The Byzantines Sing the Theme Tune in Kegworth!

 Last week (yoiks!) the now-annual Kegworth Codgers Midweek Challenge ADLG event took place in the now-legendary wargaming venue of Kegworth, with almost 40 players convening on a fine Tuesday morning to partake in 2 days of ADLG, one evening of team curry, and either 1 or 2 nights of real ale at a local hostelry. 

Having set the theme myself, it surprisingly turned out to be one which could acommodate some of the 15mm Byzantine figures I've been painting over the last year - this time as part of a Thematic army in the year 874 AD. 

As things turned out, one player's adverse reaction to the curry (or the beer..?) meant we ended up on odd numbers for day 2 of the event, and so I picked up the bye and played just the three games on Tuesday - but that did mean I was able to get these three, rather unsubtle battle reports out and into the wild in record time.

So, as usual, goggle at the poor military skills on display, boggle at the utterances of the poor troops forced to undertake my poorly thought out orders, and listen in slack-jawed amazement and horror at a Cockney Pub Knees-Up style song about the introduction of the Thematic System into the Byzantine military as the ever-chirpy Byzantine Commander not only writes the army's Theme Tune, he sings it as well !!

There is also the usual post-match analysis from Hannibal, and some glowing reviews of Mark "G." Fry's double-handed tomes covering the Medieval Khmer military machine. 

All three reports are now posted on Madaxeman

 

Yet more Sarmatian Lancers

 I'm starting to think I may have bought too many of these - my half-hearted justification is to have a mix of figure types so I can field all sorts of combinations of Lancer, Bow-armed, Elite and Average, armoured and unarmoured Sarmatian, Gothic and Steppe nomad cavalry in the same list with different(ish) figures for each.

Anyways, enough of the post-hoc rationalisation, here's some lancers with bowmen sprinkled in as well.

Sarmatian Medium Cavalry Bowmen

 The FiB Sarmatian-fest continues with some "Medium" cavalry - aka "unarmoured", "standard", "generic" or whatever. I'm not even sure which packs they came from, but anyways, they are mostly armed with short spears held in their hands, no shield, and a bowcase and bow on their hips. 

I'm not sure if this is a muted pallette or a bold one- there's quite a lot of GW Contrast Militarum Green in there, but also some pale blue "Frostheart" and the odd bit of normal painting going on as well. 

I have - like the Skythian Nobles - also added some "spots within spots" to make them look a little more, erm Skythian. 

Here you can start to see the bowcases - I have a good number of unarmoured cavalry firing bows, and two of them have made it into this set of 4 bases, but I prefer to use them on Light Horse bases if I can, so I didn't quite have enough to include one shooter per base in this lot.

Unusually I have gone for a pretty random mix of hair colours too - I always suspect there is a "right" mix of colouurs to aim for given the origins of troops like these, but that is probably "mostly black", which is a tad dull - and with many of these castings having bowl-style haircuts it can soon look like  The Beatles are riding into battle - which is not a great look TBH. 

They are now ready to go and confuse my enemies who will no doubt think they are armed with "light spear" instead of bows! 

Skythians (and a half!)

 As you will probably already know, I've recently bought an all-options set of Steppe horsemen from Forged in Battle, allowing me to make up any number of horse archer/charging lancer armies from across the ages (as long as you don't mind pretending that the figures sold as "Sarmatians" are also appearing as Alans, Goths, Gepids and, in this particular case, Skythians as well).

One of the downsides of such a morph-tastic army is that you can end up with a lot of very similar figures from the same range, which counter-intuitively sometimes means they can all look a bit same-ey. My plan to avoid this pitfall was to pick up some odd packets from other ranges too and mix them into the mostly-Sarmatian army, and at the top of the list was a packet of 12 Skythian Nobles.

As it turned out, these chaps were actually very different to the FiB Sarmatians, with peculiar armour, shorter spears, and a unique set of horse castings with unusual armour as well - meaning my theory of mixing them into the Sarmatians for variety really wasn't going to work.

Instead I decided to go the opposite way - painting and basing all 12 of the Skythian Nobles up together - which in turn led into another challenge in that the very-unique horses in this pack also only came in a couple of very similar poses.

The solution? Add some Sarmatian horses and riders back into the set of a dozen Skythian nobles to give them more variety - and here are the results!

This had ended up giving me a more-than-needed 6 bases of Skythian-style Noble Cavalry, with the unarmoured horses being from the non-Skythian packs 

The Skythian horses are slightly fatter across the back than the non-Skythian ones, which means in turn the pure-Skythian riders also have a wider stance than the Sarmatian ones - so a bit of leg bending has gone on to create this set!

The horses are as usual done with mostly contrasts, with Army Painter Hardened Leather used for the reins. 

