Despite an ongoing respiratory bug that’s been sapping my will to do almost anything, I’ve still found time to get some painting and hobby done. I think it’s the excitement of steady progress; once you get into the habit of doing something, the amount of effort it takes to start or even just take a few minutes each day to work on something. Painting is something that used to feel like a barrier in front of being able to play a game, because I am one of those weirdos who tries to have all her miniatures painted before actually playing. This typically means that I rarely played, but a few years of playing Infinity and Blood Bowl helped me to get much better at finishing projects.

All of those had existing communities, however, so the process of building one is a newer one to me. Thankfully, my good friend Brian demonstrated how to build a community by managing to return to wargaming after a long pause and getting a pretty solid Kings of War community going. I’d tried to do that with Armada a few years back immediately post-pandemic, but it was hard to get people actually interested in a game of naval combat as that was too far afield of the usual 40k or AoS games.

I really hope that’s not foreshadowing for how Freebooter’s Fate will go, but at the very least, I’ve got some great miniatures on hand that can probably sub into other games and it’s a game I’m able to do some solo wargaming with thanks to the NPC and civilian rules, which should get their own post.

However, this is all a long-winded introduction to the painting portion of this blog, where I will talk about goblins.

Goblin Mariner, In Color!

I will preface this by stating that I adore goblins. The little green dudes, dudettes, and diverse-gender dudissimos are the best part of tabletop gaming, partially because so many artists and sculptors have had interesting takes on them. I would rank Werner Klocke as one of the greats in this regard – the Goblin Pirates are apparently the only faction in Freebooter’s Fate that he insists on doing all the sculpting for. Knowing how much effort goes into producing a single characterful goblin sculpt, much less an entire range with a unique and coherent visual aesthetic, really shows his amazing design and sculpting skills.

So, here’s the first goblin I’ve painted for Freebooter’s Fate: the humble Goblin Mariner Deckhand.

Aww yeah, that’s a real fine goblin.

My recipe for goblin skin tone is a pretty layered approach: I start with a very dark green mixed with turquoise to add in some blue tones to the flesh. Then, I started mixing Warcolour’s Goblin Green (the best goblin color) with the previous mix, highlighting up to pure Goblin Green. From there, I start mixing in a very pale blue to the Goblin Green to get a higher pastel highlight, followed by adding in some pale yellow for the sunny highlights, with each layer getting a couple of glazes from the mediating tones to properly blend it into the previous ones and leaving the final highlight untouched.

The shadows were deepened with a few dark blue and purple glazes, to add a bit of life to them. I then glazed in some orange to the midtones – this came from some advice I saw from Jose DaVinci, who does a ton of painting tutorials on YouTube. I’m generally not a painting video person, but his make a lot of sense to me and don’t try to do extraneous parasocial video stuff. Finally, I played around with glazes and values until the skin looked good to me.

As I wanted to contrast the worn leathers used by the Goblin Pirates with the reddish, well-maintained leathers of the Imperial Armada, I needed to work out a new recipe. I started with a base of Vallejo’s Saddle Brown, which is a lovely maroon brown. I gradually added more and more yellow ochre to that, working in very thin layers to build up a texture on the coat. This was further highlighted up with an ivory paint in the same way, trying to keep that orangey reddish tone, and then glazed in the shadows with some deep reddish-purples and reds. This smoothed out the transitions and helped make it look more homogenous – the lighting isn’t doing it any favors here, but it does have some nice depth in person.

NMM was done as usual, though it’s somewhat duller than I’d like right now. The boat hook had a complex shape that I still haven’t quite worked out yet. The ‘official’ paint job gave it a rusty appearance: I’m considering trying to do that, but I worry that it might be too orange-y overall. His pistol, however, was great fun – it has such a ridiculous appearance that just feels like a proper goblin-y weapon.

Reviewing what I’ve done with painting has been pretty fun, and I feel like I’ve grown as a painter because of it.

So, on to the design and role of the Goblin Mariner!

What Makes a Good Goblin?

My partner and I have a theory that the best goblins come from artists that have regular access to weird little dogs. My best goblin sculpts have always come from when I take inspiration from specific dogs, and Herr Klocke seems to have that same kind of understanding of the goblinoid form.

Goblins in Freebooter’s Fate are a complicated topic that deserve their own post of review, but in short: they’re explicitly recovering from chattel slavery and successfully rebelled against the humans who enslaved them, building out their own culture again after having had it taken from them. There are a lot of elements that are pretty problematic in how they’re handled, but the explicit othering of what humanity decided was a ‘lesser’ species despite their intelligence and the handling of the initial stages of their rebellion could have been done better for what is, in essence, a silly game of pirates.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that philosophical ramble out of the way, let’s talk design. Goblins come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes in FF, with relatively equal representation of male and female goblins. They all have some pretty diverse body types as well – rather than being a simple generic form, reposed to fit ideas, they have variable facial features, body types, and stances, all of which make them feel more like people. They also universally do not have any hair, but will wear head dressings that have fake hair attached – indicating that they’ve adopted aspects of human appearance and beauty standards, but that they’re not naturally part of how they see themselves.

As far as the design, the Goblin Mariner has a clear design philosophy – they’re wearing somewhat patchy and ill-fitting clothing, carrying a boat hook and pistol, and showing signs of treated injuries. They’re a scrappy underdog, but rather than cowering, look at the stance – they’re ready to confront the world and posing confidently with their pistol. The lines of the coat and boat hook all draw your eyes towards the face, which gives a very strong, open pose.

In terms of Goblin Deckhands, the Mariner is an incredibly inexpensive Deckhand for what they do – a respectable strength of 5 on their main melee weapon, similar for their pistol, and the Cowardly trait to help buff Morale when they have a few buddies backing them up. Goblins need to have numbers to do well, after all, and so that bonus will keep them in the fight for longer. I think they make a great basic Deckhand, and will form the standard by which I compare all Goblin Deckhands moving forward.

Hobby Progress

I have painted a Goblin Pirate, obviously, but also finished assembling more minis. Steadily chipping away at projects like that is important to me, so having the ability to just pick up a random mini and work on it really helps me keep up the steady progress. I am skipping around based off of what looks interesting to me whenever I sit down to paint, but the goal of painting my Goblin Pirate and Shadows crews is feeling achievable in a few weeks.