More than 10 years ago I designed a medieval game for our club THS to be presented at the Crisis show, and at the Tactica a year later if I remember correctly. As we didn't want to game and show the battle of Worringen 1288 as a standard medieval battle between two larger bodies of knights and their retainers, we called it 1286 and did a fictitious skirmish game located more or less around the historic area. All the heraldry was of course historic and I always had in mind to continue that projekt, what I'm doing now and will show here.
As you see I used more classic 25 mm miniatures at that time, mainly from the Citadel and Foundry ranges and some others, and I was not too determined to use only historically accurate castings. When restarting the project I wanted to do a group of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, allies of Siegfried von Westerburg, the Archbishop of Cologne. A late 13th century central european army of knights would be mainly protected by mail under their surcoats, very few smaller plate pieces at the legs or arms and for the head by the classic great helmet and some early developments to a more conical appearance; definitely no bascinets etc. Horses should be fully barded. This time I would like to be a bit more accurate and started to look around what plastic sets could be used. I decided to use the Fireforge mounted sergeants at arms and the Conquest Medieval Knights sets.
The Fireforge horses have a bad reputation for their heads mainly and I tried some conversions on them:
The two main Fireforge variants. The right one is quite ok and good looking, I didn't change anything. The "grinning" look of the horse heads originates from the fully executed teeth all aroung the mouth, whereas horses have large teeth in the front of their mouth only. So I will leave the side teeth black when painting. The left one had it's front part of the head removed and replaced by a Perry equivalent. No great surgery, parts fitting together wonderfully. As I had removed the original reins, I added new ones (more on that below). The figures have some advantages as well: fully and nicely executed medieval saddles and some good detailing of the barding at the front part of the neck. But only two variants. Hhm, are there any other plastic medieval horses fitting scalewise? Yes, indeed:
A Citadel Bretonnian horse from the 3rd edition Bretonians 1991 I had in my collection for many years. A good looking horse, Perry sculpt, coming in two variants again. But lacking reins at all letting knights on those horses look quite silly. So on my first test model I tried to get a simple solution for adding the typical medieval decorated reins.
This is the simple wire construct on a slightly modified Citadel horse. I used 0,6 mm silver wire, bend it around the neck and into a kind of curb bit and glued the ends into pre-drilled holes at the corners of the mouth. You can see it even better here:
From thin metal foil, I used the lids from tobacco boxes a friend of mine gave me years ago, the decor-pieces for the reins were cut out with scissors, crimped at the upper edge with a needle to get a tiny groove which fits nicely over the pre-glued wire frame. Very easy after some attempts and, in my eyes at least, so much better looking:
And now the best thing: the Citadel horse heads fit to Fireforge bodies excellently, as you can see on the right conversion. As do the Perry horse heads what is well known, but they are not barded. Anyway, for unbarded horses another well suited conversion potential:
The left one with a Perry head and some more horse tack from thin plasticard, and the right one with a head from the Conquest box. I quite like the Conquest horses, but they are too small generally to use them together with Fireforge models, But I liked this one head very much, and using a fair amount of green stuff, I fixed the head to a Fireforge body. I think it looks ok, and with added knight and after painting it should work along the other ones.
When I started my other (late) medieval thread some years ago
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=41974.0 I did an extensive conversion of a falling horse with a Perry horse, but never came to a satisfying solution for the falling rider as that has to be a miniature in full plate armour, very difficult to convert in this scale. So now the time had come to use that horse here with a rider from the Fireforge box:
Looks authentic enough for me. The bases I use are thin steel bases from 1st Corps giving some heaviness to the leightweight miniatures and tacking to magnetic foil later in my transport box. And that base will get a second rider on it later ... But more on that next time.