Snakemen Review ~ Ghost Archipelago/Frostgrave

I wanted some general purpose bad guys. I'm sick of using orcs/goblins and, besides that I also rebased all of my goblins onto multi-bases for big battle games. I liked the look of the Frostgrave Gnolls and I also liked their companions the Ghost Archipelago Snakemen. Which should I get?

Obviously, I went with the snakemen. I think it's because I re-read R.E. Howard's King Kull stories in early 2020 and it gave me a bit of a soft spot for some antediluvian saurian evil doers. Unfortunately I'm not sure if I made the correct call. 

These figures are sort of okay but there's just something that's off with them and I don't know what it is. It might be their short arms, their hunched up look, their lack of tails or something else. I just can't place it. Maybe I'm just feeling a bit uneasy about painting tiny replicas of our Reptilian Overlords. They'll probably send out their secret agents to "suicide" me for posting this.

Painting-wise, these guys were a challenge. I wanted to make them appear without any metal or with minimal metal such as silver or gold. I was going for a sort of  Aztec/Mayan look with obsidian weapons etc. Surprisingly, this made it difficult to paint some parts of the models until I thought of adding bone to substitute for metal. I tried to make a fair bit of their armour and embellishments look like nephrite jade which I thought would fit in with the overall aesthetic I was aiming for. I'm not sure if this worked. I might have to give those areas a coat of gloss varnish.

Overall, I think they look wrong. I tried to add some colour (other than green and brown) to their cloth covered areas. Unfortunately I think that by doing so I've given them a sort of Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles vibe. 

I'll keep painting them until I've done the whole box. That way I'll have a bunch of weird evil-doers but... I should have gone with the gnolls.