Hobby Update: Pathfinding Armies

Our club had some big changes in 2025. Our main meetup store shifted to the wonderful and newly relocated Gamer's Realm in New Berlin, WI. More importantly though, "Milwaukee Brian", the blogger behind the upbeat Nerd's Tale, the runner our our events, our local Mantic Pathfinder, and overall big heart, brain, and overall organizing force behind the club, moved far far away, way out to the Southwest.

A few of us are juggling FB posts and meetup duties; Joe spearheaded the successful and recent Northwoods Melee 1-day event, and back in very late August I decided to take on the mantle of a Mantic Pathfinder for Kings of War and try to grow our little club in the coming year. The Pathfinder Program sounded neat, but within days of signing, I was swiftly hit with two successive whammies.

Whammy the first was that while I do have a handful of armies and a heck of a lot of points for each of them... Pathfinding armies need to be all Mantic miniatures. Honestly, this makes sense, but unfortunately meant that my Abyssals and Undead needed some heroic additions at least, and my Kingdoms of Men, Herd, and Varangur lists were all going to be essentially useless for this little proselytizing endeavor. Furthermore, my "Stormcast Ogre" collection and their multi system movement trays were also going to be completely out of bounds, which was a bummer, as I thought they might be a good intro army generally and effective mental onramp for newer players as well, since they easily showed how you could port existing models over to try out the system. Oh well. 

While I was figuring out my heroic additions in September, the second whammy hit, which was the announcement of 4th Edition, along with affiliated rumors and spoilers. Given the launch of  the Champions game, I figured individuals were in for a revamp in 4th, so I had started skewing my heroic additions towards the larger options with Unit Strength where ever I could. 

Undead

My Undead army actually has a good number of Mantic models, with a mix of Skeletons, Zombies, and even Zombie Trolls now. Going into this, I could already cobble together a decent 100% Mantic list, with the exception of heroes. 

The Undead, to start.

Heroes moving to larger bases was revealed pretty far along into my efforts, and this type of hero is more difficult for the Undead to field, and I did not want to buy a proper Vampire on Pegasus for this project. Thankfully, I recalled Lady Ilona from a long-ago purchase, and was able to rebase here without difficulty. And then for additions, Trevor provided me with a Necromancer and a Goreblight from the Mantic Vault to help fill things out for this army for now. I also have Zombies to pull from, as well as a Mantic ASB from extra Skeletons, so while I don't have the full army roster yet, I think we should have enough to throw something mostly sensible together for the Undead.

Abyssals

My Abyssals were also in a pretty good spot, due to having a lot of Flamebearers from previous years and many purchases of the box. I also had a lot of Lower Abyssals, from more recent efforts. I decided to donate my Abyssal Ghoul conversions to the Pathfinding cause as Lower Abyssals.

Abyssals

For heroes, I was also in a bit of a bind, but I uncovered and then hobbied up Mau’ti-ba’su from another very old purchase, and finally dipped into some of the Imps from the Lower Abyssal sprues, to give the army some chaff. Trevor again provided me with some goodies from the Vault, including a proper Despoiler Champion, and a Warlock. 

As the spoilers rolled on, it seemed like the heroic picks would impact lists in 4th, allowing certain units to be fielded, so the eventual aim for all this is to have a few set lists for each army, and let the prospective player pick whatever hero looks appealing. The Abyssal collection is a bit hero-heavy right now, but I'm still stalling a bit for the official, detailed army lists. I can give them more Flamebearers, or Berserker regiments as-needed, but the Abyssals also have a good starting point here.

Northern Alliance!

Having played a lot with the Varangur, I discovered I didn’t like the Night Raiders with Axes much. I had two regiments mostly built from Mantic’s kit, which yes, could be Tribesmen as well for the Varangur, but I figured another demo army would be a better use of those minis. No work or touchups have been done on them yet.

My new Northern Alliance.

But I needed some more units. I dipped into the Snow Foxes from the Tribesmen kit, to build up some chaff for the army as well.

I picked up a few ebay bundles of Mantic Dwarfs over the years, with the idle intent of building a demo army, and/or starting an infantry-focused Free Dwarf army. We dipped into that pile for a small lot of heavily-abused Ironclad, which got slight conversions with fur around the weird neck and shoulder armor bits of the models, and per the fluff, more "Northerly," rounded shields, sourced from various human kits. These were my first Dwarves painted. They had a bad priming job, but I just wanted them done, and overall, they turned out well.

