Hobby Update: Varangur Snow Foxes and Second Jabberwock

Overall, I am pretty satisfied with my main Kingdoms of Men army these days. There are still some more units I still want to do up, but overall, the roster has a good breadth and depth to it and I've been enjoying exploring it all so far. I have also been getting in some semi-regular games as well this summer, so in mid-August, after Battle 013 I started looking into rounding out both my Abyssals and Varangur collections.

Like a dummy I started a lot at once. Like, a lot a lot. My wife has not been too pleased... Progress has been slow too, exacerbating things. I need to recreate the paint scheme from my Abyssals, and I am having the most difficult of times locating a replacement paint pot. The bulk of the Varangur additions require a few more purchases and a lot conversion work, but a few things were actually finished up over the last few weeks.

Still creepy, but with a tiny bit less blood than my first unit.

First up is a second Jabberwock, and you can read more about the first one here. The model is the same, and the rules mechanic is still very neat to me, so I figured I'd do up another, and run them together sometime. They seem like they have a high "ceiling" for their power. If I can keep them alive they should be able to hit well above their weight as a game goes on.

The skin is a little lighter as well. 

My old Varangur didn't have a lot of chaff. The 2nd Edition Warbands tended to serve that roll, being cheap and fighting against actual chaff. But those were removed with Varangur's changes for 3rd. The Clansmen could have stood in for them, but the stats seemed off for my naked half-barbarians, and the new Draugr seemed too dead. I do some weird stuff with my lists, but I felt I needed something in the army to serve as or deal with chaff, so the Varangur have been waiting patiently... 

I joined a Varangur FB group, and ran some thoughts by them. I am planning on some converted Draugr and Night Raider Clansmen, but each requires some new purchases, some of which still have not yet arrived. And then each of those options a lot of conversion work. Those will likely both be be a while, and we'll discuss those each in more detail and in in a separate post as progress is made. But I like the options the Varangur have! It'll be fun.

Foxes!

Snow Foxes were an intriguing option, as they had been used to great effect against me in some previous games, as fielded by the Northern Alliance. However, they seemed very hard to come by. I ended up on Etsy, and picked up 40 from SugarBlushStudio. I have a few thousand points of Varangur, so the intent was to buy enough chaff to conceivably help out the whole collection for a mega battle, and between these and the units on the way, that should be the case!

The minis are a really soft and bendy plastic, and come painted. I liked the color gradient and hated the prospect of trying to prime and paint 40 of these up, so kept them all as is. They are all the same pose as it turns out, so I just tried to orient them differently and to put them behind the rocks to fake some dynamism. 

The units 40mm swarms, and my original intent was to do 3-4 per "base", so 10 foxes per unit. They looked fine with just 8 though, so we squeezed another regiment out of the purchase! I did up the bases, including the snow work, and then glued them down with super glue. The feet are all quite secure, and the minis are elastic enough this should be fine for the foreseeable future. From the front, the dots for the eyes and nose look a bit goofy, but fortunately for me I'm the one most likely to be fielding them, so we'll rarely see that angle. These aren't my best work, but should be fine.