The Vikings are Coming

The first of my Vikings have been mostly done - I just have to do the bases to finish them off. The next four hirdmen are on the way, and as you can see below I've painted up a Beowulf figure from Eureka Miniatures as the initial warband leader.

Wargs On the Way

After being away again, I thought I'd better pop something up here. I'd recently completed some Wargs from the Hobbit that we were coming up against in our The One Ring RPG campaign. I've done six of them, but here's three just to get an idea.

I have to confess to not spending a great deal of time working on them, but they're so well made that they paint up beautifully really easily. The only issues were puttying up the joins. The lines down the middle of their backs were the most annoying part - not just a seam there but with vertebrae sticking up so that if would take a lot of work fill the joins completely. However, they came out okay and they look particularly nasty against any 25/28mm figure; the size of large tigers.

Doors that open and close: hinging the doors on 28mm terrain buildings

Well, thanks to the modern miracle of shiftwork, my production rate has dramatically dropped, which should save me a packet of money if my purchasing rate drops to a similar level. It's the If in that last sentence that concerns me.

Anyways, just to add a little to my SAGA games I've built a couple of 4Ground buildings I purchased from Eureka Miniatures and War and Peace Games some time ago. I've got to say, they're fantastic to put together, well worth the bit of extra money I'd pay for something far plainer or unpainted. I was a bit put off by the furry thatched roof, as I'd seen some at the club that hadn't been finished off. However, after finishing the thatch with the wood glue and water mix that's recommended they look pretty good. I wasn't happy with the doors though - I think my OCD must have kicked in...

I tried drilling out one of the door-jams with a modelling bit to use a pin to hinge the door, but that didn't work too well. Then a friend in Kansas suggested using fabric as the hinges, and it all then fell into place. I cut the hinge pieces off and glued them into the doorjams, then glued the fabric onto the jams. I painted a little glue across the swatches to help stabilise the weave, then attached it all to the door. Finally, a spot of paint and attaching them to the buildings themselves, and they were done. They open and close nicely, so the appearance can be changed subtly. Let me know what you think of them (the doors, not the OCD).

As they started out

After the hinge-pieces were glued into the frames

...and where they came off the door

The fabric swatches now on the frames

The doors glued onto the frame and fabric hinges

The completed door and frame...

The door on the Saxon hut from the outside

The door closed from the inside

...and opened

Then I decided to make some fires to go into the fireplaces. Texture paste and some twigs!

Finally, the English are done. I'll call them that, as they'll be a core group that I'll expand into both Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes for SAGA. There's only four points worth at the moment, as I'll concentrate on building an opponent for them and some terrain before expanding each force. Of course, they could just test their mettle against some orcs or goblins from Middle Earth, of which I have plenty.

So, the Anglo-Saxons are coming along nicely, but as I've got a few different types, I thought I'd have a look at the different brands and see how they compared size-wise. Below is a picture of a Wargames Foundry figure on the left (with a plastic shield this time). In the middle is sculpt of one of Beowulf's bodyguards from that most excellent of figure manufacturers, Nic, at Eureka Miniatures. Lastly on the right is a Saxon Thegn from the Gripping Beast plastics box set.

The Foundry figure looks a bit tall, and the other two are still listed as 28mm, so maybe there's a bit of scale creep in the Foundry line. The other two mix nicely though, and I'll put up further pictures of some of the Eureka Dark Ages range as I paint them.

So, in the ongoing quest to put together an English force for SAGA I've been working on a series of figures. Some are what some guys at the club and I believe to be old Wargames Foundry Anglo-Saxons that I purchased on eBay, while the rest are plastic Gripping Beast figures. So, there I am peacefully preparing the guys for undercoating and such, and the sword and hand of one of the lads in a particularly dynamic pose just drops off! Given it's unlikely there's any sort of warranty on old Anglo-Saxon huscarls losing bits of limbs, I thought I'd better simply pin it and pop it back on. Not a big task, but just in case anyone searching online hasn't seen shots of it done before (though I'm sure there's someone who has the time to do a full live demo on You Tube), here's a few pictures of the process.

The patient's wrist after cleaning it up with a file and drilling the hole

Far-shot of the brass pin in place

...and a bit more detail. I'd already measured it and cut it to size.

The pin seemed like it may have been a bit long, but...

...after a bit of liquid green stuff it seems like a good fit.

So after constructing a miniature paint shaker to revive all my paints after my time away, it turned out I couldn't save all of them. Some had just separated to a point where they were too much like an emulsion to be usable. Some others, though, I've had to replace because the pots have become unusable. But, this isn't because of any fault in them. I'm referring to old Citadel Miniatures paints that I purchased a good 20 years ago. These things were fantastic - they have barely dried out over the years, and when they started to the addition of a little distilled water did the trick. Magnificent stuff. These speak to the quality of the paint products that Games Workshop have put out. Now, I have to retire them as the lids have cracked to the poitn where I just can't open them without breaking them any more. So, vale trusty pigments, definitely got value for money out of you lot and the others that came in the box with you!

The Terra Cotta to the right looks a bit dodgy but the paint inside was still fine.

The lids are a little on the gone-side aren't they...

After warming up with some basic painting (LotR Elves from the first box-set, a few that had been undercoated and deprioritised continuously for the past few years) I decided that of the options I had for painting, the one that would possibly give me biggest gaming-bang-for-buck, and something that I'd been meaning to do for a fair while, was some figures for the game SAGA. So I arranged a Friday night game via the club Facebook page and was ready to go. Except of course I had no figures to run in it. Mark, who was going to ref the game for Paul and I. Mark assured me that he had between his and someone else's figures enough for both of us, but I wanted to get something done. So I managed to get four Anglo-Danish/Saxon hearthguard painted up (minus finished bases) and got them into the stoush on the night.

The short version was that it was an educational game, we learnt all the basics, and I found the SAGA dice and command options to be just plain fun! Here's a few shots of a small part of the action:

The English defending the village

Vikings on the way in...

Raiders at the northern end of town

My lads preparing for action