More Lancastrians

I've added a couple more bands to my Wars of the Roses Lancastrian army.  I was hoping to have, at least, one more unit to add to them but, as evidenced by my previous post, I got distracted by goblins and scorpions.

These are a couple of the Duke of Somerset's retinue bill & bow. As you may guess the figures are Perry plastics and they came out looking pretty good as far as I'm concerned. I made the flags myself using photoshop and I don't think they are very good. I could only find a small portcullus image to use and it came out pixilated. I might re-do them. (Also, my printer broke and I got a new one which is rubbish. Whatever you do: Don't buy a HP printer!)

Edit: And I just noticed that the flag on the rear unit is upside down.

Again I organised and based them for Hail Caesar using the Perry's own unit lists. This gives decent sized bands that look good. I'm using 16 figures per band (10 bow and 6 bill) and from the two boxes of figures that I bought this ratio will give me 6 units. 

Alternatively, they can be split up into smaller bands for use in Never Mind the Billhooks or other games. I'd just have to use my casualty dials instead of removing figures.

I'm still waiting on my Baccus 6mm WotR's order to arrive from the UK. I ordered them in mid May and hopefully they'll arrive soon. I also have some Perry metal Lancastrian command sets on their way along with a pair of cannon.

And here's my Lanc's up to date. There is a metal Duke of Somerset in my Perry order but I might make a plastic version if he doesn't hurry up and arrive soon!

Goblin Scorpii

Goblins + Giant Scorpions = Scorpii. Well that's what I'm going to call them!

I bought one of these Reaper Bones Giant Scorpions in 2020 and I didn't make it because the legs were a real pain in the arse to put together. I revisited the figure a couple of months ago and it came out looking pretty good (See here.) So I bought a few more a couple of weeks back with the idea of adding some riders.

Initially I was going to add some Oathmark Revenants as riders but they didn't work out. But I had some Wargames Atlantic goblins sitting around. These figures come with saddles that are supposed to fit on the WA giant spiders. Now I can't deal with the WA spiders because they look a bit too realistic when painted and I'm a hopeless arachnophobe. So, with a little bit of greenstuff the saddles proved to be a great fit for these big critters.

I really like the result and my only complaint is that I only got three scorpions. So my new mission is to get another three of them and build a unit of six. If I can't find three I can get away with two because I can always add a saddle to the first one that I painted if I need to.

I do have a few of the WizKids giant scorpions which I bought because I couldn't get my hands on these Reaper ones. The WizKids models look really great but I couldn't quite get the saddle to fit properly. Maybe I can have another try to see what I can do (maybe the Oathmark Revenants will fit on them!).

So that's some of what I've been doing this week. I've also finished another unit of bill and bow for my Wars of the Roses Lancaster army. I was hoping to finish at least two units this week but I got slowed down with painting these guys. I think the effort was worth it.

A New Rabbit Hole

So I've found myself a new wargaming period wherein I have become enmeshed ~ The Wars of the Roses ~ And just to make things even worse for myself I've decided to do this thing in two different scales: 6mm and 28mm.

I decided to order two 6mm armies from Baccus but these seem to be taking a fair bit of time to get here and I'm beginning to wonder if my order has been forgotten. In the mean time I decided to order a Perry plastic army deal. I decided to start by building a Lancastrian army. 

And here is my first small command ~ Henry Holland the Duke of Exeter. By all accounts a rather unpleasant chap. My reason for making him is because I made a mistake when I first started applying the initial livery colours (I got livery confused with coats of arms). To rectify my mistake I did a bit of research and found a solution which ended up with me making Exeter.

To start with I made one of unit of men-at-arms and another unit of bill & bow. These figures are pretty easy to paint and I managed to construct, paint and base two full units in one week. I expect to be able to do two or three units per week if I can keep up the current rate.

This is a fairly small starting point. I've been trying to decide if I should make an army based on a historical force or just paint up random Commanders and their retinues. I'm not sure which way I'll go at this stage.

Anyway, I decided to base the troops onto multi-bases instead of individual figures. This way I can use less figures in each unit and just rely on the unit footprint. I based the units on what I've seen on various youtube videos - In particular 7th Son who kindly gave me his Hail Caesar lists and home rules (based on the Perry's own homegrown lists etc...).

The figures are nice and they look great based in units but there is one glaring thing wrong with them that I have never seen or heard mentioned by anyone: The world renowned English Long Bows are not very long. They are modelled almost as though they are supposed to be short/hunting bows. Scale wise they are about 4 foot long. Far from the reputed 6 to 7 foot length that history books record.

As expected doing the livery is a challenge and the main reason I've avoided Wars of The Roses until now. I was somewhat daunted at the idea of painting Exeter's coat of arms but I tried anyway and the results came out not too bad. I haven't painted this sort of freehand stuff for a long, long time.

The Duke is just one of the regular figures from the Perry Armoured Men at Arms box. I made his tunic/coat with greenstuff. I'm waiting on some metal command figures and cannon from Perry. I might make a mounted and foot version of each commander. But I might not. We'll wait and see.

As mentioned above, these are based primarily for Hail Caesar or similar multi-based rules. But, If I want to play Never Mind the Billhooks I can always deploy them as I have below by just putting one of the men at arms bases together with the bill base. It's not perfect But It is a workable solution.

So this is the start of my newest project. Just like many of my other projects I expect that I'll spend a lot of time painting these guys and then they'll spend a lot of time sitting in boxes and one day I'll sell them all off. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope they get on the table and prove themselves in battle often in up coming years.

No... Sorry, We're Not The Riders of Rohan.

Sorry about any confusion. We are, in fact, The Riders who look a little bit like the Riders of Rohan.

I have an Anglo -Saxon army that can fit perfectly well into a fantasy setting. But to make them appear a little less "historical" I decided to add some "Northern Riders" to the host. After looking at various options I settled on Gripping Beast plastic Goth Noble Cavalry and now I wish I hadn't.

They came out looking fine and they'll look great in battle but the box itself is really very limited with only three horse and three rider poses. For the horses this isn't too bad but with the riders it means that there are four of each figure in a box of twelve. This makes them very repetitive (especially when I have a second box of them to paint).

Don't get me wrong: They came out just the way I wanted and I really like the look of them but I know that the the next lot of figures will look exactly the same as this lot. The rider that's sitting straight looks okay and the guy charging is limited but looks okay. It's the guy with his arm in the air is the real problem...

Again, the figure looks great but it's just too dramatic to have four different versions of him in one unit. To have eight of him on the table (two boxes of figure) will look dumb. The only alternative I can think of is to re-sculpt his whole right arm/shoulder/torso on a few of the figures and that will be a real pain in the bum.

Anyway, enough of my complaining. Here are my Northern Riders who are not The Riders of Rohan (unless I need them to be Riders of Rohan at a later date, at which time they will abruptly transform into the afore mentioned riders). These can make up either one large unit of 12 figures or two units of 6 depending on what rules are being used.

As you can see I tried to make a couple of hero/leaders using the "arm up in the air" torso. One has the sword arm that came with the kit and the other has the arm of an Oathmark dwarf with a big axe.

If you're wondering about the shields I downloaded an image (and, yes... It is a Rohan shield design just like the banners) and worked them to the right size and colour using photoshop. I then printed out a large batch of them, cut them out and fitted them onto the shields. The shield was then given a heavy coat of mat acrylic varnish. And before you ask; cutting out the little holes for the shield bosses was painstaking.