Hello,
Perhaps its my advancing years but although very fond of the Warhammer Fantasy setting all my life I've been feeling a pull towards a more "serious", dark-age type or Lord of the Rings inspired fantasy lately. Seeing peoples' very nice looking Oathmark and LotR themed painted up on here has been a big contributing factor.
I then scored an incredibly good second hand deal on an unassembled Oathmark goblins and took the plunge - this is despite already having a quite sizeable GW goblin army already. When they arrived I had two initial reactions. Firstly, there are a lot of them, and secondly, these wolves are rubbish, and after that I put the whole lot away into the "mountain of opportunity".
Finally I settled on the fact that I would find and 3d print some new mounts. I was reluctant to do this at first as it feels a bit self-defeating to combine all the faff and effort of 3d printing with the cost of having actually payed for the figures, but this was offset by my ability to be a perfectionist and choose "the perfect warg".
My check-list for something to print was:
- Not too much like a real actual wolf
- Not too over the top (chains, spikes etc)
- A bit rangey and skinny looking in comparison to the super chunky Oathmark originals
- Had more than two poses as I have to be able to mount 36 goblins
I had a hard time finding anything that went by a "warg" that fit the bill but eventually settled on these "Dire Wolves" by Highlands Miniatures. These come in a set of 9 wolves. 3 are skeletal. 3 are zombies. The three that we'll be using as just regular living wolves.
I gave these a test print and expected to have to faff around resizing them as they'd be too wide, or too narrow for the mounts or have some sort of issue that was going to make it difficult but I was delighted that the rider fit
perfectly on the very first print.
The only problem is that out of the three living wolves, one of them has an arm in its mouth. I think it looks great, and I'll probably use it for a hero and a couple of other times mixed in but I can't have a third of the wolves all carrying an arm around like they want to play 'fetch' so I bust my incredibly terrible Z-Brush skills and painstakingly and inefficiently removed the arm and resculpted a bit of the mouth.
Here are some more pics including the plastic goblin with his metal boss.
Now I just have to paint 36 of them