1 - Coming Up with the Concept

One of the things that people have asked me to do more of is to get out to conventions and showcase some of the new or lesser known games. One of the games that usually comes up is Demonworld, the fantasy tabletop game from Germany (published by Hobby Products).

Unfortunately, running this website doesn't leave me a lot of spare time for painting, so when Rusty of 4 Demons Painting and I started discussing a painting project, getting started on a Dwarf Army unit seemed a natural.

About Demonworld

A lot of games have point systems where you compose the identify of every person in every unit in your army. Demonworld doesn't work that way. They take things from the general's viewpoint - you buy units, not individual troopers.

And the same is true in the store: Except for special characters and monsters, each pack contains an entire Demonworld unit. In this case, pack 4408 Dwarven Miners is supposed to contain 40 figures, enough for 10 stands of 4 figures each. (Our sample pack actually has 43 figures.)

The Dwarven Miners

So what are Dwarven Miners? In the background of Demonworld, Miners are the Dwarven equivalent of a militia - "hastily assembled" workers banded together to defend their local community. Their weapons are their daily tools - picks.

Elsewhere in the Demonworld Army: Dwarves book, it mentions that members of the Miners Guild prefer yellow-and-red-patterned clothing.

The unit consists of 40 models: 1 leader, and the rest split between two poses (double- and single-sided picks).

I told Rusty that I liked the background material, but not to let it stand in the way if we came up with a better idea.

Rusty and I Talk

"I would do a bit darker flesh than the more-human like tone shown in the Dwarf Miner pictures," suggested Rusty after looking at the online catalogue's pictures. Right away, we were on the same wavelength - I like my Dwarves dark brown, almost "woody" in color.

"I was thinkin that the clothes would be dark," Rusty told me, "but how about adding some sort of clan-like stipes or little design so they don't look like a bunch of random dwarves that just met up. [In the catalogue] there is a Dwarf that has half his top green and the other half blue, but I wouldn't use those colors - the blue is cool, but Dwarves in green clothes? Uh..not too dwarfy!"

I told him I liked the idea of dark work clothes, since these Dwarves had presumably just come out of the mines and wouldn't be wearing their sharpest duds.

"You're right, though," he replied. "Hard to imagine wearing those into a mine. Makes me think of the way I treat a suit... I'm in it for the occasional event and everyone says how nice I look in it, but as soon as I'm home that thing comes off and the ripped t-shirt and faded jeans go right on with a sigh of relief! I can imagine the Dwarves doing the same thing - sweating with these bright colors on in the Great Hall while the other clans say something like hey Nord, wow! all spiffy aint we? and Nord is like heh..heh..yeah... An hour later he changes, and Nord's wife is like oh, heavens you couldn't stay in those another few minutes for me could ya?"

Rusty suggests trying a red-and-yellow armpatch to mark them as from the same guild. I agree.

And They're Off...

And now it's time to put the figures into the mail for Rusty to get a look at them...