Hobby Update: Varangur Night Raiders / Clansmen

It was a productive holiday season, but I got caught up in posting battle reports instead of hobby updates, and that was a great problem to have. These have been done for a while, but weren't quite done in time to test out in the recent battles against the Salamanders. (Battle 022 and Battle 023). Up now for the Varangur are... dudes with axes. Via ebay, I bought two boxes (40 minis) worth of Mantic's Clansmen over the fall. They were discounted, since it was just bags of sprues. Ebay has been a godsend for cheaper hobbying these last few years! Building for more minis-agnostic games definitely helps a lot as well though.

The desire was to use them all as Night Raiders variants and use up a lot of the extra bow and axe bits and such from allllll the other human kits I have. Unfortunately, these are pretty burley miniatures, who also have bulky clothes. None of the paired bow arms I have look good on them. The clothes don't look right and the arms I had are too thin. Additionally, I didn't do my research, and the kit only comes with 2 axes per 10 minis. Finally, the kit for the Clansmen has a variety of weapon arms, and then just  has shields-with-arms, making good conversions a little more difficult. All-in-all, this was a "whoopsies" by me, and I probably should have dome some more research.

Unit 1

I managed to get a little creative though. Old GW Marauder arms work ok though with the burly size of the Clansmen, and I used a few pairs to add some muscle to the units. Then I hacked off a variety of the kit's weapon-holding hands, swapping them out for old GW Warrior gloved hands, which actually work really nicely with the look of the clansmen, and helps to get some more dynamism into the unit, since those can be posed with some good rotation. 

Unit 2

Generally, I think the units came out pretty well and look good with the mixed bits. Having all the same torsos helps make the unit "work" I think, but the Chaos Marauder bits should look good with the rest of my predominately old GW army. 

For hobbying, I finally remembered to branch into the Army Painter Speed Paints. I had primed them back in September, with an odd black and brown approach. Sorta like a weird colored zenithal, since I was trying to use up those colors as both the rattle cans were getting low. Knowing I was going to work with the Speed Paints, I gave the minis a heavy tan drybrush, giving the minis a good gradient, though probably a little darker and odder color than usual preparatory painting layers. 

From the back. The coverage of the Speed Paints can be a little off. Probably due to some user error, to a large degree.

I decided to take things in stride and explore. The boots got more "Hardened Leather", and I decided to keep the furs as browns and tans, and preserve the drybrush for all my fur-lined things. Since the Draugr got blue, these guys got blue too in the form of "Highlord Blue". The pants got "Gravelord Grey." The bones got some Ushabti Bone and the wood more generic tan, and then both eventually got hit with "Pallid Bone", which was a pretty yellowish effect overall, like old musty books. 

The Speed Paints were ok? I was getting through the minis very quickly, so they were living up to their name so far, and despite just so meager prep work, the gradients were turnout out ok overall. One layer often felt a bit thin, but two looked too dark. This can probably be blamed on my base colors though.

The paints are not great for detail work though, so with the big parts done, I switched over to a thinner brush and normal paints. The belts and straps got some Rhinox Hide, and the metal got some Leadbelcher. The flesh got (I think) Cadian Fleshtone with a Reikland Fleshshade wash. The hair was the same yellows and browns and reds as the Draugr, though I did experiment on a few beards with "Fire Giant Orange" which was very vibrant effect over any lighter base color. With all the painting done, I then went through and touched-up the fur linings to finish these up.

Units, plus spares.

These got the remaining two reused bases I touched up when working with the Draugr, though no blood effect was used here. I had hobbied up 26 of these guys, and planned on running 2 regiments of 13, hoping the units wouldn't look too sparse. Some of the poses proved too imposing however, and I only got 12 minis on each base. I started to suspect this pretty early on, and set aside two minis with swords. I was originally thinking these would be leaders, but I had two great looking axe-wielding dudes that looked like leaders too, so went with those instead, placing them near the leader points of the units. I think that's better.

But now I have two spare painted minis. I also have 14 lefover unpainted minis from my purchase, so I'm considering looking for another sprue of 10, packing minis in, and building out two more regiments of... something. I look to be out of various right-handed Marauder and Warrior axes, and still have no bow bits that look good with the burly minis, so any new units are on the back burner for now. We'll see what the future holds here. 

Bringing it back to the intro, these are all dudes with axes. I will use them as Night Raiders, but they could easily be Clansmen as well, given the shields. This kind of duality isn't normally my jam, but it works I guess. Heck, I think it is unofficial, but the wiki has Night Raiders shown as clansmen with spears and shields, so the army entry seems a bit lawless. We'll give them a go sometime as Night Raiders to start with.

The Night Raiders debuted in 3rd having Scout innately, which was really interesting, but they seem to have been subsequently nerfed a bit. This ability was rolled into and locked behind an upgrade now, though they did drop from Ra5+ to Ra4+, so the changes aren't all bad. They still have Stealthy and Pathfinder and TC1 too, so they should be able to exert some pressure, especially against some other infantry units. We'll see what trouble they can get into in some future games.

All in all, the Varangur are the big winners of the holiday hobbying bonanza and got around 800 points of stuff over the last few weeks. That is staggering! A good chunk of that is the new Magnilde and Cursed Daughter, as the heroes for the army are quite expensive, but that said, including the Draugr I have 5 new supporting infantry regiments to play around with now, which is going to be great.