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Post by jonathan e on Jul 25, 2019 16:59:58 GMT
Why? Because all the cool kids are doing it, that's why. I may have been heard to mention, now and then, that I have a Vampire Counts army, and that despite its having been 'finished' for a whole month back in March, I managed to acquire more stuff for it.  The initial haul of stuff that Might Be Going OOP Later included ten plastic Archers, twenty plastic Greatswords, and a plastic Empire Hero who didn't know what was about to hit him. I also managed to score, source and otherwise come by ten of the old mixed-medium Crossbowmen from the Soldiers of the Empire kit, which happens to be the one on which I based all my old Skeletons, and is therefore especially blessed.  Since then, this haul has been extended with another ten Crossbowmen, a whopping twenty ex-Empire Knights (actually slightly more than I can fit in my brand-new supposed-to-last-for-years figure case, but I'll either work something out or use the one unit that has a mix of weapons for something else), and a new Vampire Lord, who will hopefully be the last Vampire Lord I paint for this army...  He also comes with a big flappy thing. But I'll level with you here; I don't like the big flappy thing. It doesn't suit what's going on with his pose, and I'm reluctant to just hack him up because, well, he's OOP and that. The big flappy thing I'd like to stick him on is, don't laugh, this one, and if I can find one for less than silly money I'll be well pleased. And finally, there are the Skeletons. Because there are always Skeletons. The same job lot that brought me the new Crossbowmen also brought me some bashed up Skeletons and Empire Soldiers who, between them, have allowed me just enough bits to repair my much-abused second Skeleton unit from the original army (it's a big job because, well, you'll see why when we get to them). So, after all due adding up, knitting, purling, dropping and taking away, that leaves me looking down the barrel of... | Month | Models | Built? | Primed? | Painted? | | July | Battle Standard Bearer | Y | ? | N | | August | 20 Greatswords Grave Guard | Y | Y | N | | September | 20 Crossbowmen | Y | N | N | | October | 10 Archers | Y | N | N | | November | 20 Skeleton Swordsmen | ... ish | ... sorta | ... bit? | | December | Vampire Lord on Winged Nightmare | Y/N | N | N |
You'll see I gave myself an easy job for the first month, since there are only six days left in it and at least two of those will be occupied with giving benjie03 a good kicking/receiving a good kicking from benjie03 (delete as applicable). I'm also dopping off in October because I have two academic conferences and a games jam to wrangle that month, not to mention the first chapter of my PhD thesis to turn in. The Knights are sort of floating about because I'm not sure how many of them will be staying. Every other month the goal is to bash out either twenty regular lads or one big feisty lad and at the end of it all I'll have... well, we'll talk about that in the next post. |
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Post by GenSteiner on Jul 25, 2019 18:10:48 GMT
Ooooo Sylvanians!
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 25, 2019 18:13:01 GMT
Some BackgroundI started collecting my army at Christmas of 2003. I was a little lad with big dreams - and, more importantly, a Mordheim warband. Mordheim was a big part of it; it's my favourite GW game, and it was in development when I started out in the hobby, and I always liked it as a Moment in the history of the Empire and the Old World at large. A screaming great lump of pure DARK MAGIC smashes a city to blackened ruins, and we all get to run around doing Renaissance post-apocalyptica? I'm sold. Anyway, I had the characters from a Mordheim warband, and some plastic Zombies which I'd innocently bashed onto Mordheim mercenaries because raising the dead was fun for the whole family. And then this happened. White Dwarf 291, specifically, blew my socks off. Here, in the shape of the Army of Sylvania, was everything I wanted in a Warhammer Fantasy Battle army. The puff and slash of the Empire, plus the high Gothic of the Vampire Counts I'd tried and failed to collect for five or six years. I had my first job, my first disposable income in any sort of regular form, and if I bunked off double Games on a Wednesday afternoon I could walk into town and be at the local GW by one o'clock. You can kitbash a lot of plastic Skeletons between one and six on a Wednesday afternoon, and goodness knows I did. A few months later the Army of Sylvania got some actual rules - here at last was a Vampire Counts army that didn't depend on Necromancers to get the job done, and had a meaningful presence in the department of range (granted, it was Skeletons with crossbows, which were a bugger to convert and didn't exactly inspire confidence in their accuracy, but they were great as long as you didn't pay points for them or expect too much). I was properly in business now. Here was an army that could stand for the Empire one day, the dead taking up arms that the living might be spared, and turn its pointy end around the next. For the next four years I played my Army of Sylvania (or, occasionally, if people were all prissy about fighting against Storm of Chaos army lists, the regular Vampire Counts) against whatever the mean streets of Plymouth and, when I went off to university, Wolverhampton could throw at me. I even had the Night's Dark Masters book for WFRP, and a version of Captain/Count/Lord Ruthven was all statted up and ready to serve as recurring villain protagonist. Manchester and seventh edition proved my undoing though. The local lads down in Altrincham were all right, but the highly competitive inner city crowd at the Arndale store could smash my pumpkins in without blinking. My army was starting to look a bit shabby around the edges, my rulebooks had gone mouldy from being stored in the aptly-named Gaming Crypt (my local club met in a cellar underneath a fishmonger's shop, see...) and the new army book wanted me to buy into weird-looking new Ghoul kits by the bucketload, which didn't really work with the aesthetic I'd built up over the years. And as a starving postgraduate student who needed to pay a summer's rent, I... made a decision I would later come to regret. My beloved Sylvanians went off to Jersey, to fight in a mega-battle, all my WFRP books went off to the four winds, and my hobby became a chain of scratch forces, second hand armies, beggings and borrowings and bargains from the t'Internet. Until, quite unexpectedly, the chap I'd sold them to got in touch and said "your army's been sat in my shed for four years, I've lost a few bits, but... do you want it back?" Of course I said yes, didn't I? I played a bit of eighth edition with them, as you do, but they weren't that well tuned for it and again, the new kits that could make them do well didn't really click, aesthetically, with what I already had. So they were shuffled up and down the country, and I chipped away at maintaining them, but the End Times came and went and Age of Sigmar didn't really have much place for an army that was rooted in the Old World and all it stood for. And then I met this bloke from Gloucester who was organising a fifth edition WFB tournament, and since I'd come in with fifth edition and still had my fifth edition Vampire Counts book (the first thing I was ever sufficiently hyped for to pre-order), I thought... why the hell not? One more time. One last crack of the whip. That was two years ago. Here we bloody well are.
