The Dreaded Praetorian Guard

    The Praetorian Guard is a unit that I had no plans to include in this project, but a chat with a mate on the best source of replacement shields for GW's Minas Tirith troops* reminded me that Wargames Illustrated had two free Roman sprues in a row, I've already used the Veteran Legionaries (mixed into my Legionary units) but I also had something else. A search through my Pile of Potential and I found it was a sprue of Praetorians. So, on my last (so far) Warlord Games orders I added a couple of packs of decals for their shields and an extra sprue to make them a useable number, figuring if I didn't paint them as part of this project they would languish in my sprue pile forever.

*If anyone has any ideas we are still stuck

   Then a couple of weekends ago my Podcast mates decided to do a hangout and hobby session to have a catch up during Lockdown 2 and I decided that instead of doing the next thing in my painting queue, I would use the chance of being 'forced' to paint to get on with a project I wasn't looking forward to, a few things came to mind, but a full batch of 20 models won. I don't like painting in batches bigger than 6 (which allows me to do a Lion Rampant unit in 2 batches rather than 2 and a bit of most people's 5 in a batch) but as my Romans had already been worked in batches of 12, what I really wanted to avoid was painting the 12 I needed then leaving the rest of the unit in my painting queue to catch up with later.

   While painting 20 models at a time is horrible and I don't know how you people that do it, actually do it, doing the boring bits while having a chat was a better experience than I expected (damned with faint praise?) and it meant the project was well on it's way by the time we called it and got back on with our weekends.

   I've also given them pretty bad stats, instead of making them an elite unit as other games seem to, for Lion Rampant and at this point I'm sort of looking forward to another player finding that out mid game . . .

   Then with the Praetorian Guard being painted the next obvious thing was someone for them to guard. As Claudius only got involved in the invasion at the point where it was basically a photo op and Nero had other problems on his hands during Boudica's uprising (fiddling while Rome burned?) I didn't want it to be an emperor, so I went for a Legate or Tribune. I'm pretty sure this pair are from Warlord, although I have got a bit lost in where bits are from at this point. I only plan to use a single one in a game, but it's nice to have options. The extra figure is a mob figure from Gangs of Rome that I have spare and I plan to use him as a freedman of some sort to give the leader some advice during the battle.

Thanks for reading