The Warband Project, Part One

Posted by Comrade on June 2, 2016
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Over the years, I’ve made it my mission to collect a diverse array of fantasy miniatures from a variety of manufacturers and game lines. Because the games we play don’t require any particular set of figures, I’ve been able to pick up pretty much any old miniature, kit or blister pack that caught my interest over the years – safe in the knowledge that eventually it would hit the table in some sort of skirmish battle.

Now I’ve come to a sort of retrospective point. The last five years of collecting, painting and gaming has left me with a huge collection of battlefield-ready fantasy figures. Some are veterans of many campaigns, with unique characters and legendary battlefield exploits. Others haven’t yet tasted the fury of battle and await their first chance at glory.

Here, then is the Warband Project – Part One: my attempt at categorizing and showcasing the many warbands I’ve put onto the battlefield over the last five years of gaming, both in Chicago and now here in Oregon.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Many figures remain carefully packed away in figure cases, awaiting their moment on the battlefield. This particular post also doesn’t include my dwarves and undead collections – both of which have grown to the point where they are armies in their own right, suitable for skirmish gaming or Kings of War-scale mass battles.

Defenders of the Battle-Forge

This warband was inspired by the adventuring crew featured in an old-school AD&D/OSRIC campaign I played years ago. My character, Kjeld the Battle-Priest, explored the wilderlands with a motley band of fighters, treasure-seekers and ne’er-do-wells. Eventually Kjeld attracted a small group of followers, based around his Battle-Forge in a frontier village. He is the bearded guy with the big hammer in this photo, and he’s surrounded by his porters, hirelings and stalwart allies.

Vaxion’s Black-Hearted Brigands

Where there are heroes, there must also be villains. Vaxion is a highwayman by trade and has attracted the dregs of society to his grim cause. These guys are ideal for any scenario where you need some basic bad guys to harass and interdict another player.

Raiders of the Edelmark Sewers

There are … things … lurking in the tunnels and drainpipes beneath the city of Edelmark. This warband is just a snapshot of one such group that took part in an incursion onto the streets of the unsuspecting city. A foul troll leads the way, followed by stinking, chittering ratmen, along with a putrid swamp monster. Who knows what else lurks in the ichor-spattered corridors of the Edelmark catacombs?

Duke Baldric’s Overland Escort

When Duke Baldric makes his months-long circuit to inspect his frontier holdings, he is accompanied by a trusted escort of hard-bitten warriors. Led by Duke Baldric (ahorse, with the winged helm), Sir Hershel and Terfidor the Azure Mage, this warband was originally created for a scenario where they had to escort Duke Baldric across the battlefield. Since then their numbers have grown (or shrank) based on the number of fighters that Duke Baldric was able to muster over the years.

The Cursed Horsemen of Frostvale 

In the wind-scoured wastelands of the far north, where snow-frosted trees cling to craggy mountains and men wrap themselves in furs the year round, a band of horsemen sallies forth to raid the barely civilized lands to the south. In their wake, men whisper of a terrible curse that lies heavy upon the warband — and of unspeakable barbarity that grips the fighters in the heat of battle. Woe to those who spy the Cursed Horsemen of Frostvale at the gates of their village of an autumn evening!

These are horsemen of chaos, definitely evil, probably cannibals, who occasionally ally with the Scourge of Longrieve (see below).

Findrel the Navigator and the Moonbeam Company 

Findrel (the armored elf in the center with the upraised hand) has been part of my collection for years, but I never had a decent group of elven warriors to send into battle alongside him – until now. The cavalry and infantry figures were commissions from a speedy contract painter and arrived just a few weeks ago. As such, the Moonbeam Company has not taken part in significant battles to date.

The story behind the warband is that they are the crew of a majestic elven sailing ship called the Moonbeam that was abandoned off the coast of Qaarra after a storm many years ago. Since then, they have been investigating reports of a spectral ghost ship glowing in the moonlight, which appears on an ill wind all along the troubled shores of the continent. Will they ever find their way back to their vessel?

