Medieval Beekeepers - Midlam Miniatures

 

Blasted through these lovely mega quirky medieval beekeepers from Midlam Miniatures this evening - they do these and some lovely Halfling ones too! Their whole range is great and has many gems that you’d struggle to find elsewhere! I’ve catalogued my dark ages/medieval/fantasy villagers elsewhere on this blog (back in the mists of time) and these will fit perfectly alongside the rest of the stuff I already have!

As you can see from this recreation, the sculpts are pretty spot on from what we know about medieval beekeeping! I’ve seen an amazing terrain piece including bee hives in a shelter built in the roots of a fallen tree that I really want to emulate when I get around to building more dark ages terrain! I also have a set of hives from Midlam that I’ll be incorporating into that piece!

That leaves me on a healthy 260 points for Hobby Bingo!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Viking Berserker Horde

The Berserker Horde - I love the way these have turned out. They look pretty badass - I had told myself that I wasn't allowed to buy any other Foundry blisters until I finished all of these - glad to have got them done in time to go to another wargames show!

Just the normal berserkers - I would love to use this many in SAGA but unfortunately the Viking warband only allows for 4 of them! I may just use them as normal Hearthguard after all.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Viking Misc. Berserkers

A few random figures that I painted alongside the berserkers due to the similar themes - bare flesh, animal skins and big axes.

Although I originally purchased these barbarians for a fantasy skirmish warband, I think I may also use them in Dux Britanniarum as leaders or champions. The barbarians are either from em4 or Forlorn Hope Games - what a fantastic range! I have a bunch more to eventually work on, including the brilliant mounted barbarians!

A more standard barbarian from that range - I figure he would fit quite well as a champion in Dux Brit.

Finally, another berserker - I bought this from the bring and buy at the Sheffield Triples weekend - does anyone know the manufacturer? I love the figure - in hindsight, a different axe head would have made him fit perfectly amongst the other berserkers, but I'm happy with him next to the others!

A group shot of the berserker horde is coming tomorrow - come back then! Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Viking Ulfhednar Berserkers

These are the Foundry Miniatures Ulfhednar Wolf Skin Berserkers - another delightful pack of figures! I very much enjoyed painting these - figures that are full of character and with just the right amount of details to be a pleasure to paint. Interestingly, there is the female berserker in this pack, which is not something I've previously heard of.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - more berserkers to come! Thanks for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Viking Bearskin Berserkers

The first of my Berserker horde - I love these figures! They're the Bearclad Berserkers set from Foundry Miniatures - lovely details and brilliant to paint. I'm a big fan of Berserkers in general and I'm aiming to buy a bunch of others until I have a small army of them - I have finished more in the past few weeks and there will be more posts on them this week.

You may have noticed that this gentleman was based up differently to the rest of them - this pack was my first dark age purchase after deciding to start the historical period - when they arrived, I thought this guy would make a perfect Viking warlord for SAGA. I love those trousers!

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - The Hedge-Witch

Earlier in the year I went to the Triples wargames show in Sheffield I found the great collection of fantasy figures that Rapier Miniatures sell (it took me ages to find the name of the company, as I couldn't recall their signage from the day) - they have a wonderful selection of witches of various types. I decided to pick up this classic Snow White/Evil Queen-incognito witch with a bushel of apples! I figured that she'd work well in fantasy RPG settings or even in my dark age games as the village crone...

Thoughts, comments, suggestions? All are welcome!

Work-in-Progress - SAGA Revenants Warband

When Gripping Beast recently announced the new one-off SAGA Revenant warband I was immediately hooked on the idea! It also just so happened that I'd picked up a huge bag of plastic skeleton parts at a local wargames show earlier in the year and that the bag would just about cover a full 4pt starter on it's own! 

I started off with my usual SAGA basing method - especially where plastics are concerned - 1p coins glued to the top of a Renedra plastic base to add a little weight.

I happened to be going to visit my parents for a couple of nights, so I packed up some tools, some polycement and the bag of skellies, plus all the extra skeleton parts and misc. fantasy shields I could find in my collection. I still need to find another few skeletons to make them up to the full 48 figures needed for the force, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find them.

Starting to take shape, with shields from the most recent Warhammer skeletons, beastmen, marauders and even some arms from the original plastic skeletons.

The bag of bits I got was a mix of the Mk2 Warhammer plastic skeletons and the Mantic plastic skeletons - handily, the original owner had already carved off the built-in shields that come attached to the Mantic skeletons, allowing me to use GW shields of similar designs to tie both the plastic sets together. Note the interesting goblin wicker shields here and

The horde assembled! 

 

The Necromancer - the original figure is a Warhammer Chaos Sorcerer and the head is from the Putrid Blightkings set and is normally hanging from one of their shoulderpads - it's a head wrapped in sacking and reminded me of the Batman villain, The Scarecrow. I like it, but the folks I have shown him to have expressed doubt. It'll look better once I get him painted...

