As I’ve stressed over and over again, the best way to make a demo really eye-catching and interesting is to have everything done to a really high level. This normally means that you’ll want to paint all of your models and have some cool scenic terrain, but one thing that people tend to overlook is having all of your game components look at refined and cool as possible. If you’re going to be running a scenario, making sure all the stuff for that scenario looks like it fits together with the rest of the models.

Because not everyone has the time to sculpt their own models, endlessly search for out-of-print official minis, or even has access to a 3d printer, here’s a pretty simple method to make rat tokens for “The Hunt for Rats in October”.

Getting Some Rats

When you’re looking for easy and cheap miniatures, the best place to start is Reaper Miniature’s Bones line – this has improved quite a bit over the years as they’ve revised the materials and production process, so if you’ve had a bad experience with the old rubbery bones material, it can be worth checking it out again. Thankfully, Reaper makes exactly the sort of rats we’d like to have for this – I ended up picking up a couple packs of their Giant Tomb Rats and Dire Rats for the required 21 rats for the scenario. These scale quite well with Freebooter Miniatures models – pretty sensible, considering Werner Klocke has sculpted quite a few models for Reaper over the year.

So, now that we have some rats, let’s take a look at what we’re working with!

It’s . . . a rat on some bricks. Pretty simple. The original model was sculpted by Sandra Garrity, and I think it’s a great model. If you’re really a stickler for having all of the rats look the same, I find myself preferring these Dire Rats over the Tomb Rats, who are a bit more savage looking, but honestly, both work quite well.

There are a couple of options to make these rats fit in as tokens, but the first thing we’ll need to do is put them on bases. If you’re obsessed with making sure everything looks nice and uniform, Freebooter Miniatures does sell a pack of plastic bases which – not coincidentally – happens to contain 21 blank bases. So, to get them to work well, I trimmed and sanded the bottoms down a little bit to make sure they fit flat before gluing them to bases.

At this point, we’ve got a fully-usable token, but it’s not looking particularly good to start. Here’s where the really basic sculpting is going to come into play, and it’s the trick that helps them to fit in with all of the other models.

Sculpting Bases

Once we’ve got our rats glued to bases and have given the glue time to cure, it’s time to begin sculpting the texture to properly make them fit in with the standard FF bases. As with all sculpting, I like using greenstuff mixed with apoxie sculpt for this sort of bulk work – given that GS is no longer manufactured (and it’ll be a while before Sylmasta actually manages to release their version), it’s best to bulk out these putties with a filler, and the apoxie sculpt is the right mix of bulking and behavior to really work nicely.

After mixing my putties, I put it in place on the base. Technically, I’ve put in a bit less putty than I actually need to use, but this is also the first rat that I’m working on for this and any process needs experimentation before you can really get what you need.

After I’ve added the putty into the base gaps, I then worked on smoothing it down to get everything integrated together. Getting the top smooth and flat is the biggest way to save yourself headaches later on in the process – unwanted texture is hard to get out once you’ve started on details.

The actual process of sculpting the base is pretty simple: using a well-lubricated sculpting tool, I started by marking out the divisions between the individual bricks. Then, once I’ve given that a bit of time to firm up, I worked on refining the profiles and distinction between the bricks using a curved chisel color shaper, which helps to keep a straight line between them and curve things subtly to help mark them as distinct.

Finally, once I’ve got the shapes to where I want, it’s time to texture them. I opted to use a round chisel color-shaper and variable amounts of pressure to start replicating the texture on the main bricks. This is a big push-and-pull process: I’ll smooth things out, try out different ideas, and otherwise built up the textures rather than trying to go full-power at the start.

Assuming you’re following along, here’s what it looks like once you’ve finished the texturing.

It’s a pretty quick process, and you can see how much better it looks already! Sure, these rats are on brick rather than the classic wooden planks that we have on most of the models, but the cobbles look is found on most Brotherhood models, so these fit together quite well.

So now, it’s just a few more that I need to work on . . .

Hobby Progress

Cataloging and assembling my most recent shipment of miniatures – I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten some new and out-of-production minis from Spiel Essen, including one of my favorite sculpts that I’ve always wanted but could never actually find. I’ve also started sculpting stones for the rats – there are a lot of them, so it’s going to take a while to get everyone ready, but I think I can have all of those bases sculpted and ready to go by the end of the week if I work over my lunch breaks.