The People Playing The Bears..."

"...Either dress in costumes made of straw, or are actually wrapped in straw."

These 28mm scale metal models of four Strawbears are produced by “Crooked Dice Game Design Studio” and can be bought as SKU: MINI 466 from their Children of the Fields range. The single-cast pieces can also be purchased as part of the Lincolnshire-based company's four-figure Mummer Procession deal, along with a Hobby Horse, Accordionist and Drummer.

The highly-detailed sculpt actually came about as part of the manufacturer's successful "Children of the Fields - Folk Horror 28mm Miniatures" Kickstarter in May 2018, and was unlocked as the campaign's £22,000 stretch goal. However, I picked this particular quartet up as part of a larger pre-order directly from company owner Karl Perrotton when I recently visited his stall at "Warfare" 2024 - as I want to field a considerable number of the Strohbären as 'generic' Revenants for "The Silver Bayonet" by "Osprey Games".

"Black Site Studios" WIPs - Three primed NASA Astronauts ready for some shading

All of the miniatures were primed using a couple of coats of “Vallejo” Dark Yellow and liberally drenched in “Citadel” Agrax Earthshade. Each figure was then heavily dry-brushed with (more) “Vallejo” Dark Yellow, and then Buff, using a large, soft-bristled make-up brush. I next decided to break up their palette a little bit more by sporadically applying splotches of “Citadel” Reikland Fleshshade and Biel-Tan Green to certain areas of each model, and ultimately blended all these colours together with a second dry-brush of (more) “Vallejo” Buff.

With half of my Strawbear reinforcements finished, I've made a bit more progress on my squad of NASA astronauts from the "Lunar" range by "Black Site Miniatures". This five-model force has actually been assembled with a homebrew version of "The Silver Bayonet" in mind, and should prove fairly straightforward to get tabletop ready on account of their predominantly "Two Thin Coats" "Celestial Blue" palette - albeit I do plan to apply a little "Vallejo" Heavy Blue to certain areas just to break the colour scheme up a little bit.

Undead Egyptian Mummies attack both the British and French forces searching for treasure

I have also managed to play a second adventure for my ongoing "The Silver Bayonet" campaign featuring my British (Coalition) warband. Once again sticking to the recommended 3x3 foot table size - as opposed to the significantly larger cloth mat we've previously been playing on - my forces attempted to both discover and then capture "a powerful artefact" during scenario "The Revenants". As before, this confrontation was fought over an Egyptian-flavoured battlefield, where a tomb packed full of undead Mummies (which looked rather suspiciously like the Osiran Sutekh's service robots) rather inconveniently disgorged its protectors upon my alliance of Green Jackets and Russian infantrymen.

To make matters worse, my opponent's competing French force was lead by none other than General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie himself - who rather disconcertingly lived up to his fearful reputation by repeatedly surviving sword-fight after sword-fight with my Junior Officer throughout the encounter. Ultimately, Napoleon's fiendish Frenchmen found and then fearfully fled the desert sands with the valuable curiosity intact, despite a desperate attempt by Russian fusiliers to chase them down before they could escape...