SAGA berserkers

My first SAGA unit completed, to go with my warlord from 2½ years ago.

I'm only counting them as 3 towards my total for the year as I made a reasonable start on these in 2016 (undercoat, flesh and a few other bits).

Hopefully progress from here on will be somewhat faster, as I feel I'm starting to get myself better setup for painting in our new house, as well as working out how to set targets that will roughly be met.

One aspect is having at least some of my painting stuff on surface (although that may not always be possible) and painting in small batches, so that rather having to get stuff out and tackle whatever's next to do I can find something smaller or larger that can be done in whatever time's available.

More important though is motivation, which for me seems to come down to short-term, achievable targets, ideally with something concrete such as a game at the end of it. "Paint my vikings this year" simply isn't going to happen, endlessly procrastinated and distracted by other shiny things. "Paint my berserkers for the game in two weeks" might just about happen - although the chaps might have to go into battle without their shields.

And polishing off the last little bits generally does get done, as the finished model is where the payoff is for me.

The Legend of Kremlo

Back in March (life's been hectic!) an Oldhammer session that a number of us had arranged fell through, which left Paul and I looking for an alternative plan at short notice. Having long owned but never played The Legend of Kremlo the Slann from the first Citadel Compendium, and remembering that Paul was about the only person I know who owns any Slann, I suggested we give it a try.

Given the short timeframe, and faced with the hurdle that it's a Warhammer 1st edition scenario (but neither of us own those rules) we had to wing some bits of it (in hindsight not very successfully in places), but a good day's gaming was had which is what counts!

Part one - Skeggi

The scenario is in two parts, the first part concerns a Slann raid on Skeggi, a Norse coastal village somewhere in Lustria, which just happens to have the eponymous Kremlo as its chief.

Skeggi map for the Kremlo scenario. © Citadel Miniatures 1983

Our first challenge was setting up the table to match the scenario map as closely as we could. The map is pretty exact, and the table smaller than probably most Warhammer games at only 3 feet for the longest edge. I think we got it pretty close -

The Slann objective is to kill 12 villagers, and given there are 12 fishwives on the far side of the river from the village itself Paul quite sensibly attacked them. It then became a race to see if the other villagers and their local berserkers could get to the Slann before they could slay the fishwives.

As I mentioned in the intro we were winging the rules somewhat (or at least, playing a first edition scenario via second edition rules) and I'm not sure how much that impacted the outcome. As proper Warhammer geeks will know, in 1st edition strength and toughness are on a 1-6 scale (or more specifically, for toughness, an A - F scale). Recognising that the numbers for strength given in the scenario looked low we bumped these by 1 and used the 2nd edition charts - foolishly in hindsight as the combat resolution charts are given in the back of the Compendium!

This made both battles more lethal than they should have been, but this was offset in the first battle by an oddity of the scenario rules for the fishwives, or at least our application of them. These state that the fishwives become subject to frenzy if any of their number are killed - which in 2nd edition terms would seem a bit odd except in the case of missile fire (since you roll for frenzy when charging into combat, and it seems unlikely that the fishwives would lose one of their number to combat, leave combat and then charge back in). Anyway, we let them roll for frenzy while in combat, and suitably enraged they gave the Slann quite a hard time.

Not quite enough as it turned out to survive until the villagers came to their rescue, and with the fishwives dead the Slann made a tactical withdrawal fled into the jungle.

On to Zapotec

Enraged by this massacre, Kremlo leads the Norse in a revenge attack on Zapotec, his former home -

Zapotec map for the Kremlo scenario. © Citadel Miniatures 1983

Again Paul's scenery did rather good good job of recreating Lustria, but notably with much less river than in the scenario map -

The map and the scenario rules seem to hint heavily at how the Norse should approach this battle - except for one wooded hill the jungle is inpenetrable other than via narrow paths, and detailed rules are given for the speed of the Norse longship in different sections of the river and with varying numbers of crew.

So the obvious approach seems to be to have the berserkers man the oars, have the other clansmen (with throwing axes (or bows - but that doesn't seem very Norse!)) man the gunwales, and the scenario becomes a gauntlet run.

With our strength / toughness blunder the Norse had a difficult time of things, but conversely with a shorter river it probably worked out about right. Nonetheless, by the time they reached Zapotec there were only enough left standing for a doomed charge into their foes, although the Norse victory conditions are for Kremlo to poison the spawning pools which was still a possible outcome.

