[RRtK] Family Snapshots

Beastman Army from Microworld Games

Just tidying up after the end of 2013 and thought I would share these photos of my three completed 6mm Fantasy Armies as posted on my website.

[RRTK] Beastie Boys

You Gotta Fight

For Your Right

To Eat Humies

I've finished painting a few more Irregular Miniatures Men of the West and have also started my Beastmen Army from Microworld Games.

For the Beastmen army, I bought a couple of packs of mixed Herd, a pack of the Minotaur Warriors, and a command pack.

The detail on the minotaur figures is amazing. I was able to pick out sets of horns and the straps holding the shoulder armour on. I mixed up the pelt colours - having some brown, some black and some grey for variety - and then mixed them again when filling up the bases. The two-axe wielding boss minotaur is from the command pack. I kept one as a hero, one as a general, and used the others as unit commanders for my four Great Beastman units.

The common minotaurs are about 10mm tall while the boss minotaurs are closer to 15mm.

I've just started painting the Beastman Herd figures. These appear to be like satyrs or fauns (as appeared in the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie, and Prince Caspian) and are either armed with javelins or throwing spears (two poses) or large, cleaver-like swords. I'm looking forward seeing how they come out.

Today, my Dread Elf army arrived from Microworld. I had been torn between the Dread Elves or Irregular Miniatures' Dark Elves for my Evil Elf needs. One thing I was sure of was that I wanted cavalry for my Evil Elves, not silly riding lizards. The Dread Outriders looked interesting, though I was uncertain about the horses as they looked a little wonky to me. arcaopino, on the 6mm Fantasy Yahoo Group, attested to the quality of the Microworld horses so I decided that the Dread Elves would be my Entropic Pointy Ears force.And I am very pleased with my choice. Pictures to come.

[RRtK] Teeny, Tiny Toy Soldiers Arrive

Yesterday, my first order of 6mm figures for my Rally Round the King project arrived  from Nic at Eureka Miniatures. I had ordered a selection from the Irregular Miniatures Men of the West range as the basis of the Valgasmaan army, and then spent a couple of hours working out how I was going to base them.

I have decided to use 40mm x 20mm plasticard bases as the frontages match other basing systems, and the plasticard is both thinner, and not likely to curl like card. At the moment, I'm intending to base the heavy infantry four strips to the base, while the pikemen will be six strips to a base (five strips of pike and a command strip). Light Horse are one strip (six figures) while the Knights will probably be two strips to a base.

So, once I had the basing worked out, I had to snip some of the strips to fit everything on the way I wanted them, and then tack-glued the figures to some painting trays. Today, I undercoated everything - I'm pretty impressed with the amount of detail that a wash of watery black undercoat brought out. 

The command strips, top right, has a pair of nicely moulded flags though, at this scale, they're probably about six inches thick. 

The Knights have Maximilian-style metal barding. The lances, apparently, are a point of weakness so I have been very careful when straightening them.

I'm looking forward to putting some colour on these guys.

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While I haven't done any more work on my campaign map, I have had some further thoughts.

The white area in the northern, snow-capped  mountains is a glacier, which is also the source of the Great River. The glacier is called the Rimebeard and is rumoured to be the hold of the Mountain Giants. The province of Jaebelitz, north of Mt Gorfang, has been over run by an army of Beastmen, who are determined to establish their own state. Foranimenagii explorers are attempting to establish a colony on new-found lands to the south of the sea. They will soon discover that these lands are not empty.

[RRtK] Small Beginnings

Arkansan, on The Miniatures Page, asked whether gamers developed their own worlds for wargaming. This was a rather synchronistic question as he is planning to run a solo Rally Round the King campaign, as I am, and I am in the process of developing the initial maps for my campaign world.

The consensus amongst the respondents on the TMP thread was to start out small. The danger of trying to map everything before play begins is that you just keep mapping and never get to play. Having done this sort of thing in the past, I concur.

This time, I started doodling around with an abstract "province", or area, map first.The idea was to establish the relationship between various locations before I actually began the more pictorial style map.

Now, I could have just used the map of Talomir from the Rally Round the King book, but where's the fun in that? As I had Men of the West from Irregular Miniatures, Goblins from Baccus, and Beastmen from Microworld all on their way to me, as well as being rather taken with the City States Country type from the rules, that sort of indicated what areas I needed to develop.

The four lower boxes in the map, above, are the four provinces of the Foranimenagii City States (each province contains a city) which stretch along the northern coast of the sea. In 15mm, I have an Italian Condotta Army and have always been interested in Italian History from the Medieval period through to the Renaissance. I therefore decided that the Foranimenagii States are Italian-ish in culture, are trading ports, and have a reasonable technology level.

Inland from the Foranimen Coast lies Valgasmaa (the four red provinces). Valgasmaa - home of the Men of the West - is a unified, late Medieval-type Kingdom. Three of the Valgasmaan provinces lie along a major river that continues south through a Foranimenagii province, before falling into the sea. The eastern province of Valgasmaa is a rolling plain, bounded along its eastern march by another river. A chain of mountains (the green provinces) forms Valgasmaa's northern border. A pass, to the north-east, leads to a transmountain province, but this province is now independent.

The transmountain province became cut off from the southern provinces of Valgasmaa when a tribe of Goblins moved into the mountains. From Mt Gorfang, the Goblins were able to close the pass and this left the transmountain province to fend for itself.

At this point, I have two potential conflicts - Valgasmaa vs the Goblins, to drive them out of the mountains and reopen the pass to the north; and Valgasmaa's march to the sea, a campaign to secure the mouth of the Great River and give Valgasmaa access to the lucrative sea trade.

Now to fill in the details.

Stage one of the actual map, made in Hexographer

Edit: And here's the map with some work done on it:

Now it looks more like the sketch map