Hobby Update: Varangur Reavers

Up now are some crazed Reavers for the Varangur!

A regiment of new Reavers.

The models are Game Workshop Bloodreavers. I saw a small bundle on ebay for cheap, and decided to cave and pick them up. I've been suffering a bit from the "I deserve a little treat" mentality, picking up a handful of items in the recent months. Eh, at least this purchase is getting painted up. I thought this was an assortment, but receiving the box, everything had a duplicate, and it looks like this is just two boxes of the old Easy Build Bloodreavers without the nifty unit champion. Oh well. I wanted to hobby these up as to troops, so the duplicates aren't an issue, I was just hoping for a greater variety of models to paint for the fun of it. 

They were assembled when I got them, and primed in white, so I decided to try out a non Khorne color scheme, and use some Army Painter Speed Paint. With so much of my painting aiming to match older schemes, and even older units, I haven't been able to explore the Speed Paints much. The skin, pants, leathers, and bones all got Speed Paint treatment. I left the skin at a single pass, the boots and skulls got two, and the pants got three. The armor and metal and wood were all done with normal hobbying paints. Overall, I am pretty happy with the experiment. The Speed Paints work nicely with the wavy cloth and bulging muscles and ridged bones, but the more uniform armor and weapons and such seem to read better with more typical paint. It was a fun little experiment, and I look forward to playing around more with the Speed Paints in the future.

Having run the Herd a lot this year, I've repeatedly bemoaned the changes to the (previously) smashy Longhorns. Having run the Varangur before having run the Herd, the Longhorns felt like "younger brothers" to the Hearthguard - saving some points by foregoing armor and tweaking some of the special rules involved while still generally maintaining good damage output. The Varangur Reavers have a similar feel, and the unit caught my eye while glancing through the army roster recently.

Reaver Troop number one. A little light on minis, but they are a little awkward to "rank" up.

On the table, the Reavers have a high number of attacks (20 at the troop level and 25 at the regimental level!), but they are just Melee 4, so it's harder for them to go full bananas. Even at the regimental level, their output is lagging a bit behind the expected regimental damage output from Melee 3 Huscarls and Soul Reavers and the like, though it isn't that far behind. 

They are Fearless, which is always a plus, but their big downside is Def3. If you take them as a regiment... it's a big glass hammer. At over 200 points, I'd feel compelled to babysit and protect it, but after some recent games, I think this is the wrong way to play the unit.

Reaver Troop number two. Again, a little sparse. And the same 4 minis.

I really liked the reactive Longhorn Troops in the Battles 077 and 078, and have been enjoying using more troops in my recent Herd play. While larger is usually better for units in Kings of War, I have a suspicion that troops might actually be the way for me to run these as well. At 135 points, they seem a little expensive to leave behind to camp an objective (Draugr regiments can do that cheaply just fine for the Varangur though!), but the Reavers should do fine as a second-line or a second wave of fighting troops, where they will probably be a little more protected while your opponent is dealing with you front-line.

I've been kicking around Varangur list ideas since April, and just haven't quite made it back around to playing the army in all these intervening months. The majority of my summer games were league games, and while I wasn't managing upkeep costs or anything, I did try to play along and focus on learning the Herd for most of those games. I think we've got some kind of meetup in the works to cap that experience off, and then going into the fall and winter I'll have some self-reinstated freedom to go wild and run a little more variety of armies. Hopefully lots of interesting things coming soon!