Slayers

   There are two units I think my dwarf army is missing, beyond just generally making the army bigger, a war machine - bolt thrower especially and a unit of slayers.

   The Gotrek and Felix series of novels - even with the early ones starting to date badly now* - are a must read for every warhammer fantasy/Age of Sigmar fan and I am slowly working my way through them after giving up on Dragonslayer probably 20 years ago now. These books really got me thinking about the unit of slayers I keep meaning to add to the army.

*controversial?

   Back in 2023 with old world slayers having been discontinued and seriously expensive online I needed a different plan, so I looked for recommendations online, but none of the alternative figures quite did it for me. Then I went back to a half baked plan, the Age of Sigmar Fyreslayers, who are the spiritual descendants of the slayer, so would they work. I bought a sprue online to test the theory.

   The long and the short, they were OK, but a lot of phaff to make and the plan was never going to be cheap. Then along came the rerelease of the Old World and a box of the old metal slayers - in a box of 12 . . . The price made me upset, but eBay prices made me sadder and my initial Fyreslayer plan also wasn't cheap, so I bought a set when they went on preorder.

   I really like these old figures and while my bank account was sad for a month or so, I don't have a lot of regrets beyond why they sat half painted on the shelf behind me for a year or so at this point.

   I especially love the sad expressions on these two's faces. They may be berserkers who are atoning for perceived sins, but they are also sad about those sins.

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Undead Wolves

   I always try and stay upbeat and positive about models and the hobby on this blog, as anyone that stumbles upon it isn't here to see me whining, but this unit have been a real disappointment in multiple ways.

   I ordered them back in February from Little Corporal and they arrived in the last couple of days of August. To be fair to the shop, the figures are from a US company and the shop thought they had stock on hand at the time of the order and only found out they didn't when they initially tried to pack them. Add in the order time from the US, the shop itself moved and didn't do any orders for a month and then the owner had a health scare and didn't send anything for a couple more months and its been a long process actually getting them.

   Then the figures turn up and as they are 15mm skeletons with spindly little legs, necks and tails, them being packed in a padded jiffy bag has meant that every single one was squashed flat. I've bent them all back up and had about a third of them being too broken to be able to fix. So, I've downgraded them from two bases and a couple of spares worth to a single horde base.

   Now, the figures. These are skeleton wolves, which I've quietly lusted over for a couple of years now, mostly successfully not ordering until a moment of weakness earlier this year. They were a test order as I wanted to see how they looked alongside other stuff before I took the plunge with a big order.

   They are simply painted up as there isn't much to do with them and I quite like them, now they are based, but they are fragile as anything and it's a unit (like the bats) that I don't think will survive more than a game or two before someone breaks one or more.

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The Dwarves Are Hitting

   The last unit bought for this army is the heavy infantry, again in the style of the old warhammer dwarves, so I've given the whole unit double handed weapons. I have also put shields on their backs to emphasis their elite nature - maybe they can stow their big weapons and use side arms and a shield? - but also so I can put the army colours onto them as they don't have much cloth showing.

   At this point the army is done, as everything I own has been painted, however, in the future I'd like to add a bolt throwing war machine to the list, maybe a king on shield bearers and some dwarf berserkers if I can find any that I like the look of - old trollslayers go for silly money online.

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The Dwarves Are Ranging

   This post is about a unit I hadn't planned to do - archers/rangers. Something that I am fast beginning to think is a sales tactic by NannyOgg on eBay is to send out the wrong box/sprue then when you email to ask them to correct it, they give two options, 1. send them back and they refund the postage you paid to do so, or 2. they let you keep them at a slightly reduced price and send you the stuff you ordered afterwards. I've had this 3 times now if I remember correctly.

   This unit was bought as heavy Dwarf sprues and the light sprues turned up instead. Then the classic point that once you have something in your hands and sending it back looks like more work than you can be bothered with, paying the price seems sensible.

   I purposely did something different with this unit and painted them in the colour scheme I use for my Rohirrim, albeit with the green underneath the armour instead of on top, to show that this isn't a unit of archers but rangers and scouts who use bows. As there are 16 instead of the normal 12 (why leave a few figures unpainted for no reason) I can swap the 2 handed weapons and banner in and out as needed.

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The Dwarves Are Marching

   As always I have a lot of projects on the go - its a problem that I just can't seem to focus hard enough to solve - and this means that I flitter between them on a regular basis depending on what I fancy painting/playing or is just annoying me sitting unpainted. Why I am getting on with painting my Dwarish army, I can't tell you but I am making strides through it, so lets focus on that.

