Productivity!

We recently enjoyed a four-day Bank Holiday weekend here so, with the sun shining and the garden already pushed back to a manageable (for now!) state, what better way to pass the time than building and painting some new toys? Nine of them, in fact.

I have built up the unit of pikemen from the initial six to a full ten and reinforced them with a unit of five swordsmen.

Unsurprisingly, all the figures are still Fireforge Northmen, though this time I did raid my box of archers to supplement the warriors kit. As before, the pikemen with the levelled pikes were the biggest pain to make. Thankfully, these two will be the last! I'm not planning on another unit of pike for this force and I'm happy enough with two ranks of five (the officer being the extra front-rank figure alongside the chaps with levelled pikes). It's useful to have a secondary officer figure for when I want to split the unit into two groups of five (which will almost certainly be the case given my movement trays), so I threw in another bare-headed figure - if Games Workshop has taught me anything, it's that officers never wear helmets! As it happens, I'm identifying the officers in this force by using some of the officer components from the kits - a torso with a gorget and and arm with a hefty pauldron, so this guy is clearly an NCO. Going forward, the pauldrons may end up on different arms, depending on which pieces I use, but the gorget is a nice, consistent reference point.

The swordsmen were pretty much a straight build out the box, albeit with a couple of archer torsos mixed in for variety (and because the warriors box only builds 12 models) and the head from a Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago crewman. I almost messed that guy up - after gluing everything together, I spotted a mould line I'd missed on the side of his head. Taking a scalpel to it, I promptly carved a notch out of his ear. Rather than chuck the model or attempt to remove and replace the head, I smoothed things out with some polystyrene cement and decided that he's going to be called "Somebody Half-Ear". As above, he'll probably play the role of NCO if and when I expand this unit to ten.

Somebody Half-Ear and his fellow NCO.

All in all, I'm pleased with them. The figures are pleasingly uncomplicated and they paint up really quickly. In the absence of real inspiration for what I'm going to do for command or character figures for the force, I think I'll just move onto the next unit - archers or cavalry. I suspect the former, as I've not yet decided how I want to base the cavalry.

The force as it currently stands. This picture will eventually be updated with non-soft-focus swordsmen...

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