Game of Thrones - Wildling Reinforcements

As mentioned in the post from a few days ago, I've decided to add to my wildlings (and Nightswatcg/Men of the North) to bring them up to the warband size required for games of Lion Rampant or SAGA. I am also using these as the source of my warband members for Frostgrave, using them alongside a Warg-themed Witch (I have the official Witch and apprentice who fit the fur-clad wildling theme perfectly and they may see double-duty in this Lion Rampant force).

Above you can see the start of the additions to the warband - these are generally based on a big bag of plastic mordor orcs I bought from a friend, plus some metals I bought from another internet friend. The bag of orcs was lacking in bowmen, so I ended up hacking up some Lord of the Rings plastic elf bowmen I had sat around doing nothing for their bow arms. I did shorten these to fit with the wildlings a bit more. I also included a bunch of weapon swaps from spare parts from the Gripping Beast plastic kits.

In addition to the bits from Gripping Beast, I also used some heads available from CP Models, as shown on my favourite conversion from the bunch above, this dude and his horn. The metal figures shown above include some of the brilliant Mordor Uruk Hai, who will be used as sub-commanders in the force (and as Templars in the Witch warband for Frostgrave) with Dane axes replacing their missing weapons and another two metal orc characters with slight conversions to turn them into Wargs for the force.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

Game of Thrones - Wildling Chieftain

This is the current chief of my Wildling warband - the figure is from the Lucid Eye range that can be seen on Facebook: Lucid Eye. A great selection of figures - I hope I find an excuse to buy more!

The figure immediately struck me as perfect for a Wildling leader - the face reminded me of the Thenns from the Game of Thrones TV series. He was previously wielding a stone-tipped spear, which I decided to upgrade for a savage-looking axe. The head of the axe is from the Viking sprue from Gripping Beast and was taken from a Dane axe.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome - thanks for reading and have a lovely day!

Game of Thrones - Men of the North

Finally for the Men of the North, a group shot! The veteran Nightswatch Rangers, the Lord oh House Umber, the head of his house guard and the houndmaster I showed a couple of weeks back as I painted him around the same time - I had it in mind that he would be the master of hounds for a Northern Lord, helping his Lord hunt down the last of the Wildlings left after their raid. I'm very happy with how these have turned out! 

I have lots to add to these: the Warriors of House Umber (plastic Rohan from Lord of the Rings, on foot and mounted), more brothers of the Nightswatch (plastic Rangers of Gondor - these will represent the standard brothers of the watch, whereas the metals are veterans) and then some warriors of another Northern house (plastic Warriors of Minas Tirith - their armour looks sufficiently different to that of the Rohan forces - maybes the forces of White Harbor? I have been playing the Game of Thrones game by Telltale Games recently, so perhaps House Forester?). 

As usual, comments and suggestions are most welcome - many thanks for reading and have a brilliant day!

Game of Thrones - Nights Watch

Once again continuing the Game of Thrones project, here are my veteran Rangers of the Nightswatch. They're built from the metal Lord of the Rings Rangers of Gondor, which generally go for quite high prices second hand now, but I found these as an auction on eBay - I got the 6 miniatures for around £1 a figure and they went straight in the paint stripper.

I started these off in my normal method which goes like this; spray undercoat grey primer, then mix up a mid brown and basecoat everything including bases. Follow this up with scorched brown on the base, then when all of that is completely dry, drybrush tan all over, then drybrush stone grey all over. From here you've got a starting point where everything is picked out and ready to go - use thinned paints and washes to block the various parts in. Although the Nightswatch are known for wearing black, I didn't use a true black on anything but the bass edging - I used a lot of shades of brown-black and grey-black to paint their uniforms.

This guy is the one in charge - I was thinking of a grizzled veteran like Quorin Halfhand. The base figure was actually Faramir from Lord of the Rings. I remove his head and sword with a jewellers saw and replaced them with parts from the plastic kits from Gripping Beast - an axe from their Vikings and a head from the Dark Age Warriors kit. A little bit of modelling putty added fur to his collar to hide the join.

Finally, I got these figures of Boromir spare from various Lord of the Rings job lots I'd received - I thought I'd turn him into a member of the Nightswatch, as well as turning him into a severely injured objective marker. The arrows were missing from the figure and his sword was twisted at the end, so I decided to add replacement arrows from a paper clip and some foil, plus remove part of the sword to make it look like a broken blade.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

 

Game of Thrones - Northern Lord and Household Guard

These gentlemen are part of my Game of Thrones project - I've already shown the start of my wildlings on the blog, whilst these belong to my "Men of the North" faction - these will accompany some house warriors and men of the Nightswatch against the growing wildling threat.

I love this sculpt of Denethor from the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings line - there's a palpable sense of power and character emanating from his stance and scowl! I thought he'd fit the project perfectly as a Lord of one of the Northern houses that are close to the wall - I decided on the colours of House Umber, which also seemed to fit his stature.

I picked up this Gamling figure at a very low price on eBay amongst some other figures from a seller - I thought that his equipment and wargear would mark him out as a wealthier Lord or potentially the head of a household guard. I painted his cloak in quite a neutral colour, so I could potentially use him in a number of different uses.

These are the first figures that I'm showing on the blog from my expanded Game of Thrones project - as my projects usually do, this one has grown from being a skirmish warband of wildlings vs a skirmish warband of Nightswatch into two Lion Rampant-sized forces. I've got a number of connected posts that will be appearing soon, so come back in the near future for more!

 

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

#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!

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!

Games Mat and completed Terrain

Huzzah! Terrain collection and games mat for historical gaming and perhaps more traditional fantasy all put together! I'm deliriously happy with this - everything here is brand new for January. The canvas gaming mat follows a great guide at Tobi's Paint Pot.

Things left to add:
- buildings - a number of Dark Ages houses and a pig sty to begin with - my plan eventually is to have enough buildings to play Song of Shadows and Dust but set in a Dark Age town
- more trees! I have another 5 bases of trees to complete at some point
- hills - I have the bases and foam, just awaiting the bark chips
- fences and walls

Phew! I also have around 25 Dark Ages villagers plus livestock assembled and undercoated to populate the settlement I plan to build and I want to put together some carts for the Vikings or Wildlings to ambush! Many plans! 

Here is my current SAGA Viking force making a shield wall on the new games mat and terrain.