Hobby Update: Rebased Guardian Brutes

Ope, I am catching up on some posts. This is a little later than intended, but up now for the blog are some rebased Guardian Brutes for the Herd!

The models were some Farrow Slaughterhousers from the old Hordes line, which was a bit of an unfortunate choice as they were becoming scare even way back in 2017. Fortunately, I’ve chanced upon two additional boxes since (here and here), and been able to hobby them all up similarly, and the Guardian Brutes have been a pet unit of mine for the last few years, particularly from 2023 onward.

The first group, rebased!

I won’t get into all of their changes over the years – they’ve had a very tumultuous ride since their 2E debut. Since this update is for rebasing, I will gripe about their newest ones though! They miraculously survived the transition into 4E, but their debut stats were jumbled. They were an awkward “sidegrade” to Fire Elementals if the Herd Chieftain was taken, but were absolute combat powerhouses as the new edition started out. About 6 months later though, we have the Fracture update, and they have yet another very different stat line, different slot requirement, most of the special rules stripped away, and a new base size.

The second group, rebased as well!

From just about any customer perspective, these are frustrating changes. Most of the Herd didn’t make it into the placeholder Nature list. The only unit to not be significantly changed ~6 months later with the Fracture release are the Tribal Warriors, which just feels bad, and even they were touched, regaining the ability to pick up some spears. For the Guardian Brutes, the name has stayed the same, but everything else has changed -twice!- in about six months time.

The third group, you guessed it, reabased!

The base-size change is the most frustrating though, as multi-basing is a thing to celebrate and embrace for Kings of War, and rebasing can be no easy feat. Increasing the base size is better than decreasing it though, from a hobbying perspective. Thankfully, I had some spare bases, and after some mulling, just glued the old bases onto the new ones. While part of me wanted to be able to run smaller Troops of these, I just don’t think that’s going to be how I want to run them long term, given the new slot and their role as a hammer unit.

So, finally getting to the rebasing, we glued the smaller bases onto the larger one, tried to smooth out the join with milliput, then disguise the join more with cork and basing paste, and then try to mimic the painting process and colors to get them on their new bases. After all this, more baking soda snow was mixed up, new tufts added, and we’re calling all of these good!

The new Guardian Brutes are a smidge unimaginative. Again, their stats have had a wild ride over the years, but they are more or less “just” Molochs now. They aren’t bad by any stretch, just something we’ve basically seen before, and perhaps a bit underwhelming as a result.

Lots of Beasts!

It's been a long post already, but I'm not sure when I'll get to this otherwise... I happened upon the box above recently, and decided to treat myself. Apparently this was published around October 2022, and it looks like we had a sneak peak of the Herd within, with a minotaur-like model, that could be a Guardian Brute, as well as a sword-and-board faun (box has a sling, but he came with a sword. I donno). It was neat, and I completely missed this pseudo preview of the Herd.

It's a kind of neat glimpse, though also a bit of a shame, as the Guardian Brutes never got a hero pick, the Unicorns and Harpies have been voided, and the Beast of Nature is now has the Elemental trait for some reason. (I get that it's a new model, but you can't tell me that that thing doesn't look more like the concept for the Primal Chorus.) I picked this up solely for the badger, for a non-metal-but-still-Mantic Brock for a Berserker Lord to ride. Should be a nice kitbash, and we'll see if and how the other models might be used in the future!