Saturday, August 15, 2020

Another three stands of Orc soldiers

Small goblins scattered around in amongst the others really help with the orc mob look I think.
This orc Captain was given some face paint to bring him out a bit. The Dwarf photography is bad in this picture due to a hastily retreating battle line.
 It’s been rather quite over the last couple of weeks but I finally got around to finishing these guys. Nice and quick paint jobs over some great character figures.

 The guy above with the red head is a real mash up of kits. His body is from Fireforge, his arm is from the Oathmark goblin set. A GW goblin head off eBay and a shield from the Warlordgames orc box. Lastly it was all covered in a green stuff tattered cloak. Fun to make but even more enjoyable to paint funny enough.
 Dotted amongst these latest bases are some Nick Lund Hobgoblins for some extra character. Also some old Scotia Grendel orcs with their long arms and great poses, helped with the angry mob look.

 My friend bought me a copy of Oathmark for my birthday and I was very impressed with it. It has a nice Dark Ages vide which ties very well into Middle Earth. Stats for actual races as well rather than generic profiles, which was the only downside to Dragon Rampant.

Anyway we are both quite excited by the rules and I have already been working out what to class the bases I have already. The orcs above will be spearmen as with their long pole arms they stand out from the earlier bases I painted using mostly old metals.
Some of these figures still need a little work doing to them, a matt varnish here and there and some highlights, I just had to base them up.
My bases of six models doesn’t quite match up to the rules but nothing a little tweaking can’t fix.
We can either just count the twenty four figures as twenty, or we could increase the attacks to six rather than five. Mini dice could be used to count off the casualties from the multi bases. You get the idea, where there’s a Will there’s a way.

Oathmark lightbulb moment!
Just had a great idea, my units are made up of four bases of six figures. I could count each base as a rank, that way it would be very easy to tot up attack bonuses, simple and very easy to see what’s going on quickly.
You see my units are made up of four bases and you can only have a maximum of four ranks in the game. So a mini dice to record casualties up to 5, then a base removed...losing the base is the same as losing a rank for fighting purposes. Also because my bases are a mob of attacking troops with large gaps in the front line, five attacks per unit works rather well. The extra few figures just help with the look of the battle, you can never have too many orcs. Just quickly thought of this but I think it could work quite well without any fuss or bother. A unit of two bases is basically a small unit of two ranks and because of the way they are double ranked on the base, it will even look correct as well. I love it when a plan comes together!


Author’s note: These orcs are not American.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That’s a very interesting observation/realization!

I’m going with http://irregularwars.blogspot.com/2018/03/lord-and-lands.html for my life long quest for 25 mil, primarily Ral Partha, miniature big battle big bases fantasy gaming. Just kind of got derailed by the current pandemic as we switched to Wings of War/Glory WW I via Zoom . (At least we”re playing every week!}

They’re good open sandbox rules that suit your style of basing. Check email out!
~ Tom T

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