On the subject of painting, here is how they current stand and have for about 6 weeks now.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - The Clergy

I needed some clergymen for various SAGA/dark ages scenarios - I picked up a blister of Gripping Beast monks and a blister of Foundry Anglo-Saxon characters which contained a Friar Tuck-esque fellow whilst at the Vapnartak wargames show in York back in February and then the scribe from the CP Models.

This is the monk from the Edric the Wild blister - a real chunky figure (that's a 30mm base) and holding a ham shank! He's apparently inspired by Friar Tuck.

The CP Models scribe - quite a slight figure, but I don't mind a bit of difference in the height or build of figures. CP Models have since added two new dark age monks to their shop, which I will eventually add to these to round out the collection.

The Gripping Beast monks blister - sculpted to be walking in the classic religious procession I think! Some of the casts on these weren't too great, but they'll do!

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Male Villagers pt.3

The final group of male villagers - Gripping Beast and Black Tree Design.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Ladies and Children

The women and children for my dark age village - from what I can remember, these are all from Gripping Beast.

The ladies of the village - I would guess that the one with the bundle of sticks is a slave by her clothing.

The children - the one in the hat broke off at the ankles during assembly so I ended up pinning them.

Another batch completed as part of the 6MMRPC.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

Dark Ages - Houndmaster

I finished this a couple of months ago, in some painting I was doing for the Game of Thrones project, but he was originally purchased to be used with my dark ages villagers - a hound master for the town. I picked up the models quite cheaply from eBay - it's a blister sold by Warlord Games. There was also a third hound but unfortunately the legs snapped and were far too thin to pin back together. 

I think he'll be useful in certain scenarios - I can imagine him being used by the local lord to track down a werewolf's lair or to hunt the last survivors of a failed raid.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Male Villagers pt.2

More bog standard villagers - quite a dark picture! These are once again a mix of Black Tree Design and Gripping Beast. Oddly enough, one of them didn't have half of his facial hair sculpted on - I only realised this after they'd been basecoated so I just decided to leave it. It's not really noticeable unless you look very closely!

Many more figures to come in the next few weeks - slowly getting through the backlog of figures I need to post up! These were completed as part of the 6 Month Mountain Reduction and Painting Challenge - comments and suggestions are most welcome and thanks for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Livestock

I wanted some animals to populate parts of the planned dark age settlement - I finished painting these a few weeks ago.

This donkey and foal are from Forlorn Hope Games - nice enough figures but perhaps a tad small alongside the rest of my dark age figures - not too bad though. Very simple paintjob, but then there isn't a great amount of detail on the figures.

I needed these for the Song of Shadows and Dust rules from Ganesha Games - my plan is to reskin the game from Roman/Greek towns to a Viking trading town. In game, the donkey can kick folks that get too close.

Chickens from Warbases - in SoSaD there are rules for geese/poultry - they can muck up a stealthy approach by kicking up a racket in surprise. 

Finally, hogs! These are the lovely Iron Age Pigs from Warbases. I really enjoyed painting these - I now need to build them a pen.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Levy Bowmen

Levy Bowmen - these will come in handy for Dux Britanniarum Vikings - the figures are from Black Tree Design and were kindly sent to me by David of The Spider Web of History. They will also come in handy as villagers who managed to pick up bows as their settlement was attacked.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

Dark Ages - Anglo-Saxon Earls and Flemish Mercenaries

These figures are from Gripping Beast - the Anglo-Saxon historical figure Hereward the Wake, a unit of Flemish Mercenaries (a heavily-armoured Warrior unit choice) and another gentleman that I decided to use as a potential leader too - he's from the Welsh Teulu pack from GB and is a lovely sculpt.

I decided that I was going to paint them in the same sort of scheme - the plan being that the characters are father and son and the unit is their personal bodyguard. In SAGA I'd be using the Flemish Mercenaries as Hearthguard - I think they look suitably well-off and hardcore. The Mercenaries had the "open hand" that lots of historical figures come with - I generally very much dislike the look of this when the weapon options don't look properly gripped. With these, I removed the open hands and replaced them with suitable plastics from the GB range - I pinned them into place to make sure they wouldn't snap off in a slight breeze. The shields were part of the casts.

Not much in the way of changes to the base figures - Hereward's shield was originally the classic round shield, so I gave him a kite shield to fit with the rest of his bodyguard. This is probably historically inaccurate, but I'm pleased with the outcome! The colour scheme is probably inaccurate too (the uniform-look) but I wanted it to be easy to distinguish between these and the less professional soldiers in the army. 

Here's a close up on the shields that I've painted - I stuck to some pretty simple designs and added weathering.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - many thanks for reading!

