Finished the barrow… scruffy clumps of grass for the mound, did try my usual flowers, but in the slope it looked weird being at 90 degrees to the slope - so it’s not quite as good soil as anywhere else, but a bit better than the marsh. Speaking of, the dead grass I used on the marsh is mixed in a bit, especially at the stone tops. Interior skulls from the GW skulls set. Interior bones picked out of the Krautcover Grimdark mix (they are a bit long, but cut in irregular halves they look fine).
So, I had a thick (5cm) lump of insulation foam, but it wasn’t really enough to do anything suitably useful, maybe a stand alone hill, but of course the Bronze Age-y-ness of the Oathmark undead meant a long barrow…
So, as I slowly work towards getting enough together for Five Leagues I needed more adversaries than just goblins. With the number of plastic ranges nowadays, skeletons/undead seemed like a plan.
I picked up a sprue of Wargames Atlantic skeletons and a sprue of Oathmark skeletons to plan. I knew GW would be too large as I have some Nightgaunt sprues from one of those part work jobs, so no dice. I did however have a sprue of armoured skellies I bought years ago (2005 on the sprue anc now on eBay if anyone wants it) and inexplicably have a single sprue from the original GW Skeleton Horde (from 1986!). Looking at these arrayed some were obviously not useful - as my collection is tending toward 28mm and matches historicals rather than the current vogue for 32mm heroics. The WA skeletons were very chunky boys, with oddly smaller arms. The GW2005 were too big by far. But the Oathmark and the GW1986 were spot on and of course compared perfectly to the rest of my stuff. So I picked up a couple more sprues and kept a casual eye on eBay for the GW1986.
Now I didn’t fancy depuddling the Oathmark lot, so basing meant them all being on slight hillocks. But enough of the standard boys. This post is about the GW1986 and kitbashing them with the Oathmark, because Oathmark leaves you with lots of options…
(I had to use the GW1986 scythe though)
A bit of greenstuff adds some (very) rough approximations of the armour. I ran out of shields, ArmchairGeneral over on LAF kindly donated some metal Sea Peoples shields that would more match the Oathmark shields, but testing them I got concerned about the weight on that small weld joint at the shoulder, rooting around I found the buckler shields from the WA Conquistador set, a bit different stylistically but work for the sword unit.
So, with some fun kitbashing (and stripping of some bargain eBay GW1986’s) I have more than enough for Five Leagues and even extra for a Dragon Rampant force: 6x bowmen, 12x spearmen, 6x swordsmen and 3x character types.
I’m happy.
Oathmark Goblins - a mashup of the Goblin Infantry and the Goblin Slaves sprues. Took an age with the green stuff, but the fur especially came out nicely, but was very laborious, so cloth mantles for the majority.
Five Leagues needs 14 melee, 3 missile and 3 different leader types. I’ve more than enough, in fact enough to run 3x 6 figured infantry units for Dragon Rampant. Job done.
So, end of December and January almost done. But I have been busy… just not finished anything.
All simmering projects that get to move a bit as I’m still out of work. Oathmark Goblins (infantry and slave sprues) have been mixed and matched and almost set for finishing, but I needed a change… so looking at my homemade Mighty Empires lite to act as a Five Leagues campaign map. I’m basing the tiles on what terrain I have so will be river, village/farm, plains and forest initially. I have some 3d printed tiles a while back (50 of them) but they have a little lip within the larger boundary lip, so have been using plasticard to bring it up to one level. This has allowed me to work on the tiles, before committing it to the hex tiles as I was very unsure if this would work. But it’s looking pretty good so far. Settlements are 2mm stuff from Irregular Miniatures and I had some of the tokens from the original 90’s edition of Mighty Empires, and they match quite nicely.
Three more Renaissance types. The first two are from Antediluvian Miniatures and the last one from The Assault Group. I tried to follow the painted examples by Antediluvian and the learned chaps wear black vibe just extended to Machiavelli (if memory serves)…
I realised I’d not taken pictures of the Da Vinci tank since I’d finished it, so as Leonardo was out…
Another pseudo Renaissance adventurer, in the form of Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez, an Egyptian despite the accent… a 3D print from Etsy, I had to add the feather myself, it would have been too brittle in the printed resin, so after a few attempts ended up just cutting a feather shape from plasticard. Attempted to paint it as a peacock feather, got fed up and painted it green.
