In Episode 3 of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, my players also ran into acolytes of the Cult of the Dragon. They are nasty divine spellcasters and perform dark rituals to please their dark gods. Otherworld’s Evil Acolytes I were a perfect match.

The miniatures are part of the “Men of Evil” series. On their website, Otherworld Miniatures shows the acolytes painted with dark red robes. Although this looks pretty nice, I wanted the figures to match the colors of my other dragon cultists. So, I decided they should wear black robes instead.

Also, I wanted these cultists to have stone bases, like they are performing their rituals in an old ruin or dungeon (like shown in the gallery from Otherworld Miniatures). Micro Art Studio is a polish company with great miniature bases. They have these nice “Arcane” bases in their range that would do the job.

Basing and Priming

To use the custom bases, I freed all three of the figures from their factory base-clip-thingy. Then, I drilled holes into the feet of the minis and pinned them onto the arcane bases. Before priming, I cleaned them intensively, as they had an oily film of some kind on them.

Then, they were primed black with Vallejo Black Primer via Airbrush and then dusted with Vallejo White Primer. You can see the results below. I really like the details in the faces.

Painting

I started with blacklining the different areas of the miniatures. Next was their skin. While painting, I realized that making all of them wear black was kind of boring, so I tried different things with each figure: One acolyte was basecoated with a blue-black mix (the one with the club), one with a dark turquoise (the one with the scroll) and one with a brown-black mix (the one with the skull).

I then started highlighting them with three layers of lighter shades from their basecoat color. After that, the shadows were gone. So I washed them black, and repeated the highlighting.

For the bases, I first tried a brown-grey, to achieve a good contrast between miniatures and base. But I didn’t like it too much as it looked wrong somehow. I redid the bases and used a neutral and darker grey with black and brown washes for the shadows and a very light grey highlight.

When painting the faces, I had a little mishap with the skull guy, resulting in an ugly eye. I made it a feature and now he has a scar and fake eye. Kaboom. At the end, I did the scroll, club/dagger, skull, and cords, but I won’t go into details here. If you look closely, you can see the difference between both black robes, I think. I like the overall result very much.

Here they are as a group from the front and the back.

Plain and simple, classic evil spellcaster cultists. Fear them … because they can cast “Guiding Bolt” to kill you (which it probably does when you’re a D&D 5E level 2 char with 15 hitpoints). 🙂