Let Me Ent-ertain You

Lacking the time (or indeed the attention span) to stick with one army, I have flitted away from the Night Goblins once more and come back to the Wood Elves. The painting equivalent of a gadfly (or a Mangler Squig, if you've seen the way I do eyeballs).

I thought to reignite my interest in the Asrai with something large and arboreal:

"I AM *NOT* GROOT!"

Amber Wizard, Red Rum

I continue to lay down the lore, and today it's the Amber College of Magic.

There's an interesting decision to be made when picking a Beast Wizard: put him on a horse, and he'll get +1 for casting anything on himself (there are three likely spells), due to the Lore Attribute. However if you want the super-dragon transformation spell, he needs to be on foot.

In the end, I went with a mounted wizard: I expect he'll see most action in cavalry-heavy lists; I found a model I really liked; and I also don't have any model resembling a manticore, hydra, chimera or dragon (*drafts painting list for monsters*).

Giddy up.

Mr. Grey Will See You Now

I already have a few hireling wizards in my Dogs of Empire army (Bright, Amethyst and Light). More than enough to do the job (if by 'do the job' you mean miscast spectacularly or get caught in the open and overrun for a massive loss of points).

And after a bit of recategorization, when I realised my mad scientist conversion was a better fit for an alchemist than an engineer, I could also count a Metal wizard.

So that gives me four of eight colleges. But as you know, I'm not the kind of obsessive-compulsive who would need to collect a representative from every lore of magic, just because I was halfway there.

Yeah, so here's the Lore of Shadow.

Lover of the Russian queen.

An Easterling Parade

The Easterlings. Mortal men in the service of the Dark Lord Sauron, summoned from the evil kingdoms of the ... I'm going to guess 'the East'.

You might remember them from such memorable scenes as: the bit where Frodo and Sam disguise themselves as a rock.

"It was the Black Gate of Mordor! It was a pivotal point in the story!"

But the costume designer's work was not in vain, and from that humble beginning sprouted a subset kingdom of LotR miniatures. Fairly nice ones too, so when I was looking for halberdier models that didn't look ... well, bloody ridiculous (seriously, a barefoot Empire soldier?), I went back to the LotR range.

"Take it easy, Barry, it's just a rock. A rock with two sets of hobbit footprints leading up to it."

The Road To Cavalry

They got horses, don't they? What do you mean they're not Reiksguard Knights of the Empire?

"Just keep cool and look imperious. No-one will notice."

Not quite as tenuous as my Pistoliers, the second half of my Riders of Rohan box set are proxies for Reiksguard Knights. Their slender spears are representing the mighty lances; those bronze horse caps count as full barding. Their shields still count for shields.

Look, it made a lot more sense when the Dogs of War list had medium cavalry as an option.

"Should I mention that I've still got a bow on my back?"
"Don't complicate things, Stibbins."

Gold and Glory

My armies have never had very good standards (boom-tisch!) but back when this was a Dogs of war army, it would be unthinkable not to have a Paymaster (who, in addition to holding the coffers, fights like a hero, carries a big flag and allows Break Tests to be re-rolled – so I think I can see the direction they were going with this one).

Guys Who Went Nuts Over The One Ring Society: founder members.

The original rules also allowed the Paymaster to be accompanied by an account-like figure called a Moneylender – his stats were poor, but he allowed some boosts to the Paymaster’s abilities.

My first thought (and I use the word ‘thought’ advisedly) was to place both Paymaster and Moneylender on the same 40mm base. I could create a nice little scene with a model paychest, and it would act as a unit filler for the Paymaster’s Bodyguard. There were a number of glaring obvious problems with this:

• Unit fillers are meant to linger at the back of the regiment, bulking them out and being easily removable when it takes a lot of casualties. Not with two distinct characters standing front n’ centre.
• What happens if they leave the unit? Or if only one of them wants to?
• What happens if one of them gets killed?
• How do you determine where attacks are directed?
• What, no Stomp attacks?

Taking the Pistoliers

And now we come to the most tenuous part of my metamorphosis from Dogs of War to Empire army: the light missile cavalry.

Back in the old days, you didn’t have to be a Volga Bulgar (say that five times quickly) to carry a bow on horseback. So for my horse archers, I chose to utilise some Riders of Rohan from the Lord of the Rings range.

Enemies from the left, we got it covered.
Enemies from the right, we got a problem.

And there were some good reasons: they were relatively inexpensive plastics; the bows and shields matched up to the then-equipment requirements; most importantly, they were sculpted by the Perry Brothers, so the realistic proportions of men, weapons and horses meant they were a better fit for my existing Dogs of War that any other range.

You’ll just have to imagine them carrying pistols…

Could happen. Those are some spacious cloaks they're wearing.