#6MMRPC - Dark Ages - Male Villagers pt.1

Civilians for my dark age projects - these are a mix of Black Tree Design and Gripping Beast. Lots more to come over the next few weeks - I'm aiming for a post of new stuff each day until the end of the month.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thank you for reading!

Review: Brother Vinni's Ragnar and Eyebot

I had to put in an order with Brother Vinni when I first saw this wonderful figure!

The figure is called Ragnar and is obviously based on Ragnar Lothbrok as played by Travis Fimmel in the brilliant History Channel drama Vikings. I picked him up in order to add another interesting leader to my various Viking forces for SAGA, Dux Brit and others. The head sculpt in particular is fantastic and is a great representation of the actor. Also of note is the raven on the chest of his horn armour - this is the clothing he wears in the TV series and the Raven sigil was connected to the sons of the historical Ragnar Lothbrok.

 The kit came in several pieces - the body, head and legs as one piece as shown here, then each arm with axe and shield attached, plus a sheathed sword. Everything was very nicely cast with barely any moldlines to clean up. I did end up replacing the axe, shield and sheathed sword for ones from the Gripping Beast kits as I tend to worry about resin weapons snapping - I could quite easily have just used the original ones as the cast was crisp. 

Here he is based up - I used a 30mm round base and added some cork sheet on top as rocks. Size-wise, he fits very nicely alongside the rest of my Gripping Beast plastics and metals. 

I would very much suggest that you buy this figure if you're a fan of the series or if you're in the market for an interesting new Viking warlord!

I also picked up a figure from the Nuclear Sandbox line to add to my Post-Apocalyptic figures - the Eyebot. These were the pieces that arrived - again, another lovely and crisp cast.

One thing that I would say about the miniature is that it was larger than I was expecting - I suppose that's just the way some things need to be when it comes to transporting something from a computer game into 28mm - at scale I would guess that it would be around a quarter of the size or less, so it may be a positive that it's larger. 

I ended up using a round Warhammer 40000 base with a coin glued to the bottom for weight, then once again a piece of cork on top. I then used some straight wire to use as a flying stand - I drilled into the bottom of the eyebot and into the cork to pin it into position. I also added a canine skull to the base as it seemed to fit the theme.  

Regarding the multitude of aerials shown here, I was very glad that I'd recently invested in a set of multiple sizes of micro drill bits. I have everything from 0.1mm to 2mm for projects like this. I used some pictures of ED-E from Fallout: New Vegas and found the various spots on the model that needed an aerial. One of these in the centre at the back is a paperclip, whilst the others are actually bristles from a nylon-bristled sweeping brush. The final stage with the figure was to take some tomato puree tube metal and make a couple of metal plates for the figure to give it a "lived in" feel like ED-E.

As with the Ragnar miniature, I would very much recommend that you check out the Eyebot from Brother Vinni. I'm based in the UK, whilst Brother Vinni is located in Russia, yet the figures arrived within a week of ordering - that's pretty top-notch service! Give them a look - their Fallout range is fantastic and I'll be most certainly picking up more stuff from them in the future (after the 6MMRPC!)

#6MMRPC - Dark Age Villagers part 1

I spent most of Friday going through the multitude of images that had accrued in my "items to blog" folder on my computer - I've managed to get a bunch of interesting stuff lined up over the next few weeks! Alongside those sort of "flashback" posts, I'm going to sporadically be posting up the items I've finished in the last few weeks for the 6 Month Mountain Reduction and Painting Challenge! Here's the first!

The first batch of civilians for my Dark Age village project - these are a mix of Black Tree Design and Gripping Beast. Generally the sculpts were nice, although the tools on the Gripping Beast figures seem a little flimsy as separate parts.

More to come soon!

Accessories for Wargaming - Dark Age Leather Pouches

I recently went to a Dark Age/Viking re-enactment at Whitby Abbey - the second one that I've been to for that time period (the first being on Lindisfarne last summer). The first event I attended was what sparked my interest in SAGA and historical gaming, so I jumped at the chance to attend another.

At Lindisfarne there were a number of stalls selling various reproduction goods - I did particularly like the look of some of the leather pouches as smaller dice bags or pouches for counters for the various games that I play - I regretted not buying one when I had the chance, so I jumped at the chance when I saw the same leather stall at Whitby and purchased the above pouch, specifically to hold my Viking SAGA dice.

Here's the pouch loosened, containing my first set of Viking dice (and a little Viking coin I also picked up from the event).

I also purchased another pouch from an archery stand - I definitely prefer the other one though.

For anyone who is a wargames and history fan, if you get the chance to go to an event like this, go! They've been very good - it's great to see the costumes up close and you also get some great inspiration when it comes to the historical locations the events tend to be held at - check out this part of the ruins of Whitby Abbey. Perfect inspiration for the ruins I'm going to build for Frostgrave!

Whitby Abbey