Hi!
I've managed to get my unit of Longmyre militia painted up and based so thought I'd post them up here with some ponderings on one of my other interests, namely the Dark Ages.
Before I head off on a tangent, here's my Longmyre Militiamen:
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Longmyre Militia |
Constructed from Frostgrave Soldiers, they're pleasingly characterful and suitably grubby for a small, poor and unimportant Duchy sitting on the frontier of the civilised world.
I had been thinking of bulking up their numbers to do a Dragon Rampant style army of them but feel that 28mm is currently better suited to smaller skirmish games so they'll be seeing action in games of Brutal Quest, Song of Blades and Heroes and the likes. I've sent off for some grass tufts as I wasn't 100% happy with the bases of my Orcs so there's still a little work to do to finish them off but we'll see how they look once their bases are complete.
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Longmyre Militia clashing with Orcs on the Frontier. |
With that out of the way, I thought I'd have a bit of a look at another project I'd started a couple of years ago and then promptly forgotten about, the mythical Dark Ages!
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Dark Age Adventurers |
Looking back at this stalled project, I had an absolute obsession, collecting books, sourcing miniatures and all sorts of other madness which saw me paint a couple of small bands and then real life got in the way and I immediately forgot about the project.
Now here I am, four years later and thinking about getting it back up and running but this led me to think about how I want to do it and realised I wasn't sure exactly what I was wanting to do with it. I've never been one who can stick to any sort of historical accuracy in wargaming, preferring fantasy and science fiction over historicals but I do find myself drawn to this fascinating period of history which saw the foundation of what would become England.
On the one hand, I'd love to have small skirmishes with bold warriors braving the wilds to face wild beasts from another age, marauding Norsemen or even the odd Fae incursion but at the same time the prospect of mass battles between warring kingdoms or trying to drive off raids from the Vikings also has real appeal!
But what to do! I don't have the amount of time, space, budget or frankly focus to paint up large armies of 28mm figures so a compromise may be required, namely scale. I do think I'll keep painting small 28mm scale warbands of up to maybe 10-12 figures but I want to make use of Lion Rampant to represent larger scale conflicts between raiders, norse and all manner of other stuff and my recent acquisition and painting of some 10mm Risk figures has got me thinking that maybe I can make some larger warbands in 10-15mm scale.

There are quite a few companies out there who produce lovely stuff in smaller scales and I love the appearance of larger numbers of figures (which happen to be cheaper and take up much less space and less time to paint!) on the battlefield.
I'm not going to go mad and buy a ton of stuff but I do think I'm going to dip my toe and pick up a pack or two of figures to see how I get on as I reckon I can make a Lion Rampant army for £25ish quid in 10mm scale which isn't too pricy and would allow me to build several different armies cheaply.
I've still got a bunch of plastic 28mm scale figures to paint up for skirmishes or incorporate into my Longmyre project but we'll see what I can come up with in the coming months!
In the meantime, All the best!