Comrade's Wargames

Earlier this month I was browsing the awesome and inspiring list of blogs in my WordPress reader, as is my wont, when I came across Azazel’s June Community Painting Challenge. The theme was “Neglected Models,” which probably describes half or more of my backlog.

See, I play mostly skirmish-level games, which means I don’t usually need to paint up a full unit of anything. More often I’ll pick and choose figures from various sets to build my warbands. As a result, I’ve got lots of “leftover” miniatures bouncing around in various boxes and crates.

One in particular has been vexing me for nearly a decade: The Last Chaos Horseman. He’s so named because he’s the lone leftover from a set of Chaos Marauder Horsemen that I painted up back in 2010. As near as I can tell, the kit itself dates back to 2002. I’ve always liked these guys, because they’re not the heavily armored hunchbacks that came to define later iterations of the Warhammer Chaos line. They’ve got some character to them, with each figure being a bit unique, suggesting a cadre of individual, elite mounted warriors, rather than a wedge of anonymous armored cavalry.

The first four fellows were a blast to paint, and they’ve been in heavy rotation on the tabletop ever since then, playing the role of chaos marauders, roving brigands, or mounted barbarians in a variety of games as needed. I even developed a bit of backstory for them in this blog post (see “The Cursed Riders of Frostvale”).

The last horseman taunted me, though. For years I moved him from box to box, always vowing to work on him whenever I had a break in my schedule. Along the way I became a father, moved to across the country, built a new game group from scratch, started playing Warhammer 40,000 again, and … you get the idea.

Anyway, reading Azazel’s blog post about his June painting challenge got me inspired to drag out this lone horseman and finish him off.

Now, my painting style has changed (I’d say “matured”) since I painted up the first four guys in this unit. I deliberately tried to recall my earlier techniques in an attempt to make the last horseman fit in with his fellows. This was particularly important for the basing scheme, and I think I achieved a fairly decent approximation of my earlier work. Here’s the whole team.

My only regret is that I didn’t trim off the mold lines on the front section of the plastic horse. Oops! It’s not very visible at “gaming distance” (3 feet away), so we’re all good.

With that, this unit is complete! It only took me a decade. My extremely long term goal is to have a small generic chaos/barbarian warband for use in games like Open Combat and Frostgrave. With this lone horseman completed, I’m one step closer.