And so we reach the fourth and final batch of casualty figures for my Dracula’s America collection. The original plan was straightforward enough: four batches, four dead figures in each, giving me a respectable collection of bodies to leave scattered around the battlefield as a visual record of just how badly things have gone for the various posses involved.

Except this final batch contains five.

Somewhere along the way I discovered an additional dead chap who had apparently escaped my attention. Quite how you overlook a corpse is probably a question best left unanswered, but there he was, waiting patiently to join his unfortunate companions. Since painting four dead men while leaving the fifth sitting in the lead pile seemed unnecessarily cruel, he has been added to the final batch. After all, nobody likes to be left out.

The red cardboard blood pools have also made their final appearance in this little series. Once again there is nothing complicated about them, but placed beneath and around the casualty figures they add considerably to the atmosphere. With all four batches now completed, I should have enough bodies and blood to leave a fairly convincing trail of destruction across a Dracula’s America tabletop. Should the fighting become particularly enthusiastic, however, I reserve the right to cut up some more red cardboard.

The completed collection should also be useful for more than simply marking casualties. Bodies can become objectives, clues, victims awaiting investigation or the remains of some previous encounter that sensible travellers might interpret as a warning to turn around. In Dracula’s America, of course, sensible travellers seem to be in remarkably short supply.

So that completes the casualty project. Four planned batches, one unexpected extra corpse and enough blood pools to make the average frontier town seriously reconsider the adequacy of its undertaker.

All that remains is to put them on the table.

Although, given the company they will be keeping, I am still reluctant to call any of them permanently dead.

Below the completed part of this project.