Another round of Dragon Cultists for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen D&D adventure. These guys are part of The Pale Eye, the white dragon faction within the Cult. I converted some GW Uruk-Hai miniatures for them.

If I traced it back correctly, the idea with the five factions within the Cult of the Dragon comes from Zak Sabbath. He’s a blogger and game designer and got a lot of press for his blog ‘Playing D&D with Porn Stars‘. His DMing style is kind of dark, but the factions of the cult are real cool nonetheless are were adopted by serveral other DMs/blogs (e.g. Hack & Slash or Power Score). Sidenote for my players: Please don’t read these blogs, major spoilers for Tyranny of Dragons ahead.

Zak S. envisioned the Church of Tiamat as fivefold, comprising The Red Hand, The Pale Eye, The Cobalt Claw, The Jade Fang and the Black Wing of Tiamat. I really like the basic idea, so I’m gonna use these in my campaign as well.

Basing and Priming

In this post, I’ll show you my take on the cultists of The Pale eye, aka white dragon cultists. These guys are worshipping white dragons which are typically found in cold climates. So the minis should reflect the cold environments, maybe with lots of fur, ice, and snow. It also allowed me to re-use some old Uruk-Hai miniatures from Games Workshop: I sculpted fur cloaks and beards for the uruks (to hide their monstrous features) to make them appear more human. I based them on a 25mm base and put some small rocks and sand on the bases. The next day, they were primed black and white with Vallejo Primer via airbrush.

The overall result is far more barbaric then the rest of the cultist miniatures, as you can see below.

 Painting

As with the other cultists, I started with some blacklining (Reaper Brown Lining) and basecoating of the armor (Vallejo Model Color Black). As I intended some of the armor to be leather instead of metal, I used Vallejo Model Color Chocolate Brown for these parts. For the cloth parts, I drybrushed with VMC Sea Grey. For the leather, I used Vallejo Game Color Brown Leather. And finally, for the metal armor, I used VGC Gunmetal.

After this, the minis were washed with Vallejo Game Color Umber Ink (leather parts) or VGC Black Ink (cloth and metal). For the skin tone, I used Reaper Tanned Skin as basecoat, in addition with Tanned Shadow and Tanned Highlight and a VGC Skin Wash.

I painted the bases with VMC Flat Earth and gave them a VGC Umber Ink wash, then drybrushed them with VMC Cork Brown and VMC Dark Sand. The rocks were painted VMC Dark Sea Grey and drybrushed with VMC Sea Grey, VMC Sky Grey and then glazed with VMC Dark Green Wash to simulate moss growth.

I gave the cloaks a basecoat of VMC Dark Sea Grey and drybrushed them with VMC Offwhite. Finally, for the details I used VMC Silver (metal highlights) and VMC Offwhite for shield decorations. Pretty basic stuff, but sufficient for table top game play.

Final touches

As these are supposed to be white dragon cultists, maybe encountered in a cold climate, I wanted to have some snow on the base. I bought some Citadel Texture paint (see image below). It’s a sticky paste that resembles patches of snow. After putting a little static tundra grass on the base, I smeared a little bit of the texture paint on the base. The effect is quite nice. For the next time, maybe I should drybrush or wash the snow a little bit after applying the texture paint for a better effect.

Here are the pictures of the finished miniatures, four Cultists of The Pale Hand of Tiamat: