Don't Cross the Bows

First twenty done! 

Trying to calculate this as a percentage of the total job is too depressing to contemplate. There's at least one unit of pretty much everything Dark Elves have to offer in my cupboard right now. Some of them are forty strong. 

On Your Marksmen…

They dress like Tileans, shoot like Dark Elves and steal like drunken students ... what is there not to love about The Marksmen of Miragliano?



We're known as the Oculus Tauri ... because our general is pretentious.

The last of my Perry Brothers-sculpted Regiment of Renown is my favourite. Fluff-wise, it's a nice idea to feature a band of expert sharpshooters among the Dogs of War regiments. And on the tabletop, 20 x S4 shots at BS4 certainly came in handy (this was prior to the 8th edition, when you'd have to hunt around for a hillside to shoot in two ranks).

All this has changed as they've been co-opted into the Empire army - now they're just regular crossbowmen, probably with an unnecessary command group. All that remains are the sculpts.

The Greenjackets

This is the smaller of my two crossbow units (the 20-strong, full-command, Marksmen of Miragliano are to follow). The motivation behind creating them was simple: when looking at all the excess weapons from my Empire Militia box, it occurred to me, ‘there’s enough crossbows there to make a whole regiment’.

How easily you boys could have been halberds.

To get some uniformity, I gave them all Dark Angels green jackets (the sharpshooters of Sharpe must have been in my mind), with the usual Shadow Grey trousers and Desert Yellow hats. Unlike the larger rank-and-file unit of crossbows, I saw this one as more a ‘light company’ of woodland patrollers (and I realise that giving them bows would have been more sensible in that case).