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Gorim
New Member
Posts: 23
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Post by Gorim on Jul 25, 2019 18:16:54 GMT
What colour scheme are you planning for your Sylvanians?
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 25, 2019 18:27:17 GMT
Ahh, a practical question, to which I can only wave my Instagram about in answer. The original army was painted up in this rather fetching black and purple scheme ripped straight from the pages of White Dwarf. For some reason, I elected to do my original Knight unit (I could only have one Knight unit, see) in the same colours rather than the silver and red of the "historical" Drakenhof Templars, and I painted the first set of "new" ones to match. I think it's because I wanted to hold the whole army together around one very tight colourscheme, and my award-winning collection of plastic Empire shields with that one Iron Cross boss stuck on the front. I do still like the black and purple colour scheme though, and I'm probably going to stick with it. At least for the infantry. I might do the new unit of Knights as proper Drakenhof Templars with the red chasing and silver barding, though; the idea is they could be Blood Knights or Vampire Thralls, while my existing purple lads remain as tried and tested "ordinary" mounted Wights. |
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 25, 2019 18:31:58 GMT
(By the way, if people want a TL;DR on any of this stuff, let me know. I can talk about this army a LOT, that's why I kept my blog going long after its sell by date.)
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Post by GenSteiner on Jul 25, 2019 23:15:42 GMT
My Grand Army of Wissenland actually started life as this concept - Sylvanians in black and purple, with white and red as accent colours, all straight out of White Dwarf. I am super keen to see how this develops.
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Post by foxlordpaints on Jul 26, 2019 22:02:32 GMT
Ruddy marvellous stuff! Great backstory, high Gothic awesomeness and lots of opportunities for converting/personalising!
Also really enjoyed reading about your journey.
Looking forward to seeing this move forwards.
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Post by fiendil on Jul 26, 2019 22:35:33 GMT
So, are these humans going to stay human, or be converted, or painted to look a bit... unwell...
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 27, 2019 8:42:48 GMT
Ruddy marvellous stuff! Great backstory, high Gothic awesomeness and lots of opportunities for converting/personalising! Also really enjoyed reading about your journey. Looking forward to seeing this move forwards. Why thank'ee, kind sir Fox. Reading yours gave me the boot up the backside to do mine, so that's high praise indeed. |
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 27, 2019 8:46:35 GMT
So, are these humans going to stay human, or be converted, or painted to look a bit... unwell... Good question. There are incentives either way; the original Army of Sylvania calls for undead Crossbowmen, the Von Carstein back-of-the-book list for living. At the moment I'm feeling like skulls on these boys, since I used the same kit for all my other Skeletons, and maybe using my tiny stash of Empire Militia to put together ten living Crossbowmen. But I'm not up to carving up perfectly good metal arms like I did with the original plastics. |
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Post by GenSteiner on Jul 27, 2019 16:07:30 GMT
So, are these humans going to stay human, or be converted, or painted to look a bit... unwell... Good question. There are incentives either way; the original Army of Sylvania calls for undead Crossbowmen, the Von Carstein back-of-the-book list for living. At the moment I'm feeling like skulls on these boys, since I used the same kit for all my other Skeletons, and maybe using my tiny stash of Empire Militia to put together ten living Crossbowmen. But I'm not up to carving up perfectly good metal arms like I did with the original plastics. Have them as alive - after all, the Sylvanians have loyalty to their lords, and it just so happens their lords are a bit, um, eternal. |
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Post by jonathan e on Jul 28, 2019 5:11:16 GMT
Good question. There are incentives either way; the original Army of Sylvania calls for undead Crossbowmen, the Von Carstein back-of-the-book list for living. At the moment I'm feeling like skulls on these boys, since I used the same kit for all my other Skeletons, and maybe using my tiny stash of Empire Militia to put together ten living Crossbowmen. But I'm not up to carving up perfectly good metal arms like I did with the original plastics. Have them as alive - after all, the Sylvanians have loyalty to their lords, and it just so happens their lords are a bit, um, eternal. Calculations suggest I can have the best of both worlds; a small unit of living Crossbowmen (Empire Militia) and a larger unit of uniformed Skeletons that match the rest. As long as I still have enough Militia crossbows lying around... |
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Post by GenSteiner on Jul 28, 2019 22:38:09 GMT
