Saga: Age of Magic - The Challenge (5)

5. End of Week 5

It's four weeks since the last update and unfortunately travel for work and a holiday have meant that I have made very little progress. It's also taking me a lot longer than I expected to assemble some of the figures that I bought, and towards the end of last week progress slowed down substantially as I spent an inordinately long time assembling plastic skeletons - and I still have more to do. So as yet, I haven't taken quite the focussed approach on individual armies that I anticipated last time. The scatter-gun approach, for the time being, continues.

Here's the little I have done since last time.

Great Kingdoms

The pegasus from Fireforge is an excellent model with lots of detail and a joy to put together. I decided to construct it as an unbarded version to better match the hearthguard in  my Eastern Princes army. The rider, however, doesn't sit perfectly in position and so I have used a fair amount of green stuff to fill gaps. I replaced the shield provided with a spare Gripping Beast teardrop shield, again to better match the Eastern Princes army I will be using as Great Kingdoms.

I don't like the stand provided with the model, so at the moment it doesn't have one. I will scratch-build one in due course.

Pegasus, temporarily grounded

Lords of the Wild

Well, the lizardmen are still waiting in the queue. They're lovely figures though and I can see these are not going to take long to put together.

Lovely sprue

The lizardman Warlord is a North Star snake man. I cut off his base, drilling and pinning him instead to a stone attached to a 40mm round base with Milliput. I've also removed his weapon anddrilled a hole in his hand ready to accept a new spear which I plan to make from 1mm brass rod.

The Lizardman Warlord

The Horde

No progress, but there's been a lot of thinking about the chariot!

The Undead Legions

This is where the bulk of my efforts have been concentrated - and that said, I have surprisingly little to show for it. As I said above, it's been a week of constructing corpses.

Let's start with the new mounted Black Knight. He's a combination of components from boxes of Kings of War Revenants and Fireforge Templars, and still needs to be made good with some green stuff. I'm uncertain about his head and might replace this if I can come up with something more undead-looking, but for the moment he will do. He's based on a 40mm round MDF base, with added height and weight from a 2p piece.

The Black Knight - for the moment, actually grey

I also constructed four mounted hearthguard. These are Kings of War Revenants, with heads from Kings of War Zombies and capes, helmets and shields from Fireforge Templars. I'm not wholly saisfied with them, in particular the capes which I might remove and replace with green stuff. Their hands are drilled ready to accept new lances which I will make from 1mm brass rod, and I yet need to add green stuff to tidy them up and fill gaps. I've based them on 50mm x 20mm retangular MDF bases with height and a little weight from two 1p pieces added to each base.

Undead knights

The skeleton warriors are a right fiddle to put together. I don't know why Warlord Games chose to do this - there seems very little sense in the feet being separate from from legs, for example. Partly because of this and partly because of the enthusiasm of my super glue to stick my fingers together rather than model parts, I've only done eight warriors with bow and eight with spears so far. I'm pleased with the way they look, though.

based each one on a 25mm repair washer to give weight, and raised them slightly by using small pieces of plastic (at first), then matchstick (easier, later) to allow room to add base texture in due course.

Skeleton showing raised feet

I particularly like the look of the bowmen.

Skeletons with bows

Skeletons with(out) spears

I have yet to add the spears, which I will scratch-build, to these. Their shields seem a bit on the large size, but I think they will be fine when they're painted.

Masters of the Underearth

No progress!

Hopefully work will settle down a bit over the weeks ahead and I will make progress. However, I have an urgent task looming this month as I am going to a games day in early July and need some figures for it. Watch this space...