Guards of Traitor’s Toll, or Possibly Return to Whitby

I’m especially proud of the guy with his hands full of junk. And the fish-juggler.

With these done I should have enough guards and civilians to play the game, and I’ve got an extra sprue of townsfolk in addition to what’s in the Busy Streets expansion to build later — I’m sure there will be

Now comes the real challenge: setting aside an afternoon and getting a table set up to play…

While I stuck more-or-less to the game’s illustrations for my first batch of guards, I let myself be more creative with the civilians. I used the game’s “identify” card as a rough guide to what I would need for the game, and over three sprues of civilians plus a batch of models from Midlam (see below), I think I’ve got most of the possibilities covered. Here’s the first set of 6 civilians.

Midlam Miniatures makes some great medieval townsfolk. I got these to pad out an order, thinking they might work for Traitor’s Toll, and I’m pleased to report that the scale and sculpting style match up perfectly. “Man running with small bemused pig” is a personal favorite.

Here are few random models that seem like they might fit in: A promo from Footsore Miniatures (I assume it’s for Baron’s War), the promo dwarf from the Traitor’s Toll base set + expansion bundle, and a shifty looking llama I found in a bargain bin at a local shop.

I’ve got two more sprue’s worth of civilians assembled and primed, which will give me a total of 36 models plus the guards. That should be enough to at least try the game out, and since I’m sprinkling in a few of the Midlam models I’ve got an extra sprue of civilians to do later, even before I get into the expansion.

I bought the Busy Streets expansion in addition to the base set, so I’ve got four sprues of guards. I want to get the game to the table sooner rather than later, and I’m not likely to play with more than two players, so I’ve started with just the two squads. For these I decided to stick pretty close to the artwork on the game’s stat cards, just to make it easy to tell who is who as we play our first few games.

I painted them with my usual mix of techniques. The base coat is black primer with a few shades of grey drybrush, then speedpaint for the browns and metallics and traditional 3-color triad for the skin tones and uniform colors. One day I will learn my lesson about avoiding color schemes that include yellow, but this is not that day…

Guards of Traitor’s Toll needs buildings. While I am sorely tempted by the pre-colored Tollingchester kits from Sarissa, I already have several bins filled with Dave Graffam papercraft terrain from my 7TV Dracula campaign, some of which were in turn re-purposed from a 7TV Prisoner village I did a few years earlier.

Sadly, the impressively huge church from Dracula chapter 1 was destroyed by my cats. I could always print and build another one, but I think I’ve got plenty of other buildings, certainly enough to fill up a 3×3 table.

The aesthetic of the Graffam models will be perfect for Traitor’s Toll, so that’s one of the game’s biggest stumbling blocks out of the way.