Have them as alive - after all, the Sylvanians have loyalty to their lords, and it just so happens their lords are a bit, um, eternal. Calculations suggest I can have the best of both worlds; a small unit of living Crossbowmen (Empire Militia) and a larger unit of uniformed Skeletons that match the rest. As long as I still have enough Militia crossbows lying around... If by Militia you mean Free Company, I have like a billion of them left over from when I built my Wissenland Free Company unit and my original Mordheim warbands. So if you want some I can send you some! |
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Post by jonathan e on Aug 3, 2019 15:21:09 GMT
It is now the third of August and gentlefolk, I must be honest with you: no Battle Standard Bearer has been painted. I crave a boon, an indulgence, and your forgiveness most of all. In my defence I had a surprise visit from my old friend and comrade Squirrel and therefore spent my hobby time last week playing Blood Bowl instead of slaving over a hot palette (and never you mind that a cool and moist palette is traditional; in this, as in all else, I am an innovator). However. I have taken Steps. Steps, that is to say, have been taken. By me. Witness.  Before we can paint our little mens we must ensure they are in a condition worthy of paint application, which means no horse tails hanging off or lances in a pile. Even I like to have my models at least assembled when they take to the battlefield, for all my negligence in such matters as mould line removal or barrel drilling.  The meat and potatoes of my army are, of course, the Skeleton infantry and Wight cavalry. At your behest, good readers, I have used my collection of uniformed Skeletons to prepare twenty Crossbowmen, the final detachment in Lord Ruthven's Regiment of Foot, comprising three score and ten of Sylvania's finest reanimated soldiery. Well. Maybe a few more than that. I still have about sixteen suitable bodies for Soldiers of the Empire and more than a few spears knocking around, even if I seem to have run out of skulls for the time being. In the back you will see twelve (12) of the Grand Order of the Cross of Sylvania; they harbour few designations beyond this, although I mentally classify them as the Old, New and Newest regiments. In any case, here they are. They shall be painted a suitably lavish shade of purple and quite possibly have themselves some nice resin shields, since there are twelve shields and also twelve Knights.  I am less sure about these. Close inspection of the Mordheim warriors revealed that very few of them were actually from the Mordheim range. Many, even most, were in fact Soldiers of the Empire, apart from the one fellow who was a Goblin torso stuck on Empire legs with Skaven weapons. (The previous owner of these miniatures was about twelve when they were acquired, and may have proceeded with less forethought than I'd have liked.) However, there are five of them, they are undoubtedly alive, and they carry crossbows. I had had them marked for the Sylvanians, but since they're so few in number and don't rank up tidily I might put them to their original use and make a Witch Hunter warband for Mordheim; I certainly have an ideal Captain and Warrior Priest lying around. In the back you can squint your way toward the Essen Ford Gamekeepers' Association, who are doing their best to not let the side down and serve their hereditary masters with loyalty, if not goodwill. Someone has to beat the bounds and keep watch while the master's in the kip, after all.  Finally, in bad and therefore favourable lighting, we have the Wolves of Schwartzhafen. I am... both pleased and not pleased... with this unit. The concept is fine; I wanted a unit who could serve as Vampire Thralls in sixth edition or Blood Knights in seventh and eighth, differentiated from the rest of the Knights by their more "of the White Wolf" aesthetic, with the hairy heads and the furry cloaks and the motley assortment of weapons (including that greatsword at the end, which I'm still not sure about and might replace with my last double-handed hammer). However, I was once again working with legacy miniatures, and while I did my best to repose them, polystyrene cement is a cruel mistress and some of them simply do not sit well in the saddle. Far be it from me to bemoan the children of yesteryear, especially considering what a lackluster modeller I am in the here and now, but come on, kid, try to make them face the right way at least. Still, there we have it. Stahlritter's Devils; the Wolves of Schwartzhafen; every man jack of them descended by blood from a White Wolf who fought against Count Vlad at the famous battle where he was killed for the second time, every one recruited into the service of Sylvania by deceit, entrapment, the snares and delusions of honour, or an inability to resist the sultry tones of the Countess Clarimonde. She has that effect on a lot of people. Next week, I am going to Bristol. I mention this not as cause for celebration in its own right, but because I can spend my time in Bristol topping up on a few essential supplies like black spray primer, possibly some sort of basing paint (I've run out of the sand I originally used and none of the local model shops appear to sell anything comparable; if I can't then it's time for a new basing standard and frankly I'm not keen, not with a hundred and more old models that will never match), and a new drybrushing brush because my old one is in a state. At which point, I may finally start putting some paint on some figures... |
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