   This post is the last of the warriors I bought - in a mix of a box from North Star and some sprues from eBay. I built one unit exactly as per instructions but I used the other to test out a conversion idea and used Fireforge foot sgt crossbow arms to make the missile unit I always think of when I think Dwarves.

   I toyed with giving the second warrior unit a different shield design but decided against it - I can always add something in the future - and I decided against a banner for the crossbows, although in hindsight I'm tempted to add one in the future.

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Fantasy Dwarves?

   Advanced warning, my next few posts will be bouncing all over the place. I've got a few projects I want to finish before the end of the year and a few things to do for games in between, plus posts like this, that quite frankly, I can't justify well enough.

   I want to do a whole spiel justifying this, but I can't so I won't waste your time, but suffice to say I got carried away and bought about 24 points (possibly slightly more) of Oathmark Dwarves. The project is nowhere near the top of my list and to date I've only built this one test unit, so don't expect to see more any time soon, but as a cheap project to scratch an itch, I'm looking forward to getting them all done and on the table in the new year at some point.

   I spent a lot longer than I should have trying to decide what direction to take the paint jobs on these models. My choices were to go as historical as possible and treat them as short vikings, or embrace the fantasy and go with bright unified colours. As you can see fantasy won, simply because it scartched the itch even better and I've got dark age armies so I don't need a fake one.

   My only disappointments with the regular dwarf infantry sprue are that there aren't enough helmeted heads for every model (more cloth hats etc) and that the missile option is a bow and not a crossbow - but that might be Warhammer colouring my expectations for the whole race. I've got half an idea on how to convert up some crossbows but I have emailed North Star Miniatures to ask if they would do them as a metal upgrade pack like they have done for their other plastic kits.

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How Many Cavalry?

    As I have mentioned before, I have a hobby spreadsheet where I keep lots of different bits of data with all the formulas that I can think of, giving me numbers back out. The formula that is important for this post is how many small scale games I have played this year (4*) and it is too low for being over half the year in.

*although, I don't think the 4 is within the spirit of my aim

   Then in a separate fact, I also added all the major battle dates from the same spreadsheet into a new calendar that I have then linked to my personal calendar, so that if at the end of a club night we aren't sure what to play the next week we can see what anniversaries are the next week and see if that inspires any games**. The reason I mention this now is that with the thought of having another 15mm game at some point soon, I noticed that the battle of Adrianople (Goths vs Romans) is in early August . . .

**which has inspired a big project rethink that might be something to do with the 25th October

   The first batch of figures up are the rest of my regular Gothic Cavalry, another 4 bases bringing my total up to 6 bases (48 mounted men). These are more Forged in Battle figures from my last big splurge on their site***. I've mixed in a few more horse colours this time as I have more in my repertoire but nothing exciting beyond that.

***Although, I have just seen they have a summer sale on

   The second thing is a unit of Noble Cavalry and some commanders. The noble cavalry seem to be based on the same figures as the regulars with, I think, 1 extra rider sculpt(?) and chainmail on the torsos so I've added some white horses into this batch to try and make the easier to pick out on the table top as from 3 foot away, you can't tell the difference.

   The commanders are all Forged in Battle as well and are mostly Germanic commanders from a few hundred years earlier, I just avoided ones that were obviously the wrong period. The general is Theodoric 1st himself, although, again, I doubt I'll actually be using the figure as himself.

   Then I have some scenic bits for the project. The campsite is from Baueda and was bought in a semi-recent Magister Militant test order. I just wanted to try and bring a bit of life to the back of the table and I felt like the Goths would have some of that. 

   While the wagon is from Essex Miniatures and I'm not sure why I didn't paint it in my last big batch of 15mm wagons.

   The vineyard was a test piece copied from Setting the Scene Volume 2. I probably need to add at least one more base of a similar size, but a double sized one would be better.

Figure for scale

   The last things are two Alternative Armies 15mm War Mammoths with crew from Forged in Battle (extras from my other packs). I bought these in a sale on a bit of a whim when I was thinking about adding little fantasy bits to my historical armies. I'm sort of tempted to add one more if I do another order but for now they will do. They are mounted on half sized horde bases, so if I need standard base sizes, I can add them together as a unit.

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Bats and Zombies, Oh My!

    We are really at the dregs of Operation Panic Paint now, where I started prepping loads of figures in the hope of doing some really big painting days and weirder stuff started getting stuck onto sticks. The zombies are fairly easy to explain as they are a unit I've owned for a while but couldn't be bothered to prep and paint, but the bats . . . I bought the bats at the same time as the bone carts from a few posts back. I've had plans to get them for a while but was put off by how fragile I thought they looked. I can confirm that I don't think this unit will survive even a single game, but they look really good in my opinion.

