Back in 2018, one of the first tabletop games I crowdfunded was Tainted Grail, a narratively dense take on the Arthurian legends from a team of Polish designers called Awaken Realms. Think a cross between the Knights of the Round Table and The Witcher and you will have an idea of the grim, corrupted world they conjured, successfully enough that it is being spun out into multiple videogames. The game’s expansions came with a particularly nice set of miniatures for the new playable characters. Looking for a smaller miniature-painting project, I decided to paint these using their card art as a reference but pushing a specific colour on each character to make them easy to identify on the table. These were painted around April to May of this year (some time before the individual Warhammer Quest models I have recently posted to Instagram/Mastodon). Shot individually below there is little sense of scale, but most of the bases are roughly the size of a 10p coin.
Dagan was the original reason I wanted to paint this set, a butcher wielding his cleaver and meat hook which made it easy to tell a story through the severed pig head beneath his foot to the bloody knife and blood spatter across his face and torso. I had consider adding similar gore to his hook but felt that would detract from the arc of red across the other elements.Sloan’s illustration is desaturated to the point of being almost monochrome. I translated this as sickly, pallid skin and virtually no colour from the rear. Beneath his cloak are warmer browns and golds to add a little more life to the model. Pack-in miniatures for board games tend to be made from softer plastics or resin that lack the level of detail in higher-end tabletop miniatures — you can see this particularly in the chainmail which forms an amorphous mass of rings.Maintaining interest in a largely single-colour model can be difficult but Vallejo’s paint range contains a wide range of browns which allowed for plenty of variety in Duana’s leather skirts. I concentrated the magical blue energy into the flame in her hand, darker and colder at the bottom, rising to a hot white tip. Taking inspiration from the splashes of red in the card art, I tied together her accessories with the blood seeming to originate on the skull, dripping on the cross and staining her hand, which in turn transferred it to the flap of her satchel where she would have opened it to pull out spell components.Visually, Thebalt is the closest to a classic knight. In the card art, his yellow clothes seem to have faded or worn away to white. However, whites seemed a little too bright and pure for this game, so I leaned into the yellow (and I have only recently found techniques to create white robes with which I am satisfied). Meanwhile, as my suits and socks attest, I love a good turquoise so likewise boosted this as a strong accent colour.The most striking thing about Caolin isn’t Caolin at all, but her pet wolf. Its green eyes stand out against the monochrome fur but overall I wanted it to read as a shadowy presence almost wrapping around her (even on all fours it is 2/3 of her height). In hindsight, the handgrip wrappings on the bow ought to have been brighter to contrast the dark fur.I wanted to lean into the exotic trappings of Naazer, a foreign explorer laden with map scrolls. A palette of rich green and gold made him stand out against the darker or desaturated tones of the other characters.
Finally, here is a bonus pack mule because it’s cute. Feel free to suggest names on a postcard.
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