Hobby Update: More Heroes, ASB with Lute, and second General on Winged Beast

I got married recently, and as we decompressed from all that stress and excitement, I was able to sit down and chip away at some draft blog posts and hobby a bit more than usual. Over the last week or so I managed to do up a few more hero slots for the Kingdoms of Men. 

Two are actual Heroes, mounted on horses. They seem like great choices, especially with Indomitable Will. They are quick and can disrupt shooters; they are cheap with good stats; and good anti-flyer defense being individuals. Toss on 5 pts of IW and yeah, they should even stick around an extra turn and continue to muck things up for my opponents. 

These are built with the same kitbash ideas as the previous two minis I hobbied up recently. These newcomers bring me up to four of these picks. This is more than I could normally field, and so I might add a cape or something to make one a Mounted Captain or General something for some more options. We'll see. To get them on the horse for the kitbash, I needed to remove the back part of the saddle. I still need to do up a bedroll or something to hide this on each model, so some touchups are definitely in the future already. But I'd happily run any of them on the table, and yeah, we'll see if one gets a promotion down the line.

Still no space for the lightbox, but I am making due.

Next up is an ASB with Lute of Insatiable Darkness, modeled appropriately! I tend to go my own way and explore things for myself, but this common ASB loadout is winning me over in all my theory crafting. Naked ASBs are pretty bad, as they don't do anything but Inspire, so seem inefficient for their points. So, access to Bane-Chant via the lute seems great. 

This is a kitbash as well, using a Warlord Roman banner/ musician body, the brace and hands from the horn bit, with a head from Warlord's Celt/Dacian box. The lute is a blob of greenstuff with the horn brace to form the neck of the lute. I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, and he reminds me a bit of old-school James Hetfield but with braids, so yeah, that's kinda fun. I've got probably a dozen more of these banner/ musician bodies around still, so it was good to find a use for one of them at least.

Second General. Same... almost everything, but painted up a little darker in case I give them magic items and need to differentiate them for my opponent.

The last heroic addition here is another General on a Winged Beast, something I have been resisting adding in for a while now despite hobbying up multiples of just about everything else the Kingdoms of Men can possibly run. 

• Multiple "Generals" in a single list seemed silly, fluff-wise.
• "Normal Humans" still appeals to me, and flying monsters kinda went against that. 
• A strong multiple flier list has been floating around for a while for the Kingdoms of Men, and is largely what Randy Atchley has been working on. I'd rather run my own things.

Meh. I am over it. Multiple Generals is fine, even flying ones. I can fluff this up as something like a joint consular army, especially for large games. That'll work in my silly half-baked headcannon for the collection. I am also not planning on pursuing the Dash28 style list, so topping out with two generals is fine as well - I won't be giving you the same lists and reports like Randy. And the Generals are strong, but not insanely strong, so I don't feel bad running them.

And while I like the human emphasis, I realized that I have been running this flier basically every game already. Fantastic elements have already been embraced, and I don't need to circumscribe my lists or thinking at all here. I am not as human-centric in my lists as I was thinking, and I also want to experiment with a ton of stuff still. I know I will be bringing my mammoth dinos and giants and fliers back to the table soon. So yeah, no worries there either, I'll just continue to explore and have fun.

Hobby-wise, the models are exactly the same as my first one from 2017. A plastic Reaper Griffon and a metal General from Warlord Games. This time, the griffon was a darker plastic, from special line if memory serves. Stronger, but still soft and bendy. So I again built a bit of a brace for the mount to handle the weight, this time using foam insulation haphazardly cut into bricks, which was protected with a layer of PVA glue before priming and painting. The greenstuff saddle was again pretty bad, but hey, that matches the old model then. Everything else is pretty typical. 

Game-wise, this second General is ready for the table. This should be a big boon to the army for larger games, as these seem great to run in multiples, as they are fliers and it can be hard for an opponent to protect everything from them at once. They should be able to find and exploit openings. I  think deploying them generally on each of my flanks, giving them a mission for turns 1-2 and then just seeing what happens from there is still a good idea, and how I'll continue to try and use them.

May was nuts, but with the wedding ceremony behind me now, I am hoping things calm down just a bit over the summer. I got introduced to a few new potential players in the area, so I'm hoping to pick back up both the monthly bouts I had going, as well as line up some more regular games in town in the coming weeks. Hopefully I'll have these heroes on the table very soon!