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Undead Supplies?

   In a bit of a tangent, I've painted a few of my 15mm Undead army, again an army I'd like to get on the table, but not one that was particularly urgent. I've had the knights and command figures on sticks for a while with no real motivation to get on with them, while the wagons were a more recent buy.

   

   The necromancers and knights are all from Alternative Armies and were bought in one of their spring sales - which they've just announced another one of . . . - the knights I bought as a pack and then loads of singles to get enough regular guys rather than too many of the standard bearer. It would be nice to have a bit more variety but as there are only 2 units its not too jarring.

   The necromancers were sold as wizards and I scoured their whole range for my favourites. The photos look much worse than they look in person. I've based them as per my future proofing theory. Big base for the army general, medium bases for sub leaders - useful when splitting a collection between players - and smalls for magic users in Sword and Spear. I've got a real urge to buy another figure of the male wizard on the single base to paint red and write WIZARD on his hat . . .

   I'm not sure if I NEED a civilian wagon and baggage element for my undead but it seemed like fun so I did it anyway. Now that I've found somewhere that sells 15mm undead farm animals, I'm tempted by a  few bases of them now too . . .

   The big wagon is from Essex Miniatures and was the first one I bought, with added horses from Alternative Armies. Then about a week after I built it ready to go, Alternative Armies announced their own corpse wagons, so I ordered 3 (was only supposed to click 2) and ended up with a small fleet of undead wagons.

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More Man Or Beast?

    This is another post about the result of an early morning of doom scrolling on social media while trying to convince a baby to stay asleep - although hopefully the last post like this for quite some time*. I've wanted to do a centaur army for quite some time, the idea of an entirely mobile half man, half horse cavalry (?) army just seemed like a really fun project, but as a mythical creature every company has their own spin on what they look like and rarely has more than a model or two in their range, making armies both hard to build (and being metal) really expensive. I've got 6x 28mm models from Otherworld Miniatures but struggled to work out what I would do with a single unit.

* Have I set myself up for a fall?

   Then as part of a 15mm High Elf army (not going to be completed for a very long time) I bought a Ral Partha character pack, which came with a Centaur hero and was impressed enough by it to put more centaurs from their range onto my shopping list. Then late last year, I got it into my head to buy two unit packs to test my theory. 

   I've painted them up with regular horse colours in their lower quarters and with Mediterranean skin and hair tones in their upper halves to show where they might historically come from. Something about blonde centaurs feels odd to me, even with almost blonde horse halves.

   I also tried putting the light cavalry (?) versions on a deeper base so that they look like they are in a much more skirmish formation than a fully disciplined charge. This is something I might do again for my Palmyran horse archers when I get to them as I quite like the look.

I'll probably end up adding at least another couple of units of the light versions in time, so sadly, I'm not counting this as a complete project.

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Is It Autumn Again?

   I won't lie, this wasn't a planned army. I mentioned in the 15mm werewolves post that I like the idea of element bases of hordes that can just be added to any army, so when Alternative Armies sent me 4 giant spiders as a free gift when I bought a few bits in their sale, I test fitted them onto a base and liked what I saw.

   So early one sleepless morning sitting in a chair with a baby that wasn't sleeping in his cot, I was doom scrolling on social media when I saw Alternative Armies also did bigger spiders and it dawned on me that a spider army could be a cool idea. A little order later, including more free spiders and I was swimming in the 8 legged monsters.

   Its barely half way through the first month of the year and I'm already breaking my 2 projects at any one point rule, but in my (weak) defence, this army was taking up a lot of space on the shelf behind me and it's an easy first finished project for the year.

   I plan to use Dragon Rampant with the following stats; the smaller spiders will use lesser warbeasts with the venomous rule, medium spiders will use greater warbeasts also with venomous and the big beastie will also use the greater warbeast stats with venomous and cunning to give it a bit of a kick. Its an expensive army in points, but it should do some serious damage.

   When the big spider arrived I was slightly unhappy to have received one of the bodies with open sores on the side (its a lucky dip of 3 different bodies) so I had to rethink my plan. I didn't want it to look wounded as it would be out of character compared to the rest of the 'army'. In the end I decided as the brood mother that the open sores would be a massive sack of eggs erupting out (well aware that this isn't how spiders normally do it) to try and make her threat look even worse.

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Werewolves But Smaller

    I'm trying to have a bit of a tidy up in my man cave and one of the things that is taking up space is presticked (figures glued to lolly sticks) models sitting in neat rows on top of boxes. I'm still aiming to get some of the real projects moving and getting some of those figures finished, put onto proper bases and put away, but in the meantime I picked a more interesting set of sticks and started painting. 

