Christmas Special 2022 – The Christmas Broo!

I know it’s nearly Easter, and that I should have posted this in early January, but life got in the way. I can’t help myself and wait until next Christmas, so I thought I might as well release this now 😊 .

In the past couple of years, whenever time allowed it, I made customised gifts for my loved ones: doll houses for my nieces, a vignette for my brother, and this time it was a surprise for my gaming friend. Since he is a long-time fan of Runequest and his favourite monsters are the broos, the choice was obvious.

When I found the Brash Horde, the Brash Horde 2 and the Brash Master miniatures from Lucid Eye Publications, I knew that these were the right ones. They look exactly like the broos are described.

Lucid Eye Publications also has a Brash shaman, but since I’m a slow painter and it was launched fairly close to Christmas, there was no way for me to purchase and complete it on time. However, I already had the Bethamel miniature, which was the perfect choice as a leader of this warband.

The minis are very nice, they are full of details and personality. There were no mold lines or any other imperfections that had to be corrected.

Painting the Broos

I had to keep two important things in mind during the process:

• Runequest is a bronze-age setting, so – instead of steel – I used bronze, copper and brass for the weapons. Initially, it felt restrictive but I soon started to enjoy using these colours.
• The Broos are the creatures of chaos. Normally I use a more or less uniform colour scheme for a warband but in this case, I did the opposite and aimed for variety. I picked multiple colours for their skin and fur, so that no two figures have the same colour combination.

After cleaning and glueing the figures to their bases, I base-coated everything with white. For the painting, I used The Army Painter’s Warpaints: Kobold skin, Necrotic flesh and Witch brew for the skin and Hemp Rope, Leather Brown, Monster brown and Combat fatigues for the fur. I painted the loincloths with Uniform grey (oh, the irony…😊 ) and for the smaller details I used whatever colour made the most dynamic contrast. The metal parts were painted with Vallejo’s bronze, copper and brass.

In the next phase, I used The Army Painter’s Quickshades: Strong tone, Soft tone, Light tone and military shader. To make the colour scheme more chaotic, I combined the quick shades with base colours that weren’t necessarily the matching ones. Once they dried, I highlighted the minis with the base colours and with their lighter variants.

At the end of the painting process, I applied a layer of gloss and a layer of matt varnish, and I used metal varnish for the bronze, copper and brass surfaces.

The bases were made with Stierland mud, with Desert yellow and Arid Earth drybrushing. As a finishing touch, I added Deadland tuft. It’s self-adhesive, easy to use and added to the character of these minis.

Bethamel

The Bethamel miniature is a serious piece: it’s huge, it’s fully made of metal, has a significant weight and it’s got a lot of details. It looks like a classic depiction of Baphomet which makes it a versatile miniature for fantasy or horror games. The wings and the arms were big and heavy, superglue wouldn’t be enough to keep them in place, so I pegged them but haven’t done any other modifications to this mini.

Since I had two sets from the Broo/Brash minis, I decided to keep one of them unmodified but I added leftover bits from my bits box and arms from Anvil Industry to the second set. These were mostly simple hand swaps but they made a lot of difference.

I enjoyed working with these minis, they were fully painted by Christmas, and my friend who got them as a Christmas gift liked them too. So that’s a complete success, right? Well, almost… I made one mistake: I painted them during winter, mostly after work, which means there was no sunlight at all. I painted with my desk lamp and I used a lot of light. As a result, the minis look very dark under normal lights and some of the details on them are barely visible – at least until you give them more light. Well, that was a lesson learned: next time I’ll use less light.

The shaman will be painted soon, but by next Christmas the very latest 😛