The Gravedigger's Boy: Frostgrave, Blood Eagle

The pain kept him running.  Sucking air across shattered teeth, stone raised welts on his screaming back.  The outraged mob.  Sick little bastard!  Rough hands hard from working the earth grasping.  Not right, just not right!  He had slipped their angry net.  The dead were a comfort.  The pastoral memories of a humble village the root of his terrors.  Running.  Fleeing into the night.  A lure. a shining copper mite sinking into the miller's pond  drawing him to the darkness like an anchor of iron shackled round his neck.  Not iron,  Never iron gravedigger's boy.  We draw you, bind you.  Listen to our calling. 

With the first Necromunda turf war drawing to a close it was time to to switch up painting and gaming projects.  We've been tossing around the idea of playing some Frostgrave before the next stint in the Underhive so I had a look at some fantasy models I had available, and started making a plan.

Some neglected favorites are GW's Lord of the Rings range.  I have armies of Rohan and Harad, as well a small collection of assorted figures gathered because I thought they looked cool.  The small group of elven characters wouldn't amount to much unless I gathered more elves to support them so they ended up differently than they might have been.

In fantasy my favorite elves are alien things.  An elder race whose dark purposes are a mystery to men.  Capricious and insensitive to the frailty of fleeting human life with designs incomprehensible to mortals.  Immortality as a plight that has dulled all joy of life.  These ancients are kin to the elves of folklore who live beneath ringed hills in slumbering courts that transcend time, enrapture the the flower of human kind, abducting them so they can live through them vicariously.

There are contemporary elves cut from this cloth and I'd be remiss not to mention them.  The nature of my elves is born from the writings of Susanna Clarke and Mark Chadbourn.  Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a tale of Napoloeonic magicians and her interpretation of the fair folk was of great inspiration.  Chadbourne's Swords of Albion series is a swashbuckling tale of spies in Elizabethan England where with elves as the insidious enemy of man.

For the Frostgrave campaign my elves are somewhere between elves and fallen angels.  A first race as elves normally go, they were either banished by a god or some great work of magic by humanity.  Bound within a shadow plane they watch the moving of the earth with hunger and avarice.  To transcend their prison they must draw a suitable human and make a focus of them.  Odd, the gravedigger's boy is such an unfortunate and has been lured to Frostgrave and a mysterious black mirror that will free his new masters from their imprisonment.  The LotR figures will become my necromancer, apprentice, and high end soldiers.  These will be supplemented with Heresy ghouls and zombies to represent thieves and thugs respectively. 

The figures will also make a fine addition to the small collection of models I've been building for Blood Eagle.  The Sidhe are one of the bands inspired by folklore included in the rules set.  In addition to the gathered fey I will augment the force with some Hobbit Goblins I already painted.  The last model is a ring wraith.  For Blood Eagle I would like it to represent an unquiet spirit in thrall to the Sidhe.  I imagine a long dead chieftain whose people defeated by the Saxons;  A thing of tattered rags and hate.