Mining for Lead-Undead Part 5 Support Units

The support units for the shambling horde.

 

The wonderfully destructive chariots from the Army box.  Great figures, I will have to review the bases and decide if they need changed out to the Proxie Min bases.

Some old school carrion units with their wraith riders.  I decided to mount them on traditional flight bases and then onto 50mm squares to improve their stability.  They tended to flop over with just the old flight stands.  I also have a couple of skull chuckers and crew to paint up as well as another chariot.

On the previously mentioned trip across the pond I picked up at Plague Cart to add to the support group.

I would like to get a hold of the boxed set that had the chariot, skull chucker, and the miscellaneous characters in it as well as Arkhan's 4 horse chariot to add to the collection.  I haven't seen either on ebay for awhile, ah well some day!

Mining for Lead-Undead Part 4 Foot Troops

The least inspiring of the troops, the foot sloggers.

These guys aren't all that awe inspiring.  They lack shields only because I haven't bothered to get them painted up. I'll try to follow the same theme as the mounted units and give them all matching shields.  I have a pile of sprues still to assemble, about another 20 or 30 figures.  I also have some old school command units for each of these units but they are unpainted so I'll forego posting any pictures of them.

My "Skittles" colored wights which I've been known to use as champions or wraiths or even ghosts.  Most if not all are Deadmen of Dunharrow from the first LOTR line that GWS produced.  These like many figures from that license and other licenses were absorbed into WHFB lines once that were no longer able to officially produce them.

Next post some support units.

Mining for Lead-Undead Part 3 Mounted Troops

Now for some mobile troops from my recently unearthed, or better put unboxed WHFB undead army.

A mounted Necromancer to lead them, actually from the 4th Ed to 5th Ed range.  I have a Red Duke figure from this same range as well as a mounted/foot Vampire of the same era in the waiting to be painted bin.

Some mounted units each with a metal champion from the old Dead Men of Dunharrow of the 1st Middle Earth license miniature run.  Like many of these figures from their licensed lines, they were absorbed into some of the regular GWS lines in this case the Undead.  I do plan to someday put some pennants on the ends of a few of their lances.

Next up are the foot troops

Mining for Lead-Undead Part 2 Characters

Back in the day, I was hesitant to get into another army due to costs.  My green tide of Orcs and Goblins was consuming most of my budget for wargaming which was not much. I focused on the green ones and lurked around the undead section of the blister displays admiring the figures, then two events happened that pushed me into necromantic collecting.

The first was the release of the plastic skeletons.   

This was a breakthrough in undead miniatures, they were inexpensive and in many cases a better quality than some of the lead at the time.  Games Workshop released them initially in two sets.  Most are familiar with the large 40 pc Skeleton Undead Army which contained 30 foot troops, 8 mounted troops and a chariot with 2 crew in the previous two pictures.   

The lesser known box, Skeleton Horde, was actually released first.  It consisted of 24 foot troops and was made up of the same skeleton body sprues that were in the Skeleton Army boxed set.  All it lacked was the horse sprues which would stick around well into the 2000’s until plastic became the norm for miniatures.  This put great hordes of skeletons within my price range.  

The second was an opportunity to venture over to Jolly Ole England!  I graduate from college in 89 and went to Europe with my family on a vacation that they had been saving several years to pull off.  That gave me access to somewhat better pricing, yes even with the poor conversion rate of the dollar back then there was a little bit of savings over buying in the US.  I'm always looking to pinch a penny!  On top of that I stumbled into a toy store one day to kill time while waiting on a train and found a wall of blister packs, most of which were on sale!  Talk about heaven!  I only wish I had bought more!  I picked up at least one if not two army boxes.  I visited a couple of Games Workshop stores which was a novelty since we didn’t have any back in the states.

Lastly I made a pilgrimage to the Orc’s Nest which I had seen numerous adds for over the years in the early White Dwarf issues.  A great trip on multiple accounts. I digress, how about those painted troops you ask?  Here you go, a few characters to wet your appetite.

