a special miniature (or two)

 few days ago a fellow wargamer, misterc posted an entry on his blog,
the Periodic Painting Table, and there he was discussing his more favorable miniature.
click here to check out that post here.
and i think i misread it on what would be your favorite miniature over the years or
which miniature are you more attached to.

and as reading that particular post if there was one miniature or model that would be
my favorite it would have to be the 2nd release of the Great Unclean One
from Games Workshop.

 
the Great Unclean One

why would this particular model be special to me?
it goes back to little after it was released and the following summer i just started playing
chaos space marines for Warhammer 40k and i saw this sitting on the shelf at my
local gaming store at the time.
i thought what a cool monster what is this thing?!
 so i went home and read about it more in my Chaos codex book.
after i read more i sold my soul to Nurgle.

 
not long after i bought the model i thought to myself,
since i am going to the Games Day '98 in Baltimore, Maryland i'm going to paint
this the best i can do is to my ability and then enter it in the
Golden Daemon painting competition.

of course i didn't win but it felt good knowing my model was sitting there among
other great looking miniatures.

and now over twenty years later this monster has been able to reenter into my life it
feels like we were meant to be. haha!

it is one of the few 40k i still have since i pretty much turned away from GW games
a few years back.

another miniature or even a name of a character that seems to stick with me is
Grungni Whitebeard.

a name i used way back when i first started playing World of Warcraft.
he was a dwarf hunter with a black bear named Bjorn.

i had that character all the way up until the Cataclysm expansion, six years.

 then i retired him and ran several other characters/classes,
which i reused the names from with some new characters for D&D.

which i do have an idea of a group of misfit heroes who the gaming group
might run into sometime in the future.

when i started playing D&D my first character was a dwarven cleric of the war domain,
Grungni Whitebeard, representative of the Bronzebeard clan of Ironforge.
(yeah i took some influence from World of Warcraft, i'm a fan of WoW lore)

Grungni Whitebeard

while still basically playing with the same characters we made two years ago,
this character took a dramatic turn story wise.

it got to the point i didn't want to DM for the group and also play a character.
so in a session we had i pretty much sacrificed the dwarf in such a heroic manner.
but after sometime when the moment was right i brought him back but as a resurrected
hero born of fire and brimstone with the help of the flame lords of
the elemental plane of fire.

the miniature i used for the first version of Grungni was so cool,
when i wanted to bring him back i used the same figure but this time around gave him a
more gnarly looking maul and painted his armor and clothes in a more darker tone.

a new "character (with some new backstory" need a new name),
so i renamed him Grungni Darkmantle.
gave him some enchanted armor and a new weapon,
the Gavel of the Elemental Arbiter.

and now since he's higher level with new spells i selected a spell that lets the
spellcaster created a spectral weapon, so i made a larger version of his
magical maul he wields.

i don't game with him as much as i run him as much as a npc now but he will
always be part of my D&D games.
and if there are any games where i can play as a dwarf sure enough there will be a dwarf
named Grungni in it.