It's Orcish Re-Basing Time

I haven't quite finished rebasing my elves but I was getting bored with doing the same bases over and over so I thought it must be time to start getting my orcs into order. These bases took a bit more thought and effort than the elves and a fortuitous trip to my closest wargames supply depot (House of War) saw me buy all the supplies I needed in one fell swoop.

The basic item I needed was a basing past. The one I wasted was European Mud from Vallejo, and I was lucky in the fact that the shop had a delivery and the stuff was put on the shelf an hour before I got there. So I bought two tubs along with a large bag of stony grit and several packs of tufts.

I started with some infantry. I wanted to make the units as looser formations compared to the elves and as a result I only used 10 figures per base instead of 12. This will end up giving me two or three extra units buy the time I get them all done.

The vast majority of the heavy infantry are Oathmark Goblins plastic figures. However, there are a few other figures including a couple from Mantic some conversions of human figures. 

The bases are the same as I used for my elves - 11.2cm blank cup coasters that I get from my local hardware shop. I cut them down to 7cm depth, round off the cut corners and add a 12mm dice frame. After that I slather on the basing past and add stony grit and foliage. I like the result although it is time consuming.

I also did a couple of bases of skirmishers. This army won't have formed archers but they will have formed crossbows.

Next are what I'm calling Mountain Orcs. These are Wargames Atlantic goblins. I initially made these as light infantry but I decided to change them a bit. I have three Reaper ogres/trolls and I could put them together to create a unit but I decided to add them to an infantry unit. I like the idea of a troll escorted by contingent of smaller critters (to make them feel braver) so that's what I did. Sort of.

As you can see I painted these orcs with a dark tan skin to differentiate them from the regular orcs. I think these figures they look better with this skin colour. The idea of these bases is to create a hard heavy warrior unit and not a monstrous creature unit. They will be Heavy Infantry Warriors with a couple of appropriate traits (Spears as Tribute and Brutal).

However, The trolls are not permanently fixed to the bases. I made a plateau using 3mm cork sheet and cut out a 40mm x 40mm square. I put a magnet into the bottom of the creatures bases and a square of thin metal sheet onto the base (after photo). In this way I can actually group the three creatures together into an dedicated troll/ogre unit.

And now, here's in one of my favourite and weirder units: mounted bows on giant scorpions - Scorpion Archers!

Hey, I forgot to add tufts to the second unit and I also forgot to paint the bases edges!

These were made using Wargames Atlantic Goblins and Reaper Bones giant scorpions. I used the saddles that come in the goblin box and fitted them onto the big stingers with some minor modification and some greenstuff. I'll make these Heavy Riders with bows and the traits Fearsome and Spears as Tribute.

I had to put these onto fairly large bases. I tried mounting two of them onto a shallower base but they didn't project the same sense of power and awe as the single base with three. I was a bit sad to have to remove these from their single 60mm bases but the big bases wouldn't fit on to a sabot with the same frontage as the rest of the units.

And, that's it for the orcs so far. I still have a lot to do including warg-riders, boar cavalry, spiders, werewolves and a dragon! I'm sure there are other things too that I can't remember off the top of my heard right at the moment.

Thanks for reading,

IanKH

P.S. Since I began writing this post I've done another 4 bases of heavy infantry bringing the number up to 10 units and I still have plenty more to do.