Grubb’s Bonecrushers

Sometimes you just need some orcs or goblins to stand between the adventurers and their goal. Grubb’s Bonecrushers fulfills this role admirably. In my mind, they’re hobgoblins, sort of halfway between orcs and goblins. These are some of the oldest minis in my current collection, having been painted back in 2009 or so. (Hardly ancient, I know, but still….)

The Scourge of Longrieve

After the doom-cloud had swept across Qaarra and the fearful population had been left to quake and mourn, the mysterious Leathern Gate in the northern mountains opened once again, briefly creating a portal between Qaarra and the Wyrdwold. From the grimacing doorway came the Scourge of Longrieve, a band of raiders, cutthroats and foul creatures bent on looting the jewels of Qaarra. They broke like a wave upon the idyllic village of Longrieve, earning their name through senseless butchery and slaughter.

In game terms, this was my attempt to make a true chaos warband for last summer’s SBH campaign. I tossed together a whole bunch of disparate models: a mindflayer, a sorceror, two gnolls, an orc, an anti-paladin, maybe a few others. It was a lot of fun to get them all on the battlefield together.

The Hour of the Rat

When the Clock of Omens strikes thirteen, families know to bar the door and place their heaviest cook-pots atop open drains and sewer pipes. For it is the Hour of the Rat, when the chittering hordes surge from the under-depths, led by fearsome chaos ratmen armored in scavenged mail and plate, and wielding blades of corrupted steel. They visit the surface world to raid for treasure and slaves — but the day may yet come when these ratmen do not slink back into the catacombs at dawn, but instead stay to rule the realm that they have conquered.

This is an old-school Skaven warband composed of some vintage Citadel miniatures. They can easily ally with the Raiders of the Edelmark Sewers or the Scourge of Longrieve for larger scenarios featuring chaos foes.

That’s all for now! I’ll be back soon with the next installment, featuring an assortment of warbands drawn from my undead and dwarf armies, plus some leftover figures that don’t currently have a home.

Post-Apocalyptic Russian Scavengers

Posted by Comrade on May 31, 2016
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Last year I decided to look into purchasing some select models from Ratnik Miniatures, a small-batch Russian manufacturer distributed by Lead Adventure Miniatures (and sold domestically here in the U.S. of A. by Cool Mini or Not). Imagine my surprise (and glee!) when I strolled over to CMON and saw that the entirety of their Lead Adventure Miniatures stock was on clearance!

I quickly pieced together an order, snapping up a half dozen packs of post-apocalyptic figures that I’ve been salivating over for years. Much of this stuff is inspired by the STALKER video games: lots of scrappy scavengers with gas masks and bandoliers and pieced-together military kit. Very heady, atmospheric stuff.

Anyway, the figures arrived and I set about painting up two batches of Russian scavengers, for a grand total of 10 guys. They’re armed with simple 20th-century weapons — no laser rifles here — which fits perfectly with my post-apocalyptic games.

As an added bonus (and just to see if I could), I gave each guy a name, written in Russian along the base. Somewhere my college Russian professor is chuckling!

I’m sure they’ll be a familiar sight on the wastelands for a long time to come!

Open Combat: Skirmish in the Old City

Posted by Comrade on May 30, 2016
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For my second go at Open Combat, the fast-play skirmish ruleset from Second Thunder, I put together a multiplayer game. Karl, Tim and Mattias showed up with appropriately evil warbands (I was fielding my newly painted chaos ratmen), so we crafted a scenario whereupon the four warbands converged onto an eerie deserted city, its populace fled in terror.

The four warbands were jockeying for control over four key locations: the Guild Hall, the Blacksmith’s Forge, the Forest and the Old Town. These locales were more or less distributed evenly across the battlefield. We used the “Confrontation” deployment rules, where each player took turns placing individual figures anywhere on the map, no closer than 8 inches to another opposing figure. Using this method, we were able to seize strategic locations and put ourselves in position to fight it out rather quickly, which is always nice.

