Hobby Update: Free Dwarf Crossbowmen

Up now are some Crossbowmen for the Free Dwarfs! Beginning to hobby on the Free Dwarf army in earnest, I knew I wanted to try and squeeze in a demo list for them to help with my Pathfinding efforts, and after doing Demos a handful of times now, knew I would want a bespoke demo list I could keep with the others.

The regiment.

These weren’t originally planned for, but since painting up the shooters was a little confusing to me, I dipped into the reserves of my grey plastic and put together a quick Crossbow Regiment for the demos, and to help me figure out how to paint up the shooters better.

Painting-wise, the shooter models just have more fiddly bits than the normal infantry. They have all the normal sheathed weapons, but Crossbows have bolts and bowstrings and such, and the guns have a bunch of weird metal bits that don’t read particularly well, and each has the “ready-to-fire” sculpt with a weird face. With these done, I think I’ve mostly figured these shooter models out now, and what I need to do to finish up the rest of my planned missile units.

From another angle.

On the table, the Crossbowmen have a more distinct role now as they can move and shoot, unlike the Rifles. The Rifles (and Reload) proved to be a bit unsporting for my demo games, where I always let the new player go first. This meant that if they ran Dwarfs, they couldn’t shoot since my existing list had Rifles and an Organ Gun, but if I ran the Dwarfs, the newbie would move up and immediately started getting hit. This wasn’t oppressive, and I tried to only run it against the Undead to showcase Fearless, but did strike me as potentially un-fun, so hopefully the Crossbowmen are a little more fun to play with.

In larger games, the Dwarfs look like they can run a nasty gunline now. While that is not my goal with the army, I did want them to be a combined-arms list with a healthy contingent of shooting pieces so I could explore shooting more, and the Crossbows could easily have some play here too, being able to inching ahead to loose in Round 1. This unit is bespoke for demos for now, but I have another horde's worth of rescued ebay Crossbowmen, we’ll see what the future holds!