Hearts' Dark Ages Projects

[hearts261]

So originally this was going to be a post about Pillage but I'll come back to that in a second. First here's the first unit of Hearthguard for my SAGA Viking force I just started



Still very slightly WIP, need to base still but I think I'll do the army at the same time and take better photos when I do.

And now a brief story. I picked up a copy of Pillage as well as the Anglo Saxon and Viking starter bags. In parallel to this I purchased SAGA 2, Age of Chivalry, Age of Magic, and Book of Battles. I was able to finally find a copy of Age of Vikings, so I figured in for a penny. I figured I could build the pillage sets and then expand into SAGA. On the same visit to my LGS I picked up a bag of the new(ish) Victrix Pagan Rus as well. Now here's where it all gets tricky.

I was originally going to try my hand at LBMS Dry Transfers but as of the time of writing this, the "tariff situation" has made it impossible to source them here in the US. Victrix is currently not taking US Orders and from my research no one in the US has enough stock to do a whole bag's worth of figures.

As I started to build the Vikings I thumbed through the Pillage book and unless I'm mistaken I think I have quite a few figures. The book recommends 100 point learning games, 500 regular, 1000 mega. A chieftain (required) is 50 points with a shield and armor. I think you see my point. This makes the sets an amazing purchase if you're going to just play Pillage.

It also really solidified my choice to just build a SAGA army and have access to stuff to play Pillage. Rather than build and paint a handful of guys at a time, I figured I'd just paint the 30-40 ish for a SAGA force and then cherry pick to play Pillage. If I can source a unit of Beserkers and combine the Archers in each set to make one unit of 12, I can make the following list:

Warlord
Beserkers
Hearthguard
Warriors
Levy

Which leaves me with enough to either make another Hearthguard or Warrior Unit if were not too fussed about the chain mail being sprinkled in the warrior units.

So now that the units been built and painted, the question of shields comes roaring back into focus. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of freehanding the shields and was debating trying to make my own decals when, while perusing Koyote's beautiful Pagan Rus, here on Lead Adventure, he mentioned some 3d printable shields from Rodge (who runs the SAGA Thorsday Podcast). I printed about 25 to start. These have very slight relief and basically allow for a more paint by numbers approach. They mostly all curled while drying but seem to have dried and cured flat.

So for anyone wondering about those shields as an option


I sprayed the backs brown and the fronts grey then basically just ran the side of a brush over the relief and they turned out fine. Could probably stand for some weathering but I think it sells the point without being anywhere near as tedious as trying to hand paint those.

[Ogrob]

It does seem like there is very good overlap between SAGA and Pillage in figures and a SAGA army should provide most of what Pillage needs.

The 3D print shields look good, certainly a good option when LBMS is unavailable.

[Pattus Magnus]

That all sounds like a sensible approach.

The 3D printed shields turned out quite well. Another point to consider is that you can be a bit strategic about using the LBMS transfers and 3D printed shields, and give those mainly to the higher status figures. For the lower status warriors, you can probably get away with just giving them a simple geometric shield design - half coloured, quartered, etc. The guys with simpler shields will blend into units as long as the colour palette is similar, and in games where unit grades matter, they can be used by themselves to represent levies (or whatever is the relevant type for the game).

The Saxons I painted about a month ago have that kind of simple patterns:
https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=145083.0

If you want a bit more variety, you can add some simple line patterns to the geometric divisions on the shields, too, like on the 15mm barbarians at the bottom of this page:
https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=132213.150