   I think I bought the werewolves from Blue Moon via Old Glory UK in one of my Napoleonic orders as a bit of curiosity. They are a tad big compared to regular 15mm figures, but they are also fantasy monsters, so do we really know how big they should be? I have absolutely no plans to do a werewolf army, but with element bases as a unit I can get away with a lot more variety in units, I don't need to explain why 7 models have 6 or 12 wounds, it's enough to know the base is taken off once the threshold is hit, so I plan to do a few different bases of unaligned hordes that can be used to boost other collections. These werewolves can either be used in my Undead army, or in my Roman or Goth army in a fantasy game.

   The werewolves themselves are painted as a mix of wolf species just to make them more interesting using my timber wolf and coyote (seemed similar enough to a red wolf) recipes with a few slightly plainer colours added in*. I figured the overly large wolf should be jet black to stand out.

*and a fox but we don't need to go into that

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Yes, the Dead ride behind. They have been summoned

    As I mentioned in my last post, painting time and motivation has gone off the cliff at the moment but I've not stopped thinking about projects. One thing I keep thinking about with my 15mm Undead army is how to include a unit of ghosts/spirits to my ranks of risen mortal remains. A few companies do the classic sheet shaped ghosts, which I think look brilliant in small units like DBA/HOTT but ranked up I'm not sure they would work as well.

   My next thought was to buy some normal troops and paint them as ghosts, so as I am reading a series set in the late Roman republic, I decided that would be a good era to buy figures from. The figures are from Essex and are a mix of their Marian troops including a pack of cavalry for variety. I painted the figures in my normal ghost colour scheme and spread them across 3 bases in what I hoped was a fairly even manner. 

   I could easily have just done a single base to test the idea out but there is always something about doing 3 units of any standalone project that I like and now they are done and based up, it has got me thinking about whether a whole army would be cool, but that is a project for another day.

I really could do with getting the necromancers done for this army now . . .

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The Unquiet Dead

    I've made a bit of a concerted effort to paint this week even though life has been pretty busy again. The lists I put together for a Middle Imperial Roman vs Undead Dragon Rampant game last week were small due to how cheap Undead units are compared to Romans, so while my Romans should be the priority, I decided to get moving on some Undead instead.

   While I was mucking about I, also, painted up a unit of praying monks. Quite a few of the historic novels I've been recently have had mentions of the commander at the back of the field, surrounded by a crowd of aides to advise, religious people to advise and pray and hangers on just getting in the way and this is a lot of the stuff I want to start getting onto the board. These monks are from Essex Miniatures and are part of my first small order where I wanted to check scale with other ranges - figuring a stand alone side unit doesn't matter if it is slightly out - and while I mostly plan to use them in future Dark Age/Medieval projects, what I thought I could do with them for the short term was give them to my Middle Imperial Romans for their fantasy games. While I am aware that the Romans I am painting would be mostly pagan, in a fantasy world where the risen dead are shambling towards you, any divine favour wouldn't go amiss.

   I've ordered the fantasy version of Sword and Spear, so that I can work out how to base up my necromancers for my Undead army, but I suspect it will be the same as I plan to do my captains for historical Sword and Spear.

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A busy week

   This is a bit of a mixed post, but here we go. As with past years, I don't plan to post about every game I manage to play but with it being nearly six months since I last played a physical game, I though I would celebrate the UK starting to open up and start to arrange would games I could.

   The first game I managed was of Warhammer 30k with my podcast mate, Keith, and was in fact 2 games (as I lost the first so quickly) and was, also, last weekend. He wanted to get his new Imperial Fists on the table to try and motivate himself into getting them finished and I used my favourite legion, my Sons Of Horus. As I have already mentioned, the first game was a complete loss with the final score being 17-0 to Keith, as his first turn of shooting neutralised the two tanks I was relying on. The second game was much closer but was still a loss, but only 2-0 to him.

   Then this week, I really went to town with arranging games to test gaming on our new(ish) garden bench. When we picked the bench I pushed for one 6 foot long, however it isn't wide enough to play a decent 28mm game on - although I plan to rectify that by buying some board to sit on top of it - but for 15mm it is a perfect width, so that is what we did. 

   The first game we tried was after work early in the week and was Rebels and Patriots using my epic scale Warlord and Kallistra ACW stuff. While I lost, again, I'm really taken with Rebels and Patriots at this scale. We played with 38 points a side, which was 4 or 5 infantry blocks depending on the side, a cannon with limber and 2 units of light cavalry each, which is a big game at 28mm. In 15mm it was a couple of hours where we had space to manoeuvre and attempt to flank. I want to get more 15mm on the table in the next few weeks but it's really made me feel more confident with this scale shift.