A couple of Marauder characters with the Necromancer and Vampire.  I'm pretty sure I have the Liche to complete the Trio.

Here is the big dog, the original version of Nagash!  I did some conversion on him to raise up the arms in a more menacing, mid spell casting pose.  

I have several more character figures but they are all in unpainted states such as a 2nd edition Heinrich Kemmler The Lichmaster, a Marauder Lich, a 4th/5th edition Red Duke and mounted/foot Blood Dragon vampire as well as an old Night Horrors vampire.  I also have a couple of those "someday" conversion projects like a Lucrezzia Belladonna to mount on a Red Duke horse and use as a female vampire.

Next post the mounted troops.

Diggin' Up Bones Mining for Lead-Undead Part 1

"I'm diggin' up bones, I'm diggin' up bones, exhuming things that's better left alone." While I'm not a country music fan I thought these lines from Randy Travis were an appropriate intro to this post.  After the green fellows my next love is the shambling horrors of the Old World, the Undead.  They are probably my second most complete force with paint.  I'm sure my fascination with skulls, skeletons, and undead probably began with the great Ray Harryhausen’s 1963 stop motion classic Jason and the Argonauts.  This pre-dates me by a couple of years but still holds up as a great movie to this day.

Harryhausen considered it his best stop motion work and I would have to agree!  I must have watched the fight scene where Jason takes on the skeletons dozens of times on Dr. Creep's Saturday morning movie re-run show Shock Theater.
 

For those uninitiated, Shock Theater was a Dayton Ohio area TV show that played horror, monster, and sci fi movie reruns on Saturday mornings/early afternoons from 1972-1985.

It exposed me to the greats like Jason and the Argonauts, all the Godzilla movies, Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and Mummy, Lon Chaney Jr's Wolf-Man, Bela Lugosi's Dracula and probably my preferred version Christopher Lee's Dracula.

Harryhausen and Lee started it and then D&D came along with incredible illustrations such as Russ Nicholson's great undead illustrations in books like the Fiend Folio which further pushing me to these wonderful animated un-living creations.

Then the supporting miniatures followed and I stumbled upon Citadel’s great Fantasy Tribe series.  Some of my first purchases were the incredible pre-slotta base miniatures of the fantastic Fantasy Tribe Skeletons (FTS) series by Citadel.

Not my best painting, if memory serves me correctly I did these as a wee lad in my pre-teens in the late 70's!  I was without inks so the results are less than stunning.

One very interesting thing after getting this old FTS figures out was the noticeable size/scale difference.  This is one of the plastic skeletons from the Oldhammer era for comparison.

The FTS skeletons are probably more true to a 25 mm scale than the plastics.  They now appear very undersized to me when you get them out with current figures.  One of the restrictive factors of the undead was the sheer numbers of figures that the army required.  This was resolved with the release of the now historic Skeleton Horde boxed set and the Skeleton Army boxed set.  More on that in the next post along with some painted forces.

WIP Quick Paint Update

Quick WIP photos of some recent painting.  First up is the Skragg c23 ogre miniature. Orlygg had a post about plate mail where he lamented about its rather boring qualities.  It inspired me to try something different.  I’ve been bitten by a battleship grey bug as of late.  Not sure why, maybe it was that grey Hellcat Dodge Challenger I drooled over the last time I got an oil change on my Jeep.  Whatever the reason I saw this as an opportunity to use the color and try a different approach to the plate mail on this guy.  The easy path would have been to just drybrush some metallic paints on him when he was primed up in black.  Here is where I’m at so far.

Not too bad as I avoid breaking my arm while patting myself on the back!  Still have some metal work to do and a few odd detail items.

Next up is an old Rogue Trader era Inquisitor in power armor.  I have no idea why I bought this figure, maybe I was sleep shopping on eBay.  I figured I had him might as well put paint to it and here are the results.

Nothing fancy just a clean paint scheme.