Guest Article: The Cult of the Mushroom God

By Bonespoon (https://bonespoonminis.io/)

For NEMO 2025, I wanted to put together a new warband (because I don’t have enough warbands, of course) and I wanted to use these cool old metal goblins I had traded for at a oldhammer meetup in New Jersey. Thus The Cult of the Mushroom God was born!

Shaman Gutrot was a well-respected night goblin wizard, a pillar of the community, but had a strong predilection towards madcap mushrooms. After one particularly vicious mushroom trip, he fell into a coma for seven weeks. On his journey, he was granted a vision- Gork and Mork are not two separate beings, but truly are just two sides of one beautiful, mushroomy being- the Mushroom God. Awaking from his coma, the shaman rushed to spread the good word. Quickly condemned as a heretic, he was driven from the World’s Edge mountains with a small band of followers. Seeking power and resources to spread the gospel of the Mushroom God, the warband has wandered the Empire, finding themselves on the edge of the City of the Damned...

The Build

Building these little weirdos was a blast. I had a mix of oldhammer metal miniatures from a couple of manufacturers, and I wanted to custom sculpt my Squigs. For the basic dudes, I 

• Cleaned up the metal minis 

• Tore up some cork and used PVA to glue it to the base (heroes got to be on taller bases)

• Filled the cracks with spackle

• I added mushrooms I made out of little sausages of green stuff, cut in half, with tops which were flattened out of green stuff balls (Gardens of Hecate has a nice tutorial on this on her blog)

• These were glued on individual to each goblin, with 2-3 scattered around the figure

For the squigs, they were all custom sculpted. For these I

• Started with a backbone of wire and added two legs, bent at the bottom to make feet

• Cut up and superglued tin foil to make a big c-shape (since these things are mostly mouths)

• Added a flat cap of tinfoil

• This was then covered in a mix of greenstuff and Aves apoxie sculpt (about 50-50) to smooth all over the body

• I then sculpted the cap shape, and cut some mushroom frills on the underside

• For the teeth, I rolled out pointy sausages of greenstuff and let them dry. I then glued them in place and added the lips around the edges

• Finally, I made an indent for the eyes and added in a ball of greenstuff

I also decided to make them a carrying case out of scraps from the garage. I took some ¼” plywood and cut out 8 sides. I have some high-density modeling foam, where I cut out a big flat rectangle and two pillars. This was glued in place with wood glue around 6 of the sides (leaving the other two for the lids). Once dry, this was shaped with a dremel to create rock faces and carve out spots for each guy. This was then partially covered in spackle and grit, then sanded to create variable texture. In each guy spot, I added a cutout of metal from a cookie tin for the magnets in the base.

The Painting

I needed to do something that was fast but got the point across, as I was under the gun putting stuff together for the deadline. I wanted to make it look like they were in a cave, with the primary light source being bioluminescent mushrooms.

So I got out the airbrush. First I primed them all black. Everyone got a shot of a sort of burnt umber mixed with black (I think it is Scale 75 burnt shade) from the top to represent the dark ceiling of the cave.

I then took the airbrush, and shot a mixture of white and white ink upwards at the mini from each mushroom as if it was glowing. Most of them had two to three mushroom clumps around the mini.

I then hand painted in some titanium white on the mushroom to help sell the glowing look.

To add a bit of variety, I had two types of mushrooms - flat caps (a pale blue) and pointy caps (a darker green). So I did two rounds with the airbrush filtering over these two colors, only shooting from the direction of the target mushroom.

I then went back in with a brush to quickly fill in the areas around the mushroom, and any big surfaces it looked like I missed, with the correct color.

I took some very dark blue and went in to do some recess shading to define the models, and picked out metallic parts with a bright off-white (mostly blueish). Finally, I painted in some details like the eyes and tongues in an orangey color to help them stand out!

The Final Product

And I pulled it all together in time! I was really happy to have the final layers drying a few days before getting into the car to go to NEMO! I was going for something goofy and different, and I think it worked out pretty well! The paint scheme, while very rough, also had good returns on the amount of time spent to results achieved, I hope. And while my sculpting is not particularly great, having a strong and fun concept helped it resonate with people- having something goofy and insane helps take the pressure off!

Hope you enjoyed all these mushroomy lads, they were a lot of fun to put together.

-Bonespoon