One not particularly ambitious experiment with this army has been to paint all of the saddle cloths in striped patterns, all of which are sort of different. 

The overall effect is one my opponent won't benefit from I guess - but at least I get to see something better than a load of horses arses!

The Skythian Nobles are in this sort of strange blocky armour, which I chose to paint up as being leather scales, using GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes with a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone to really pick out the deep details on these FiB figures.

They are some of the nicest figures I have painted in recent years, making me suspect that Andy the FiB sculptor must have something of a "thing" for Skythians, as they seem to have had a lot more work put into them than perhaps some of the Sarmatian figures!

I've also added a number of "spots", usually in sets of three, but sometimes as edging or sleeve braiding to these guys as well in order to make them a bit more, well, "Skythian-ish". 

It's a simple addition, made only slightly more difficult by the addition of a smaller dot of colour inside each white spot, but I feel it is really effective at giving the impression of me having added a lot more detail and made a lot more effort in painting than I have actually done!

I dithered about the colours for the crests and "ponytails" but in the end went for black, with GW Templar Black contrast giving them a bit of depth.

Here you can see the spots and stripes on the saddle cloths more clearly.

 

And here the mostly-leather armour really pings in this photo too. 

More Sarmatians (and friends) to come soon...

Camels in Devizes!

 The annual pilgrimage to Devizes (or, as it has been in recent years, the annual pilgrimage to stay somewhere nearish to Devizes because a load of middle aged ravers reliving their Ibiza youth book up all the hotels nearer town) came around again this past July like a well-buttered West Country scone repeating on you even before the remains of the jam has attracted a wasp.

Having fairly recently painted up a load of 3D printed camels, I had decided that this event was as good an opportunity as it comes to get them on table as the core element of a Christian Nubian army - but in the process creating the very real challenge of how to make such an army actually interesting to play, and to play against.

You too can now re-live the 5 games which were fought by thissomewhat self-hamstrung army list in the town that is the spiritual and literal home of WRG over one hot sunny weekend by following the 5 full-text battle reports through all of their painful punnery and chirpy in-picture comments.

After each report there (of course) follows a robust dose of post-match analysis from both the Christian Nubian commander (seen below), and Nasty Hannibal himself. 

As an added bonus, this report includes links to a load of photos of the Army Air Corps Museum at Middle Wallop, and a brand new music video of the viral musical hit "The Beja Camel Song".

Beja think your camels are hot like mine !! 

Horse Archers

 So far I have only painted up a handful of Light Horse for my Sarmatian (etc..) army - so these three are the start of probably half a dozen or more bases.

All are bare headed, as I used the guys with helmets to sprinkle into the Heavy Cavalry with lances and bows. 

Some of these figures are carrying a short spear as well as a bowcase. 

They have nice clear faces - unlike some of the armoured lancers, some of whom have faces that are a bit lost under their helmets.  

Again I worked on a fairly muted palette with some splashes of interest and colour, using a combination of Contrasts and layers triads on different parts of each figure. 

More to come ... eventually! 

Sarmatian Medium Cavalry

 These FiB lancers have been painted with leather armour instead of metal - the figures are the same as some of the "heavy cavalry" I posted last week, just the paint is different! 

I also adopted a mostly-blue palette for the cloaks, again to help make them more easily distinguished from the other riders in what is most probably going to be a mostly "Heavy Cavalry" army.

These are pretty much all lance-only riders. 

They also have a swordsman on each base too - FiB are more than generous with command figures in their packs, such that I often end up with too many. 

That allows me to use the sword-armed guys to provide a little more unique (and easily seen) character to some of the units. 

Sarmatian Heavy Cavalry

 The next set of Sarmatians from my FiB painting marathon are these "Elite Heavy Cavalry" 

Using the visual key of "an armoured horse on each base", and all-metal armoured riders, this lot have 3 lanncers on every base as well so they can be identified as being primarily hard-charging Impact cavalry.   

In fact, not just "3 lancers", but "2 upright and one at 45 degrees" lancers!

Some of the FiB "cataphract" horses have edging to the armour that can be painted to give a bit of extra colour - like the guy bottom left of this photo. 

Whilst these are all armed with lance, you can see that some of the riders are sculpted with a bow and bowcase (and arrows) on their backs - so if I am using an all-mounted-shooting army they are still legitimate troops to drop on table as a discretely identifiable set of figures (ie in one command) 

This set of 4 bases all have a bowman on each base as well as 2 lancer figures.

The archers from FiB don't have armour, but these ones do have metal helmets so they can fit in with the "Heavy Cavalry" ethos of this little set of 12 guys perfectly well. 

Again, plenty of bow cases and arrows on their backs too. 

More to come soon..