Comrade's Wargames

I pivoted away from working on my Skaven army last month and returned (after an extended absence) to my beloved dwarf army. I originally built this army for Kings of War, and I haven’t touched it in 5 or 6 years.

Here’s a look at where it stood back in 2015. The core of the army used a bunch of old school Ral Partha metal models sculpted by Bob Olley, plus assorted figures from various other manufacturers, including Warhammer, Reaper, Heartbreaker Hobbies, Alternative Armies, plus some Kickstarter offerings. In its present form, it can easily work for Saga: Age of Magic or Dragon Rampant (our two go-to rulesets for mid-sized fantasy battles).

In any case, I was gripped by dwarf fever (is that a thing?) in May, and I started rummaging through the huge box of unpainted dwarf stuff that I had earmarked for this army back when I first started building it.

Up first was a simple palette cleanser — some plastic Warhammer dwarves, as a no frills, low pressure way to ease back into painting stout bearded warriors. Was I up to the task, after years of focusing on Skaven and undead? You be the judge.

With those fellows out of the way, it was time to start addressing some needs. I have a number of artillery pieces in this army, but not a lot of crew-type figures to man the cannons. So I found a couple crewmen and added them to the painting queue.

After that, I dug out a Rune Lord that I had acquired in a job lot rather recently. He is resin finecast, which I wasn’t excited about, and I was also frankly bewildered by the sculpt — it’s covered by these little circular runic medallions, and I had a really hard time figuring out how to paint this guy. Circles everywhere! Just when you think you’ve painted them all, you find another one tucked away behind a swathe of beard. But I persevered, and here is the result.

He’s missing a small piece — there’s a pipe that supposed to be sticking out of his mouth. No idea where it ended up.

I’m thinking that staff in his hands is some sort of magic wand, and he’s in the middle of casting a runic enchantment of some sort, maybe targeting a chaos barbarian’s mid-thigh area. He’s got a big ol’ hammer on his back in case magic just doesn’t cut it.

Lastly, I decided to have a little fun. Years ago I snagged a few Reaper blisters (metal, not Bones) including this zany dwarf berserker on a wild boar.

Wow! Check out that sculpt. He’s missing a shoe, barely holding on to a length of chain, holding an axe that’s as big as he is. What more could you want?

Normally, mounted models exhaust me, because you’re basically painting two figures disguised as one. I feel betrayed by the time I’m done with the model. For this figure, I tackled the boar primarily with contrast paint, and it worked swimmingly. Consequently, I was able to focus most of my effort on the berserker.

After that, I pulled out a few figures from the Song of Hammer & Forge Kickstarter, which I backed in 2014. I received 40+ figures for my pledge and basically haven’t touched them since they arrived in the mail. They’re nifty figures, a mix of familiar poses along with some new and exciting stuff. Everything looks like it will fit just fine in my rather traditional dwarf army. Here are the first two basic warriors and a female rogue-type that I painted up as a test.

There’s more to come. In particular, I plan to paint up 12 metal Warhammer Thunderers to fill in as levies for my Saga: Age of Magic army. That’s one of several distinct needs I identified whilst rummaging through my box of unpainted dwarf stuff. I’m also looking to paint up some heavily armored dwarves to serve as hearthguard. Stay tuned for more!