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The Imperial Muster - Part 2By Matt Thrower.So, here was I intent on making an Empire army with a generally useless ragbag of old 3rd Edition models. Where to start? Well on sorting through some of them it became increasingly obvious that a lot of them were completely useless. For a start, many of them were 25mm and some of them were far too small to stand place in a modern army. A lot of others were damaged or just too damn ugly. Yet more wouldn't fit in a well themed Empire army or weren't equipped correctly. For example, I had too many wizards, and also an upsettingly large group of delightful foot knight models with heavy armour shield and hand weapon rendering them totally useless as either greatswords or swordsmen. Most unfortunate. I'd also collected a decent amount of DoW stuff, some of which was in my old collection and some of which I'd picked up from EBay while trying to put together a DoW army even when I'd wanted in my heart to play Empire. I thought my old collection was more suited to DoW but since I had no pikemen I realised I'd probably be better off just spending the money and doing what I wanted to do anyway. I wanted to use these figures, and since I had no flagellents and no hellblaster, filling my rare slots with DoW seemed a good way to do it. So when I'd weeded out the chaff, and added in the Empire plastics I'd managed to collect (mainly those from the box set) and some Dogs of War, what did I have?
In other words, very little! But, determined to recycle what I could I started looking around for a suitable theme. I wanted to make a good job of theming this army because my previous army, the infamous Vampire Counts tried to take in too many themes at once and ended up looking and feeling something of a ragbag army. It seemed to me that the obvious way to go about theming an Empire force was to do it by province, so I started out by asking the helpful folk on the forum at http://www.warhammer-empire.com/ what they thought of a couple of army lists I'd constructed, based on the figures I already had and adding in the essential purchases of a box of knights and one of swordsmen, swordsmen seeming to be the preferred choice of troops for making up infantry blocks. I wanted a themed army, but not a soft army! The initial replies came back suggesting I use Averland or Altdorf. Averland because it's a rich province (justifying Artillery and Handgunners) with a high population of Halflings (boy, you gotta love those halflings!). Altdorf on the other hand because as the imperial capital you can justify taking pretty much anything you want. I rejected the latter suggestion straightaway as it was obviously too loose a connection to get the strong themeatic element I was looking for. I thought long and hard about Averland, but in the end that had to go too because I didn't like the colour scheme. Black and yellow. I didn't much want my army looking like a swarm of bees! I've heard many times that you've got to like the paint job to motivate yourself to paint the figures. So I thought a different approach would be to pick the colour schemes I liked best and go from there. I hate painting white (it's such a pig to shade) so a whole lot of the provinces went out of the window straightaway. Of those that were left, I liked Hochland (red and green) and Ostermark (purple and yellow). These were both northern provinces. When I started reading about the northern provinces, I started to see some real theming possibilities coming out. For starters, I had a unit of spearmen, and spearmen are the usual core troops of choice for northern provinces. To my mind, they're not that much worse than swordsmen so there was an easy way to present a theme, justify my not taking any halberdiers and not take much of a hit to my army effectiveness. Also, Ogres and light cavalry are very much in theme for the northern Empire, so there's some background I can use to base my selection of DoW units on. Hellblasters are rare up north due to lack of money, and Flagellents are less common in the rural provinces where worship of deities like Taal, Shallya and of course Ulric is more common. When I started looking at my collection of older figures with this basic northern themeing in mind, I got a bit of a shock. It turns out that on closer inspection an awful lot of what I'd put aside looked either very ranger-like or was Norse related in some way. Here's a few examples of the figures I'm talking about culled from the http://www.solegends.com/ - easier than trying to take usable photos of my old and often badly painted figures:
See what I mean? Now to me, these look mightily northern, so I figures slipping these in amongst more modern citadel Empire castings would be another really good way to bring some northern flavour to my armies. The spearmen, I figured, were best used as champions in my spear units. I always like to have champion models armed the same as the rest of the unit anyway, and that would be the best excuse for them looking rather different to the rank and file spearmen behind them! So a northern province it was to be then! But which one? Well, on closer inspection I went for Hochland. There was just too much talk of filthy, ignorant backward peasents in Ostermark to make it very appealing and I preferred the colour scheme of Hochland anyway. It was also an avenue to introduce more theme while, ironically, justfying more powerful troop selections. Being poor, many of the northern provinces can't afford handgunners, so crossbows or longbows are more in theme. But by taking handgunners, I could outfit the units with a marksman with the Hochland Long Rifle. Sure the HLR itself is a bit of a dog, but it's got a lot of psychological impact and it adds oodles of theme for a Hochland army, so they had to go in. As a final bonus, I got quite attached to thinking of Hochland as a beautiful realm of deep forests, cold lakes and high mountains. A very wild beauty compared to the more rural Ostermark. So I had a theme, and some figures to build on the theme. What else did I need? Well, some knights would come in handy, obviously, so I had to purchase myself a couple of boxes of the plastics. By fiddling around with some older models and getting a bargain basement purchse of the White Wolf Grand Master figure from Ebay I managed to make up three units of six with full command. One of white wolves, perfectly in theme for a northern province and the other two one with "heraldic" heads and one with "feathered" heads. The introduction to the Empire army book makes clear that the knightly order in Hochland is the Order of the Silver Mountain. Sadly, no more information is given. So I got myself a few sprues of blank fighter shields to use, thinking I'd need to design myself a silver mountain heraldic device. Something to put on hold until painting time perhaps. That's still not a full army. I'd need more bowmen and free company to make up my unit detachments, so that's a couple of boxes of Free Company as well. Thankfully, a lot of the FC models can also be constructed to look very rangerlike, adding to the theme. Another unit of spearmen would be required so I could put together a convincing infantry army and this was acquired cheaply from Ebay. At this point it also struck me that if the fancy took me I'd be able to use these figures as a DoW force - the spearmen would substitute for pikemen. Bearing this contingency in mind I deliberately constructed quite a few of the FC models with pistols, so I could use them as duellists. The final thing I wanted to try and get in to the army was some pistoliers. Now this could be a bit tricky since pistoliers are supposed to be rich young nobles - something that might be in short supply in Hochland as well as looking rather out of place in an army that was increasingly looking like a loose collection of local hunters, bandits and hooligans. It seemed to me that a province like Hochland would be more than likely to have more than it's share of skilled horseback hunters and highwaymen, which would make excellent pistolier substitutes. The mordheim highwayman model seemed a good start, but what about the 4 others I'd need to make a unit. Help came from http://www.warhammer-empire.com/ yet again, thanks to a fantastic thread on making pistolier models out of free company. The result was just the visual theme I'd been looking for, I'd link to some photos, but sadly they're not on the board anymore, although you can still read the thread if you want to. But before I could actually go and order all the models I'd need, I had to decide on some characters to use. I already had some ideas on this front, left over from my long-lost roleplaying days and the thoughts I'd had on the DoW army. But I think that they, along with comments on my overall theme, are best left for another day ... to be continued ... |
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