Karl’s red-armored chaos knights deployed near the forest. Tim’s orcs (led by a fearsome armored man known only as the Death Dealer) took up positions near the two elevated walkways. My chaos ratmen seized the Old Town (the raised section of buildings) and the Guild Hall (large multi-story building in the center rear). Mattias’s Wyrdwold riders occupied the long street between the Guild Hall and the Old Town.

Here’s how the battlefield looked at the start of the game. (Note the snazzy custom-embroidered CSW dice bag in the background of the first pic! Tim made that!)

We used a simple card activation system to inject a little uncertainty into each turn. As the game began, each sector of the battlefield saw its own conflicts develop. Tim began moving his troops along the walkway to engage the chaos ratmen in the Old Town section.

The movement rules in Open Combat don’t allow friendly figures to move “through” each other, so my armored rat was able to bottleneck Tim’s advance along the ledge quite nicely…for a little while, at least.

Elsewhere, Mattias’s grim horsemen thundered through the streets and clashed with the ratmen occupying the Guild Hall.

The battle for the Guild Hall (which lasted for most of the game, with plenty of negotiation and backstabbery along the way) showed one of the minor weak points of Open Combat — the lack of any established army lists or premade units.

Since we were building our armies in a vacuum using a point system that didn’t really have baseline stats for a typical human soldier, I ended up building my ratmen to be slightly beefier than Mattias’s cavalry. We agreed that this felt weird since the stats we came up with didn’t match up with the way the miniatures looked, at least in comparison. Our lists were perfectly balanced at 200 points each, but in single combat, my ratmen were more deadly than his chaos warriors — many were slewn over the course of the game, and Mattias gleefully announced each fallen warrior by name.

Over by the Blacksmith’s Forge, Karl’s chaos raiders met the rest of Mattias’s Wyrdwold raiders in a desperate scrum.

As you can see, things got ugly pretty fast. But the bulk of Karl’s force was committed to the forest, and they formed up to present a red-armored wall against the probing attacks of Tim’s orcs.

Here’s another panoramic shot, showing Karl’s chaos raiders closing in on Tim’s orcs in the foreground.

And here’s what happened moments later, as the fight developed under the walkway.

As we approached the endgame, Mattias realized he should have deployed his horsemen closer together, as they were individually annihilated in the deserted streets of the city. With the streets around the Guild Hall cleared of foes, my ratmen celebrated on the steps.

Elsewhere, Tim pressed his attack in the elevated Old Town section, slaying the armored rat and leaving just a couple of rat spellcasters as defenders. Open Combat lacks an official section for magic, but the game designer intended for players to use a variety of psychological skills to represent magic spells and other effects. We’ve found that this works well, as there are “skills” that represent plenty of things that might otherwise be covered by magic. In this little clash, my rat wizards tried to destroy the orcs’ Mind statistic, but Tim happened to have an orc shaman who buffed his buddies by boosting their Mind stat whenever I attacked it.

Here’s the final scene at the Old Town, where my sneaky rat managed to race across the battlefield and climb halfway up the ladder to relieve his beleaguered fellows … alas, the game ended at that point.

We took stock of the victory conditions and found that Karl had won a clear victory by controlling the Blacksmith’s Forge and the Forest. I came in second place by controlling the Guild Hall.

Afterward we reflected on Open Combat. As with our previous  musings, we were pretty much in agreement that the core game is solid and quite playable, but it lacks many of the peripheral elements that go into a full-fledged fantasy wargame. Of course, this is by design — the game is intentionally designed to be 100% generic and useable for a variety of historic and fantasy genres.

But I’m definitely interested in a dedicated fantasy supplement with rules for magic, armor, monstrous abilities, racial characteristics, dungeoncrawling, etc. Here’s hoping that Second Thunder has something like that on the release schedule this year!