  We then arranged an afternoon of gaming for Saturday which was going to be another test game using my 15mm Lion/Dragon Rampant armies to see how that looked in 15mm for which I did some frantic late night painting of a unit of Undead Knights and Undead Chariots. Both units are entirely Alternative Armies figures. The knights I'm not hugely keen on as they look too fantasy for me (in my head undead knights should just be skeleton knights, they don't need bat banners and skull shields) but I couldn't find another model range I liked more, I also, just about fitted the 8 cavalry on that my basing requires, but it was tight! The chariots have had a crew swap as I have other plans for the drivers and I've put them on half width bases to allow a bit more flexibility in future gaming.

   It was all moot in the end as time and other stuff meant we played a couple of board games instead - something for the future.

   I also saw online that Mike Hobbs has sadly passed away this week. He was a play tester for various rulesets, was a co-host on Meeples and Miniatures, was seriously entertaining on Twitter (both for his hobby and for his cats), was a friendly person you could ask questions of and was the cause of a lot of my hard earned money being spent on projects I didn't know I wanted to get involved in. My thoughts go to his wife and family at this time. He will be missed.

Thanks for reading.

Smashing Through The Rank And File

   This week has been a bit of a breakthrough in terms of getting bulk loads of figures done, the long weekend is what you are expecting me to say, but mostly it's the fact my son has learnt to put himself to sleep, which has freed up an extra hour in the morning before work and untold hours afterwards, and that's not including weekends.

   With that in mind and still waiting for my Old Glory Napoleonic's back order to arrive I went back to my neglected 15mm projects - Middle Imperial Romans and Undead. I still plan to split my Romans in half for their first proper game, before I really get on with buying and painting an enemy for them, but I've also had half a thought that they might end up fighting my Undead army in the short term as well. Using Lion/Dragon Rampant means it doesn't really matter what is on each side. With a unit of Legionnaires being 6 points to a regular skeleton unit's 3, I'm going to need to get cracking with undead, but as a quick reward for each Roman unit finished, I think they will make both projects move fairly quickly now.

   So, this is what I managed to achieve this weekend:

   Firstly, I finished the remaining two units of Legionaries, this time with shield transfers that I discovered that Forged in Battle had added to their range since I bought my army - this now leaves me the issue of going back to the two units that I painted shield designs on, which I am not looking forward to.

   Next are my Medium Cavalry. I had already finished one and a half of these units - which was when I found out my plan of 12 cavalry to a base wasn't going to happen, however, this has the happy accident of meaning that I get 3 units out of 2 packs of models, which is nice. Thankfully, sorting out the transfers on the finished models was a simple process. I have half a plan of buying another couple of packs and giving them a different shield design but that is a problem for later.

   Lastly, the the Romans, is a unit of Auxilia. I got 3 units wearing similar gear to my Legionaries as part of my kickstarter, so when I wanted to round the force out, I purposely picked something different. A bit of a shame I can't get printed shield designs for these guys, but they are supposed to look a bit like a rushed raising of local militia rather than a standing unit.

   As I was on a roll, I decided to get some undead units moving too, just to keep myself a bit more refreshed. Nothing particularly exciting here as its a lot of quickly painted mass infantry but I've got two more units of regular skeletons, a unit of skeleton archers and a mass unit of zombies off my painting list. The regular skeleton warriors are made up of a slightly better mix of figures than the first unit I did, as on my second order I realised Alternative Miniatures have a pack of skeletons with swords. I probably need to put a small pennant on a spear in each unit, but I'm not too worried at this stage.

   I've put the zombies on a base 50% deeper 80/60 instead of 80/40 with an extra 11 figures to try and make the unit look like a cheap horde - in game play it won't make any difference but I like the idea of fantasy zombies being so easy to kill that units need to look intimidating - I also think Sword and Spear uses bigger bases for horde units, so it will allow them to work with that ruleset too.

As always with my 15mm stuff, I apologise for my photos. 

As this whole 15mm thing is a bit new to me and 15mm fantasy ranges seem to be the worst for websites that don't have pictures of the product, I've had a bit of a splurge and bought a single unit for a few different fantasy armies with the plan of seeing how they look next to other models in different ranges and whether my 24 infantry and 8 cavalry fit on a base - I don't want to place an order for an army and find I'm a few figures short and I really don't want to be buying a whole army and finding I really don't like the look of the models - so expect to see a few projects appearing that don't seem to go anywhere for a bit.

Thanks for reading