Pattus Magnus' Fantasy Armies - 15mm Barbarians and Giants

[Mudstone Miniatures]

Always great to see Grenadier Dwarves!
They go well with the new Oathmark stuff because I'm pretty sure that Mark Copplestone sculpted the plastics for the original Fantasy Warriors box set and now he's doing the characters for Oathmark Dwarves.
I like your colour scheme and the addition of the female dwarves is a nice touch.
Excellent work.

[Hobgoblin]

What a terrific-looking army! Really great work on those dwarves.

[Pattus Magnus]

Thanks all for the positive feedback!

I found that the Oathmark dwarves are a little bit taller than the Grenadier plastic dwarves, but the difference aren’t really noticeable once they’re painted and based, especially in units where the figures hold their shields in front. I certainly like the style of both!

The female dwarves were a bit of an impulse purchase I made when a pal asked if I wanted to add on to his order with Old Glory. The pics on the website weren’t flattering, but I gave the dwarf ladies a try and it turned out well. They’re big figures for dwarves, but they paint up well and add a bit of variety to the army. The Bronze Age Miniatures figure I used for the queen is also pretty large, but I don’t mind that with character figs.

[Pattus Magnus]

It has been a little while since my last update, but since then I have been lucky and got to play a game of Oathmark. We put together 2000 points each and rolled off to see which scenario we would play. It turned out that I was the attacker in the Battle for Cardbridge.

The first pic shows the initial deployment. I had already made a mistake and placed my slowest troops - the dwarf warriors and their supporting units - to move up and assault the most distant of the 3 crossing points, while my fastest units - a unit each of human and dwarf heavy cavalry - faced the nearest ford...

My opponent, Prince Violent d'Orc, brought an almost entirely orc and goblin force. The centre of his line is shown in pic 2. The centrepiece was his heavy artillery piece, the Gonk, which took chunks out of a few of my units. My army was about half human and half dwarf, with some ogre warriors in the centre of the line.

It took us a couple of turns to close and engage (except the dwarf infantry, who spent the entire game waddling toward the ford they were supposed to assault... and never swung an axe in anger all game). Both sides exchanged some arrows, and then I sent my first trio of ogres against the two trolls he placed as bridge guards. The 4th and 5th pics show the battle for the bridge - the ogres eventually won, but the leading unit lost 2 of 3 warriors. The second company of ogres sauntered across and got ready to tear into Prince Violent's bodyguard of orc linebreakers - or so I thought.

At about that point I decided it was time to send my human cavalry across the ford, and they charged a unit of orc warriors. The cavalry hit hard and I rolled well, so they killed several orcs and sent the rest recoiling back in disorder, while suffering relatively few casualties. Unfortunately, Prince Violent's bodyguard weren't yet committed, so they charged my cavalry in the flank and wiped them out to a man. I hoped to exact revenge by having my ogres charge the orc linebreakers in the flank, but they failed to activate, in spite of having a commander close enough to add an extra command die. We'll never know exactly why - couldn't hear the order over the noise of the rushing water? too busy pillaging dead trolls? pondering the implications of quantum mechanics? - probably not that last one, but in any case, they stood around being ineffective.

At that point, we had to call the game because of time limitations, but I think it was pretty clear that it was a bridge (and two fords) too far for my army that day, I had to get more troops on the other side of the river than my opponent had remaining and his goblins were still plentiful, so my command headed for home.

Some take away lessons for me were that: deploying can make a big difference, especially when the scenario is not just a pitched battle; ogres are very hit and miss for activation - best to use them somewhere that even a failed activation will let me move them where they will inconvenience the enemy; cavalry are fragile - I was using units of 7, and both the humans and dwarves took casualties from lucky archery hits before getting into charge range.

In any case, it was great afternoon!

[Pattus Magnus]

A better picture of the "Gonk" and Mr. Pointyhat, my opponent's human wizard.

[batu]

Wow amazing army! The color scheme is very striking. I really love the banners of the army. Can you share how you go about making them?

[Pattus Magnus]

Hi Batu, the banners for the dwarf army are fairly simple conversions. Generally I cut off the weapon the figure is holding (spears are often easiest) and drill out the hand to take a brass rod for the staff. I cut the rod to length and glue it in place. Next, I cut off a piece of styrene tubing (about 4-5 mm long) that can slip over the rod. I CA glue the tubing in place near the top of the rod, then I carve a small notch at the top of the tubing so that I can glue a styrene rod as a cross-bar for the banner.

Once the cross-bar is in place I either CA glue  a metal foil banner to it, or I cut a banner from very thin styrene sheet and glue it to the styrene rod with plastic cement. For the dwarves, I used GW dwarf shields for decorations and used plastic cement to attach them to the styrene rod or tubing.

Once it’s assembled, I paint the banner with the figure, or apply transfers/ decals (one of the human units has a flag from Little Big Man Studios).

It’s harder to describe than it is to do!

[batu]

Thanks for the info! They look great

[Mason]

What a gorgeous looking army, especially with the addition of the baggage/camp element.
 

[LouieN]

Thank you for the report.  it all looks great. 

[Pattus Magnus]

Thanks for the positive feedback! I have more stuff in the painting queue, which hopefully will be done soon. I’m also hoping to have another game this month, so maybe another battle report to add!

[Pattus Magnus]

When my opponent in my last game visited he brought me a few surplus figures from his lead pile. Specifically, they were 5 GW plastic multi-part orcs. I don't have any use for GW orcs in my Oathmark armies, but I do use them for the base to kit-bash most of my ogres....  Over the weekend I got out the scalpels, plastic glue, and a little epoxy putty and put together some reinforcements for my ogre contingent.

The shields on the warriors came from a box of GW Gors, while the axe-heads on the line-breakers' poleaxes came from some old GW chaos warriors. Aside from that, the figures were just modifications on the Orc parts my friend gave me. The only challenging parts were turning the spears from the original figures into the pole-axes and maul. For those, I used spear arms and cut the right and left arms at the wrists, next to the arm-bands or bracelets. Then I messed around to get the spear staffs the right length and the hands lined up and glued them in place. Then it was just a matter of using putty to fill gaps and add a nose to each face.

I also cut the pointed ears down and rounded them off. It is odd, but adding a nose and rounding the ears goes a long way toward turning GW orcs into ogres, even on an otherwise 'stock' figure.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how these conversions turned out, and now I have enough ogre warriors and line-breakers to field a full 6 of either type. 

[batu]

Fantastic conversions Pattus 

[Chief Lackey Rich]

Conversion worked very well, and you're 100% right about the small facial conversion completely changing the look of those sculpts.

OTOH, those kits are long OOP now and it makes me sad to see them used for ogres.  They were 100% parts-compatible with the 40K ork boyz kit and really helped add variety to the figs you could make, and I've been regretting not buying more when WFB was still with us - they were retired early in AoS.

And now we've got new 40K boyz coming, but instead of being modular kitbash-friendly figs they're all monopose designs that only fit together well in (at most) a couple of variants, and more usually just one.  It's like GW is moving backward to the early 90s... 

[Neldoreth]

Excellent conversions Pattus. Looking forward to see these figs painted up and ready to go!

And now we've got new 40K boyz coming, but instead of being modular kitbash-friendly figs they're all monopose designs that only fit together well in (at most) a couple of variants, and more usually just one.  It's like GW is moving backward to the early 90s...

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one noticing this! That is exactly what happened with the Sisters of Battle; aside from a few weapons and head options, they are mono-pose kits, all of them. The poses are more fluid and dynamic than those old wooden poses though, but they are difficult to build because of it.