Lannister war-band for Saga

      A couple of months ago, a few of us at the club got chatting about the Game of Thrones tv series. One of the guys had just got into it and was buying up box sets as quickly as he could, but he also had that hobby itch to model something from the series. So that got us thinking . . .

      In the end the challenge became; both Alan and me had to build and paint a 4 point Game of Thrones themed Saga list ready for a game the last weekend of September. Easy. He picked the northern Starks and I picked the southern Lannisters.

      I decided to use one of the normal lists rather than one of home brew ones on the Saga forum, but that doesn't mean it won't change in the future, and went for the Normans as they seemed to suite the way the Lannisters go to war. Looking at the Norman battle board, I quickly realised their strength lies in their crossbows and their knights, but, as I wanted this list to be nothing like anything else I would ever play in Saga, I opted for a full mounted war-band. 

     The biggest problem I then had was trying to work out how I was going to model and paint them. The armour the Lannister troops wear in the series just wasn't how they looked in my head from reading the current books, which gave me massive hobby block for the first month of the challenge. I bought up a box of the Perry mounted men at arms as I thought the mix of different armour would suite the Lannisters, and I bulked out my numbers with a pack of War of the Roses mounted troops and a pack that included Edward IV to be my Lannister noble.

      After reading the September copy of Wargames, soldiers and strategy magazine, I had a brain wave. There was an article in it where the author had done exactly the same thing we were intending, but had stumbled across an interview by the Game of Thrones book's author, George R R Martin, where he compared the conflict with the War of the Roses. The Yorkists and the Starks are comparable, while the Lancastrians and the Lannister are too. So that's the inspiration I took for my paint scheme. Metal armour rather than the black and gold from tv and red lance shafts just to try and get some more of the family colour into my warband.

Teclis Lannister

      The war-band does need a bit of a touch up as it was painted really quickly for the deadline day, but the overall feel of it is right and I am pretty pleased with how it went. It probably needs more lion motifs on any available surface to make it feel a bit more fantasy but as the books feel much more historical in their feel than full fantasy I think I prefer the slightly under stated nature of the paint jobs, although a Lannister noble should always wear gold and ride a white horse . . .

       Again to speed the project up I chose to have all my troops as hurscarls to keep numbers right down,, but I feel that of all the potential kings in Game Of Thrones, the Lannisters are the ones with the most resources to throw at having an elite army, so I don't feel like I have gone against the grain by doing this. They will have their peasant army somewhere, but it's somewhere else.

     The game itself was delayed due to Alan's work commitments, but I am aiming to get a post on his models and a report up of how the game itself went in the next few weeks, just soon as we can organise us both being in the same place at the same time. 

Thanks for reading. Now, onto painting zombies!