In September I also caved, and seeing two, mostly complete NA Ambush boxes for less than the price of one, picked them up on ebay as well, and used a sprue from it to build up a unit of Elf Berserkers. It turns out I do not really like these models! They are dynamic, but the cloaks are very cumbersome, and they have a lot of overhang, making them a bit difficult to multi-base. This troop is done though, and we can add more berserkers or elvish shooters as-needed.

Rounding out the heroes for the new Northern Alliance, Trevor again came to my rescue, with a Thegn on Frostfang, and a Snow Troll Prime, both printed off the Vault. They did not have the best joins, but a little green stuff fur smoothed it all out, and despite some imperfections, on the table, these all look fine.

Imperial Dwarfs!

I wanted at least 4 demo armies around. It seemed like a good number. 

As-mentioned, over the years I picked up a few bundles of used Mantic Dwarfs from ebay. Taking an inventory of them all in the spring, I discovered that I had nearly 200 basic bodies (Ironwatch, Ironclad, Shieldbreakers)! I would still like to hobby up some Free Dwarfs (more on this topic in the coming months), but wanted them to be painted up well. Mantic minis tend to be a little goofy with consistency and details and how things are supposed to “read”, so with Pathfinding coming up, I diverted a bit of each pile in order to make a 4th demo army of Imperial Dwarfs. 

Imperial Dwarfs.

I would like my Free Dwarfs to have more complicated basing, so here I carved away the stands, to see how all that works. Overall, not well. I bought a Dremel tool for this, but I don't know if it's not powerful enough, or I was using it wrong, but it couldn't make a dent here, so I resorted to clippers and then hobby knives to trim off all the stands. Basing was just messing around with stuff. I had some plastic card stock and cut out some rocks, and then added some basic grass. I don't really like the basing here. Despite efforts to texture it, the card rocks look pretty bad. I may rip those out and start again at some point, but no desire to build up Imperial Dwarves much more, we will 

We have two regiments of basic Ironclad, one of Ironwatch with Rifles, and one Shieldbreaker regiment as well. Organ Guns have been a very attractive unit to me, but I have never run them in 3rd, so I hobbied one up here, and then grabbed a metal Warsmith from the Pile to lead the contingent for now. One of the bundles had nearly a dozen conversions, so we should be able to grab anything else we might need to help lead the force, like a Ranger, or a King, should we want those options once we get more of the rules released.

All of these armies were all built and hobbied up in advance of the reveal of the new Core-requirements for list building. Blindly building for a new edition, I think I did pretty well though, and each list has at least two of what should be a Core unit, with a handful of others units around to enlist to spice things up, and I should be able to figure out a few lists for each army... eventually. Pathfinders were supposed to get a version of the rules in early November, but those have yet to materialize. We're now just shy of two weeks past on the revised delivery date with no news. I'll organize these into some actual lists once I actually see some rosters and points... 

Terrain

Supporting all of these armies is a new demo table, since I need/want to be self-sufficient for my demo days. I picked up a 3’x3’ wintery mat and then threw together some more of my homemade terrain over the last few months. I didn’t go overboard since we didn’t need to populate a full, standard table, but we have a few small forests with removable trees, a few obstacles, a hill, and one piece of difficult terrain with some battlefield debris. Overall, this should should be a decent stage for any skirmish game, and give us a little variety for setting up. The mat is a bit small, but I figured we could shrink the deployment zones and have some nice, quick games.

Mat, and terrain for the Pathfinder games.

The last steps are tossing together a demo bag with rules, dice, measuring tapes, and such, and then figuring out how to transport all this! I am set on the former, but the latter is complicating things a bit. I would like to get some small lockable tower bins for all these, with something like a bin for each army, one for rules and game aids, and one for terrain, but haven't found anything worthwhile yet.

Thankfully, all of the units pictured today fits in one of my standard travel / storage bins. The mat rolls up, and rules / terrain can all easily fit into a smaller bin. I'm all set for now, and can upgrade whenever I see something that fits my needs exactly.

While to-date I have reported on every game I have ever played, good-or-bad, errors-or-no, I will likely break that streak here in 4th Edition. The experience of the new player needs to be prioritized, and I think a report is too much to ask of me in the moment, and despite new rules and tactics, the smaller games might also not be as interesting. Hopefully more demos off-screen will lead to more games to properly report on in 2026!