Hobby Update: KoM Foot Guard w/ Two-Handers

The Regnum is sitting comfortably at 3000+ points. This year, I’ve added a second Beast of War to the ranks, which should be a powerful addition in any games I manage to find.

I still have about two boxes worth of Warlords Roman Praetorian Guard though, and have been looking for ways to incorporate them into the army, more or less as a way to “finish” the army for now.

My infantry right now is entirely defensive. Holding the line are numerous regiments of Spearmen, Shield Wall and Foot Guard all sporting shields, in the hopes that they can hold out while the cavalry and Beast(s) of War can deal the damage.

I wanted to do something a little different with these last units in hand, and decided to do some light conversion work to get some infantry options with more of a punch. While my early days I advocated for chaffy Pole-Arm troops, here I went with Foot Guard, as I have a ton of their crested heads around. As a bonus, they hit on a 3+, and start with a 5+ Defense. Swapping for the two handers only drops the Defense to 4+, which is even with my Spears and Shield Wall units. These elite troops should hold the line as well as my typical lowly infantry, and provide a bit of an offensive threat too. When you pay for an elite unit, they can fill multiple roles I guess!

Chopping off the pila heads, I tried to swap in GW State Troops halberd heads, which worked ok. The GW bits need some trimming, and they are a bit wider than the pile tops. A few turns of a hand drill against the bottom of the halberd heads seemed to anchor it a bit better. The crested helms are in line with the rest of my army, showing these guys as the elite Foot Guard.

The only rub with the minis was that the Roman minis all have a static arm for the shield. I’m not a good enough hobbiest to alter that, so I needed to incorporate that feature somehow. Fortunately, the kits come with a bonus buckler shield of sorts, and I had purchased enough kits to accumulate a fair number of these bucklers…

The basing work needs some cleaning up, but the unit looks pretty good.

The head-cannon is the unit is “on the march”, with the buckler around and the side-sword in the scabbard. They have their two-handed weapons though, so when battle in joined, the bucklers would be ditched and they’ll start hacking away.

The result is a bit of an odd model, with regards to the rules and wysiwyg, but it works well enough. I don’t think anyone would begrudge me the use of some bucklers. November is almost here, so I’m hoping to get the rest of the Guard minis primed before it gets too cold out to do so. Hopefully more of these guys will be ready soon!

Back in the Hobbying Saddle

It's been a very long time!

The move to the new apartment went well, but hobbying (and blogging) took a big blow. With no designated hobying space, getting paint and stuff out was juuust time consuming enough for me to not hobby most of the time, and with no games being played to energize me, I didn't really have a drive to hobby on much anyways.

Sadly, still no games to report on, but I am hobbying a bit again, and have been painting at least a little every week... more updates to come!

Back around May, a friend gave me his old Tomb King collection, which I was pretty stoked about.

As I think I've mentioned, I almost played Tomb Kings back in the day. The army had so many cool models! The absolute coolest was the Necrosphinx. It just looked so ridiculously awesome! Abnormal anatomy? Wings? Arm scythes? Just rule of cool all the way. Luckily for me my friend's collection had one. So, to try and get back into a hobbying spirit, I started on arguably the model that convinced me to get into war gaming...



The model itself was actually a lot of fun to paint! The fiddly detail usually gets to me on GW kits, but on a larger model like this it was actually fun, and I feel like this is a well-designed model from a hobbying perspective.

If you aren't a great painter, you could take it easy: paint the exposed lower beast-body a color; paint all the armor/upper body a different color, and it would look just fine with a wash.

If you were more skilled and/or daring, there are skulls, leather wraps and lots of ornamentation on the model you could really dig in on. All the tessellated triangles could really let a great painter go nuts and add lots of color as well, as those triangles are ideal for adding 2-color army colors (like my usual purple and white) to the model.

I went a more moderate route for my return to painting. I painted some skulls and wraps, but left the triangles all metal. I'm not entirely sold on the rib cage or the hood coloration, but I don't know what colors I would change that to, so this is set for now. Overall, I'm quite pleased with this, and painting up this little piece of nostalgia over a few weekend sessions was quite fun!

...Ideally though, if you were are KoW fanatic looking to get the most mileage out of the kit... I think the way to go would be to build up the warsphinx option, and run that as the Reanimated Behemoth instead, very likely with the catapult upgrade. My Kingdoms of Men Beast of War is great, and the Behemoth looks to play similarly, though with a slightly reduced stat line and different war engine. With the warsphinx all built up, you would still have the entire upper torso to still work with. Find some legs, and you could make a pretty imposing (legendary) Idol of Shobik, or a simple Bone Giant, if you'd rather. Plus the kit still has a bunch of skeletons and a Pharaoh too...

...with the Necrosphinx built though, if I were to re-purpose the rest of the kit now, I think I'd use the skellies as charioteers (with their long pikes), and the howdah/Pharaoh as the start of a Royal Chariot. The chassis is quite formidable looking, so you would just need to add some steeds and wheels to finish that up. 

More updates coming soon...