Hobby Update: More heroes for the Abyssals and KoM

The weather has started to turn rainy and chilly recently, so I've been changing gears, trying to prioritize getting the last of my known priming in quickly before the outdoors gets too nasty. I gotta have things to paint up over the winter after all! Despite that shift in priority, I did hobby up a few individuals recently...

The first up are two more Abyssal Champions for the Forces of the Abyss. The hobby pendulum continues to swing back with this army... more characters is not really what I need, but I was really impressed with them and picked up a pair of additional minis. Running all three is probably overkill for a typical game, especially since the army has a lot of great character options, but the stats are great and reliable, and with a powerful Lightning Bolt option, they seem like really strong and flexible characters and fun to have around.

Old and new. I apparently never did lava for the original. Eh, oh well. 

The minis are still Vaeloth, Hellborn Paladin from Reaper Miniatures, but the plastic this time was Dark or one of their other plastic options, not the typical flimsy white stuff I associate them with. Reaper used to be the "cheap" option in my head, but they've really come a long way over the years. Definitely check them out for characters, monsters or for D&D stuff!

I also finished up two heroes for the Kingdoms of Men. I was inspired by the Brothermark heroes I ran into in Battle 013 and Battle 015. The Brothermark stuff is really neat and that style of play is very interesting to me. It's potent and fluffy for the Brothermark, and my options and additions here pale in comparison - but that's how the Kingdoms of Men operate! Let's see what we got.

An Assassin and a Fanatic Instigator

The Fanatic Instigator comes from Warlord Games and their Dalcian Falxmen box, which I used for my previous two Fanatic Regiments. They are decent, though the metal parts make the units a little oddly weighted. I built up about half my Falxmen, and just haven't been able to bring myself to hobby up the rest the last few years, so I went back and cannibalized them into future Varangur Draugr, breaking off the superglued metal torsos to mix the plastic parts with Mantic Ghouls and Zombies - more to come on those over winter, hopefully. Left at the end of that reclamation process was a solitary full metal falxmen, so that got set aside and hobbied up here as a character.

My Heroes on Horses are decent speed bumps already, so I'd probably expect more from the Instigator, though I'm not sure he has a ton more to offer. He is decently smashy character, and has double the attacks of the Hero, so you can probably expect a him to do a few damage to most things, but I'm not sure a few damage is enough to justify his inclusion most of the time. With Wings of Honeymaze (and assuming line of sight) he could theoretically able to threaten more things and deliver those few pips of damage where you want it. I am not entirely sold on him, but now that I have him, I will likely run him at some point for fun.

The Assassin mini is a tiny kitbash, using a commander from the Roman Veterans box from Warlord Games and the hooded head of a Teutonic infantryman from Fireforge. I hobbied him up years ago as a leader for some old Militia troops, and plucked him out when I recently redid them, feeling he was a bit out of place and a little overdressed. A quick retouch on some of the paint and quick rebasing and he is good enough for the table again.

The Assassin seems slightly more likely to see play? Even ignoring the Brothermark, most of my opponents have made good use of heroes and individuals against me, since I have needed to ignore them to focus on their units, so if my list building gets a little better and tighter, a mere 80 pts might be worth spending in a "counter-pick" of sorts. The Assassin is a Duelist with Stealthy and vicious and a ranged attack, which all seems great, but the daggers only have 12" range, putting him quite close to his targets. With Def4 and only 10/12 Nerve... he doesn't seem very likely to survive a prolonged encounter with anything, even his quarry! I am not sure how viable he is, but I suppose the only way to test is to actually run him sometime. We'll see when he is able to make his debut!