As the Norse player I wasn't too sad when Kremlo was shot down, and genocide was averted -

Conclusion

I'm glad to have finally played this scenario through. Given my lack of tactical acumen it's completely possible that I approached the battles entirely wrong, but they seemed to me to be much too linear with Skeggi being a race and Zapotec a gauntlet. The scenarios have plenty of narrative flavour but very little depth. There are options for up to six players, for example having different people play Kremlo's ambitious younger brothers, but while this would add tension it doesn't seem to change the tactical possibilities.

Also, much as I'm coming to enjoy the Lustria setting, I can't see myself adding to my handful of Amazons or my single not-Slann in order to visit very frequently.

First finished figure of the year

Arguably one of my first truly finished figures since I took up this hobby again - he's properly based, varnished and everything...!

It might seem from that that I'm on for an even worse "painted" count than last year, but I've been putting bits and pieces of colour on several of his warband as well, so things are progressing.

In last night's game of SAGA for the first time ever my warlord didn't die, so maybe I'm slightly getting my head around how to play - although the winning warlord is now feasting in Valhalla along with his entire warband, so maybe not!

Next week it looks like I'm going to get a chance to try out Dragon Rampant, so the focus might switch back to orcs for a bit.

Nor way to paint an army

I originally hoped to have 6 points of SAGA vikings painted by the weekend before Christmas, as my club was holding a competition. I always knew it would be a big ask, but I rather thought I'd get further than this...

For the benefit of the uninitiated that's only 4 points worth, and 3 of those points are elite quality, so that's about the smallest starter warband you can conceive of.

As always it took me ages to select the models - my starting point was always going to be Foundry's ex-Citadel Norse, and I was hoping some Gripping Beast plastics plus a couple of their berserkers would round off the force. Unfortunately although the GB plastics are 28mm they're realistic rather than heroic proportions compared to the Foundry Norse (i.e. a bit skinny, with small hands and heads), and GB's berserkers and character models look enormous next to them. Eventually I settled on one of the smaller GB berserkers and a Foundry character model who Marcus sold me on at Colours, along with a mix of plastics and Foundry Norse. There's definitely a bit of a variation in sizes, but I think once painted and based they'll look fine together.

I've since found that Crusader's vikings are a pretty good match size-wise for the Foundry ones, so I'll add a point of their hirdmen to the final warband.

I also found assembling the plastics to be a further hurdle - there's the decisions to make as to the pose to go with, then when you're obsessive like me also a question of filling some of the more obvious joins, all of which slow me down further. More of a reason to stick with metals where I can!

My painting approach may seem a bit odd, being neither a batch or single model. As can be seen from the photo I've undercoated everything then painted the metal (and flesh in case of the berserkers), I'm then adding the main colours (including shading) a model at a time, and will then do all the leather (belts, straps, scabbards, etc.), hair and finally give them shields.

There are a couple of advantages to this - firstly I can field them in the right company with only minor embarrassment from an early stage, but also the stage I'm at now has rapid results and is much more enjoyable than a standard batch process. Hopefully the whole group will slowly "come in to focus" - but time will tell...

Starting a Norse force

It's a long story, or perhaps merely a convoluted justification for starting yet another project...

No one at my local club plays Warhammer, except for when I can entice other Oldhammerers along. I'm going to try and rectify that (our games in the past have attracted some interest) but in the meantime I'm likely to be playing SAGA, Dux Brittaniarum, maybe Hobgoblin and hopefully Frostgrave at some point.

So plan A is to have some painted wizards that I don't feel need the Dettol treatment and 6 points worth of SAGA vikings. That gets me set for SAGA and Frostgrave, with some chaps also usable towards some Dux Saxons. It also gives me the excuse I've been looking for for about 25 years to get some of the Citadel Norse (now from Foundry).

Juxtaposing the sorcerors and the vikings gave me another idea. In the good old days the WFB Norse were basically vikings with a side order of werewolves and some colonising of Lustria. In modern-ish Warhammer they seem to have lost a lot of that flavour and become basically chaos followers in fur - I don't want to go all the way down that road (and close the door on the Magnificent Sven) but it seems to me that, with the chaos gates pretty much on their doorstep, at least some would take the path to chaos. I thought at first if mixing some Norse in with my Citadel mercenaries and some Wars of the Roses (i.e. Empire) infantry to create a renegade / outlaw / wanderer chaos warband. But then I decided it'd be much more flavourful - and so much more work - to create separate Empire-themed and Norse-themed warbands.

Of course I can't have my more exotic beastmen (rhinos, slugs, lizards) in a Norscan chaos force - I need to stock up on beastmen more suited to the climate. So hopefully boars, bears and wolves can be added to the standard goat and dog types.

Or maybe I'll be side-tracked again before I get much beyond the viking warband...