August kind of got away from me hobby-wise, with a lack of opportunities to get anything done. One thing that was delayed was making a start on my Lion Rampant force, for which I’d bought the first figures but had barely managed to open the box.
I’ve got a multi-player Lion Rampant game weekend in November, in celebration of Goat Major recently joining the ranks of the seriously ancient. I’m looking forward to this event and would feel a bit guilty if I didn’t bring any figures of my own along so, like others, I’ve committed to turn up with whatever I can get done in time. It’s actually serving as a useful preliminary deadline for Ayton 2017 (we like to plan ahead!), which will be LR-focused and should see a very interesting collection of retinues turn up for a weekend mini-campaign.
My force, with pretty much anything from 1000-1500AD to choose from, is going to be based on the Normans in Italy in the late 11th Century. This suits me for a number of reasons;
- I’ve always liked Normans, and was painting them in 15mm (TTG figures) over 30 years ago
- I’d rather paint them than anything more ‘High Medieval’ with all the heraldry, etc
- I can extend things imagi-nation-wise to cover the earliest Medetians, which I see as being Norman adventurers who decided to grab a nice bit of sunny coastline
- By adding some Saracen allies I can re-use those figures as natives for my colonial Sharp Practice project
- Nothing much else really appealed as it’s not a period I’ve ever really considered doing at this scale
After a lot of looking around on the web, I settled on the plastic figures from Conquest Games as the core of my force – certainly for the mounted element. There’s plenty of variety in the box, and enough for 15 figures. I need 6 for a unit of ‘mounted men-at-arms’ (Knights to you and me) and 6 more for a unit of mounted serjeants. I’ll divide them on the basis of how much armour they’re wearing and work out some colour schemes for them.
For now, I need to plough through the inevitable grind of preparing and sticking them together. The lances will generally be replaced with brass ones and I’ll add a banner or two.
First go:
My leader with some of his bodyguard unit of Knights:
I’ll come up with a name for him and some more background fluff in due course.
9 more to go, but I might get one painted soon just to see how they’ll look.