Assembling an invasion force.

Six weeks to go, and it's time to put a dent in the pile of shame. For this year's convention game we are doing Holland 1940 with lots of dastardly German fallschirmjäger raining down on the happless Dutch defenders. I actually had more than a platoon of German paratroopers bought about 20 years ago; a mix of Wargames Foundry and Crusader miniatures. About a squad were painted and another squad and a half basecoated and in various stages of completion. Unfortunately all were based on standard Games Workshop bases which I have since abandondoned for historical games. So rebaseing were in order.

Oh the joys of rebasing. At the same time I fitted the figures on to team bases from Sarissa.

The Dwarfs of Whatever

So despite my opinions on the Oathmark Dwarfs in my previous blogpost I soldiered on and assembled the whole box of figures. The problem was I had no clue what rules I'm going to use with these figures. Now the actual rules doesn't matter as much as the army lists for said ruleset which dictates how many figures you need in a unit and how many figures you can have a maximum of.

My top contenders for the rulesets are, in alphabetical order:

• Dragon Rampant
• Dux Britanniarum (with the unofficial Dux Arda mod).
• Oathmarks
• Warlords of Erehwon

I'm actually not counting Games Workshop's Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game because I think they sort of jumped the gun with the Hobbit movie rules, and I have no interest in forking out £35 for the new rulebook to see if they have changed anything, and then £35 for the army book of each army I want to play. (I'm not criticising their business model but I already buy the big expensive books for 40k so I'm thinking enough is enough.)

I arranged the figures into units while assembling them.

Oathmark Dwarves, a review and some thoughts.

As a long time dwarf afficionado -- the fantasy literature kind of dwarf -- I was very curious when Northstar brought out a set of plastic dwarves. The set is in the same vein as their Frostgrave plastics, but geared towards unit building rather than skirmish warband. Thus it contains a whopping 30 miniatures (compared to the 20 in a Frostgrave box) but with more limited equipment options.

The box art. Nice innit?

Apparently the nice Mr McCullough of Frostgrave fame is writing a set of fantasy battle rules for Osprey, due out later this year, but the figures were released in 2018 already. There are also goblins, elves and human sets out already.

Build me an army worthy of Mordor!

Dear Internet, I haven't written in a long time. It's not you, it's me. Truth to be told there haven't been much to write about, but I though the new year would be a nice time to make an effort and restart the blog. We'll see how long it lasts this time, but at least I have something to write about right now. (I also painted something, skip to the end if you just want to see the pretty pictures.)

Just before the new year I met up with my fellow Scandinavian Lardies (or Lardie Penguins) Jocke, Koen and Thomas for our annual shits and giggles game. In a moment of hubris we decided to play Dux Gondorianum -- which is more or less just Dux Britanniarum with Lord of the Rings figures.

The forces of go.. evil I mean.

Dux Brit is a large dark age skirmish game from Too Fat Lardies which is quite brilliant if you fancy playing saxons vs romano-britons. Which is nice, I guess, but we don't have any of those kinds of miniatures or any connection to that bit of history. What we do have is a lot of Games Workshop's  Uruk Hai, Gondorians and Rohirrim. The biggest hordes of painted stuff belongs to Koen and Thomas as I sold most of my Uruks and Riders of Rohan to Thomas a while back. Still, I had a handful of painted Mordor Orcs and a bunch of Wargames Foundry viking archers that didn't look too out of place in a Rohan Army. For some reason I even had two Grishnak!

One of my Grishnaks leads the charge!