Saturday, September 3, 2011

Hasty Hordes Army

My son mentioned his dinosaur themed Hordes of the Things army recently, so, as I mentioned a couple of posts back, I decided it was time to recycle a project we called The Peasants are Revolting.  PaR was built ten years ago for the early years of the HAWKs Kids' Table at Historicon.  It was intended to be a simple game using inexpensive plastic miniatures and card buildings available from Usborne, as a bit of a demo of what one could do with some time and imagination and not much money.  We recycled that idea a few years later as the Battles for Beginners Contest, but that's a story for another day...

In any case, PAR was built, for nostalgic reasons, from a few boxes each of recent production runs of Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood figures.  When I was a 10-year-old getting started in this hobby, that was pretty much all there was for inexpensive medievals figures, and I had what I then considered to be quite a few of them.  So, using them again as an adult was a deliberate nostalgia choice, made despite the fact that significant numbers of probably better sets were available in 2001 (let alone what you can get today...)  After running the game for a couple of years, they have been shelved since 2003, so I didn't think I'd be missing out on anything by repurposing them.  I originally mounted them as individuals on pennies or larger washers for the horsemen, and I had a few problems getting some of the foot back off.  Nevertheless, I was able to assemble the group shown below, of six mounted stands (either riders or knights--I enjoy Hordes flexibility...), a stand of blades, a cleric, four shooters, and five hordes (or warbands, if one is inclined to be generous about their fighting ability.)

I set this aside for a week for the hurricane, but got the basing finished off this morning.  I hope to try them against Norman's Dinotopians this weekend, and I'll post some pictures if we do that.

Army overview
Blades stand from Sheriff of Nottingham figures

Friar Tuck as, what else, a cleric

The flag is somewhat the worse for years of wear, but this should be the general stand

A rider or knight stand

Shooters, with warband or hordes in the background

3 comments:

  1. Nice one!!!! I´d have replaced the flag pole and used a paper flag but apart from that a cracking army!!!!! I really like the blue you´ve used for the general. Great mix of the two sets...
    Cheers
    Paul

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  2. I may go back and do that in the near term; they don't look too bad en masse, despite being an experiment with a speed painting style. They are also the first plastic figures, as I recall, that I did with a gesso undercoat and flexible acrylic varnish topcoat, and they appear to have held up over the past ten years fairly well.

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