Shadow Dragons! The last of the Descent monsters…

“Some fragmented records from the Dragon Wars speak of dragons that shrouded themselves in darkness, emerging from the blackness only to kindle their flames. The idea of such a large enemy moving with such stealth and secrecy is obviously terrifying. Fortunately, Shadow Dragons are nothing more than legend.”

In game, they breath fire in a line across four squares, and their shadow power makes them hard to hit in combat.

The figures themselves are a fair size, but fairly simple in terms of detail. Wing ribs and body spikes are the main features. No scale detail. These have some mould lines (in awkward places), and look to have been multi-part figures. Some of the joins aren’t smooth either. I did what I could with file and knife – this is one of the occasions where I really could have used some greenstuff. For a board game piece I feel I put in quite a bit of work. I could have done more, but I’m happy with the way they look and I’ve still got more figures to finish!

Right from the beginning I was thinking of a dark grey with a purple tint… this became a dark purple once I started painting. Blue on one and red on the other sounded like good secondary colours to set them apart from each other. A blue wash over one was disappointing. I mixed blue and fushia and got a nice mix that went on smoothly, then did the same on the other dragon with red and fushia. Highlights, particularly on the wings were almost straight blue and red. Black wing edging, and on most of the spikes.

Normally with bases, I glue sand and all stones on, sometimes adding moulding paste on top. This time I started with thick layers of the paste, and pushed stones into it. I left it in peaks and ripples hoping for an stone effect I’d seen a few other people do with these figures. Painted grey, then a good black wash over the top got almost exactly what I’d been wanting. A lighter grey dry-brush finished it off.

These count for Dave Stone’s ‘PAINT WHAT YOU GOT 2025/2026‘ Challenge. I have some almost complete heroes, but they won’t be done in the next few days!

Not much painting over the last few weeks as it was hot and work has been flat out. Lots of reading instead. Nearly all Sci-Fi… Neal Asher, David Weber & John Ringo, Jeremy Szal.

Nearly all the Descent monsters are done now, with the two Elementals being the second last, and probably the craziest of the lot. Which elements? All of them – Fire, Earth, Water, and Air.In one creature.

“Beings comprised of all four primal elements are dangerous and impossible to control. Their warring primal natures make these elementals lethal to all around them.”

They have special actions that effect all figures/heroes adjacent to them. Fire is an attack, the others sound like debuffs.

I found many images of people painting all four sections as the different elements, and I feel they look like a chaotic mess. I had one image where the style used was air/water for one and the earth/fire on the other. This looked much better and I’ve done my own version of that…

A couple of fluid coats of gray & blue on one, and browns on the other, to get the colour to sit in all those lines, then lots of dry-brushing.Then finally some base decoration.

Air/Water: Light blue, light gray (mostly on the lower bits), some green, lighter blue and white.

Earth/Fire: Light grey, light brown. Then carefully applied yellow, orange, and red for flames. (The red is brighter IRL than in the images.)

I really enjoyed working on these. Large, fairly simple, not complicated to paint.

These count for Dave Stone’s ‘PAINT WHAT YOU GOT 2025/2026‘ Challenge.

My wife and I set-up Descent last night and tried the tutorial mission for the campaign in the box. [I’d been left with instructions to paint figures, learn the rules, but not play the game… it’s hard to get the idea of how everything works without playing!]

I’m feeling that overall, Descent is both simpler and more complicated than I’d been expecting from looking at cards and rules. I don’t want to do a full review on the game-play, but I fully understand why they expect one player to be the Overlord and run the monsters. I struggled to play both a hero and the overlord, without forgetting about cards, and abilities for both. We did win the scenario, fairly easily, but I think that was both good dice rolls for the heroes, and me forgetting to use extra abilities for the monsters. We may run the same again, with my wife playing two heroes, and me being Overlord.

Only two Ettins in the box – one boss and one standard. In Descent, they are the typical two-headed giant that isn’t very smart, though they like eating adventurers.

The figures themselves are pretty simple – loincloth, wolf skin, club and a helmet. The detail is fairly good, and I think they look much better with the simplicity of the gear, rather than being loaded down with “stuff’.

They are quite a large figure and I spent a bit of time trying to to fill slight gaps where they had been assembled. (It looks like the upper and lower torso were separate, and both heads, and one arm were too.) Both got a basic flesh paint, one with an extra brown wash to darken the skin. Finished and next to each other, I like the look of the darker one more than the pale, but not enough to go back through the process of darkening skin again.

The wide empty base was just asking for some clutter… I started with the rocks and decided a tree trunk would suit too. My small bag of “flock” is nearly empty – time to cut open another tea-bag!

These count for Dave Stone’s ‘PAINT WHAT YOU GOT 2025/2026‘ Challenge.

There are four Flesh Moulders. These were really fun to paint – they are a relatively simple sculpt, without much detail – but with an interesting pose… and they got more interesting the more I worked on them.

“Flesh Moulders study the living, and are capable or rending or knitting living flesh as it suits them.” Their main in-game ability is to heal other monsters.

After the Merriod, these have to be the next most unusual. When I went to spray them white, I noticed they had three hands… which got me reading the monster description. Next was an almost all over flesh (there’s lots of skin) and I realised that the twirl of the robe in front was attached to the top of the right knee. I cut this free and trimmed the ends on a few to have a slight variation. Now I noticed that they also have three feet – their left leg starts to split into two just under the knee.

I picked base colours for each – orange/red, blue, green and fushia. Then they all got a thorough wash to bring out all the detail. Each robe got a darker edge, and a lighter highlight. Some of the flesh was touched up, or highlighted, and hair done in brown. Then on to the magic or whatever they are moulding… purple with a darker wash then fluro pink and white highlights. Eyes (and claws on third hand) picked out as pretty much the last step.

No extra work on bases for these – I don’t feel they need it.

These count for Dave Stone’s ‘PAINT WHAT YOU GOT 2025/2026‘ Challenge.

Happy New Year!

The smallest of all the figures in the Descent game – the goblins. At roughly 22mm high (including the base) they are dwarfed by every other figure.

I’ve read through the main rules for the game, and the introduction to the campaign in the box, “Heirs of Blood”. Goblins appear in a lot of the initial quests, and being small figures I thought they be more tricky to paint than the rest. Two good reasons to get them done.

They weren’t that bad actually – while small, there’s not that much detail, and I got them painted quite quickly. Art shows them with green skin, brown loin-cloths and boots, and bronze helmets. All the browns look okay on the artwork, but its too much brown paint on a small figure, so I added so dark red for loin cloths. They were finished yesterday except for some base touch ups. After taking an initial photo taken, I added some extra stones to the bases. (Image here updated)