula in this v2 speed paints.
Still, close enough to fit together quite nicely, and were very quick to do (once again, took me far longer to do the bases than the minis themselves).
