I actually enjoyed playing the Undead in the demo game from mid-October, and with nothing on my hobby desk at the time, I decided to hobby up a new unit for them. It has taken quite some time, but up now are some unexpected units for an unexpected army: some spooky Revenant Cavalry for my neglected collection of Undead!
After poking around some storage boxes, I decided to refresh some old minis back from the early days of the blog. Back in 2016, I hobbied up some medieval Mounted Sergeants for the Kingdoms of Men, complete with special unit champions, since I had yet to really embrace multibasing. In 2017, the champs were disbanded and these units got a refresh, rebasing them as 4-model cavalry troops. As the rest of the army grew though, their knightly appearance clashed with the rest of my humans, and these have been sitting in a box with old, unused WHFB stuff for several years now. I figured the different shields and weapons and such would work really well for the Undead though, so I got to work.The Sergeants back in 2016, with unit champions. |
Three troops is a weird amount to hobby up, so I resolved to figure out a forth troop as well, which would let me run a variety of unit sizes.
I didn't think three-strong troops would look good since the stone and mud basing scheme was just so barren. I was out of Fireforge Mounted Sergeants, since it was just one box of 12 from back in the day. I don't actually know what manufacturer or kit the remaining four minis came from - I have picked up a number of random humans boxes, especially knights, over the years, and just sourced the horses and riders from one of my humans bits boxes. That they were close but not exact matches to the existing minis was a positive for me, as I felt the incongruity would enhance the disheveled undead look I was going for. A bunch of skulls and limbs were snagged from my undead bits box (I think these bits were mostly GW), and primed, to help transform the riders as this refresh continued.
The rebased Sergeants back in 2017. |
A nice mix of bits for a spooky unit. |
Coming from the Kingdoms of Men, the tunics were a mix of purple and white, which I painted over to get a more uniform coat for the touchups. I have played a fair amount of D&D 5E over the last decade, and the tunics reminded me of a stock photo I had been using as a token for a Knight of Myrkul in one of my online games, so I decided to run with the idea, going with a dark tunic and dark shield.
GW's Grave Guard kit has a lot of fun bits. The helmets are all great. |
Myrkul needs a skull though, and I didn't trust my free hand skills (nor want to attempt that across an entire unit, even if it was a smaller cavalry unit). Fortunately, I had come into some 40k decals, and found some suitable skull ones to utilize here.
WIP decal work. |
Some good horses here! |
I would assume that the necromantic magics for raising both horse and rider is the same, so part of me is bugged that the horses have the eye effect and the skeletons don't, but that is a Pandora's Box for hobbying that I do not want to open! Practically-speaking, many skeleton sculpts don't have eyeball bits, so I am in the clear, for now at least.
I have felt for a very long time that my basing for the Undead was too barren. It's a neat look, but too spacious. I had explored a few options for zazzing up the basing, but nothing quite clicked. The final touch for the unit here was a basing upgrade idea stolen from Lazy Pirate Painting, a youtube channel recommended recently here on the blog. I don't know the exact players, so I cannot credit them more than that, but one of the Undead players that throws down in the channel on occasion had created a fog effect from cotton balls.
Disaster. |
For creating the fog, I would tear off a chunk of poly-fil, and roll it around a few times in my hands to roughly shape it. The fill is a tangle of strands, so this was a must to make sure it all stays within the dimensions of the base. I wasn't sure how PVA or super glue would work (leaving a glue spot or residue), so I used an acrylic glazing medium (the same thing I use for making the mud shiny) as a glue, pushing the tuft fill into the medium for stability and around the minis for the effect. If the shape was too round, the fill could be teased out a bit using a tweezers to fit better around the minis.
Yowza! These units took a while to complete, but it was great to repurpose some older units. I think they all turned out well! While the project started out small, in my typical fashion I did get distracted with my bits boxes and started in on a few more new units. Additionally, now that I have the fog effect, I'll need to go back and add it in to the rest of my Undead collection. Personal time is still in shorter supply than I would like, but hopefully I'll have a few more updates (and games) to post here before 2023 closes out!
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