Vikings! A New Project

The best cure for laziness is activity. So, building a new Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB) army is just the thing. I've been seduced into this Games Workshop game by a few evil people who are tempting me with ever more interesting miniature games. In fact, I've always wanted to play WAB, and then just founds some people who are doing it. So I jumped into it.

Seeing how I'm writing (struggling to write, more like it) a novel set in Viking age Norway, a WAB Viking army is just the thing. Unlike other GW games, you don't buy miniatures from them. So, this game is a lot cheaper. I paid out less than half of what it would cost to do a comparable army with GW product. I've bags and bags of lead Viking models, more than I'll need, to build my army. They are all from Old Glory. The figures themselves are not exactly the best I've seen. Many a Viking has only half a face or some other casting problem in the model. But they are pretty good. They're true 25mm; so they're smaller than what I'm accustomed to.

My only complaint is that I had to make spears for my spearmen. I guess this is not all that bad, as lead spears would just bend and snap off anyway. I'd have to replace them with brass rod eventually. But I've got a lot of spearmen, and need to make lots of spears. In the pictures below, you can see piles of "brass toothpicks" that I'm using for spears. I've clipped down rods to size and then used my Dremmel tool to grind out points. The points are freakin' sharp and I've already stuck myself a few times! Damn Vikings! I'm also going to have to convert a few standard bears for this too. I'm not good at conversions. So we'll see how that goes.

I'm excited about this. I've got quite a challenge ahead to get these guys modeled and painted before the next meeting of the WAB group next month. I plan to dip these guys to speed up the painting process. We'll see how that goes. For now, here are pictures of the men in their bags and laid out on my work table. Pretty rag-tag, even for Vikings!