Wiglaf Miniatures: Penda's Mercians

[danmer]

I'm slowly building up an army for Penda of Mercia, using my Wiglaf Miniatures. Matt at Glenbrook Games painted these ones for me, leaving me with the part I enjoy the most - basing.

For the past few years I've been using 80x40 bases, with a dice holder to track hits etc. This works for a variety of rules I play: Dux Bellorum, Armati, Age of Penda, and Neil Thomas's. Plus up-scaled DBA.

[danmer]

Raedwald of East Anglia has also put in an appearance, so some of the units do overtime in his army too. They don't get paid twice though.

[Bodvoc]

Excellent looking army, also like you basing suggestion and the dice holder idea.

[traveller]

Great work! 

[DivisMal]

The look of those massively based units is fantastic!

[danmer]

Thanks all! Matt's painting works really well en masse, and the poses of the minis were designed to look good in larger groups, as a cohesive force rather than a load of people disco-dancing to different songs 

80x40mm bases are really flexible across many sets of rules that I play, and much less fiddly than my old 40x20mm basing (although I still have some armies based in that way for DBA and the like).

[Commander Roj]

I am completely new to Dark Ages, but inspired by starting to watch “The Last Kingdom” only last month, and coincident with the release of 2nd Edition Lion Rampant, I couldn’t resist this lovely miniatures. A couple of questions if I may? I can’t tell how many figures you have on a base.  Looks like 7 or 8, but do you vary the numbers?
What are you using for spears/ standards?
Finally, does anyone sabot base as I am considering basing options to maximise versatility. Thanks for the inspiring photos!

[danmer]

I put 9 figures on each base, or 4 for skirmishers. Some people might prefer a denser look, maybe 12 figures. For the rules I'm using these armies for, the number of figures on the base doesn't matter.

I use wire spears (I sell them, as do North Star and others), but I've also seen plastic brush bristles, pins, and flower-arranging wire used. They all work well!

I don't know if anyone uses sabot basing for these smaller scale figures. Certainly they do for 28mm figures, so you could do the same, just scaled down?

[Commander Roj]

Thanks for these answers. I obviously can’t count ( or need to wear my glasses). I didn’t think the north star miniatures spears would fit since they don’t seem to recommend them for 15mm. Plenty of options there then.

[Billythefish]

These look excellent - does anybody know if Wiglaf mix with your late roman-british-franks by Newline and BandB miniatures 20mm stuff? They look bigger than 15mm stuff aye?

[James Morris]

Very nice! 80x40 is the way 

[danmer]

Billythefish - Wiglafs are larger than most 15mm ranges. I wouldn't mix them with ranges like Essex, for example. James Morris did a size comparison with Forged in Battle:
https://mogsymakes.net/2022/02/26/small-far-away-part-3-more-15mm-dark-ages/

Not sure about the Newline or B&B ranges so hopefully someone else can answer that for you. But I haven't seem any other 20mm ranges that I'd mix them with.

[fred]

Looking good.

As to sabot bases I use them quite a lot for my 10mm figures, allows 40x20mm bases to be combined for various rulesets.

[Cacique Caribe]

Do the Wiglaf figures mix well with Khurasan, Baueda and Fighting 15s?  Thanks

Dan