A Liche Lord and 2 ladies

These ones look a lot better 'in the flesh' than they do in photos.

The RAFM Liche Lord in his tomb entrance seems to have been made from the same dolly as the Egyptian Queen figure. It seemed reasonable to group them together, and they really do look nice on the table.

 The Liche Lord with a couple of winged friends. 

These are two of the 'Egyptian' ladies - one painted 25 years ago, one a couple of weeks ago.  

These figures are some of my favourite RAFM figures - but a picture over twice the size of the  original figure does show up painting defects!

Egyptian Monstrosities

Plus another couple of views of a Manticore.

The sphinx is the one that arrived with the two right wings and has had them swapped with another figure that used the same wings.  I like the face, not sure about the body.

More ready painted toys pressed into service. The 'Nile Crocodile' is a bit iffy, but does the job, giant lizards and cobras just seem to be very useful.

One thing I don't worry about as much is base depths. Beasts are supposed to be 80mm deep, frankly, if 60mm looks more 'realistic' then I use 60mm.

More on Chinese dragons

As I said on an earlier post, I intended to get another Chinese dragon and probably paint it blue.

Done.

I've also put together a vaguely Oriental wizard element, shown here with both dragons. Note to self: do a better photo of these sometime!

March of the Ten Thousand

Every now and then you go looking through things and come across something that had a major impact on your future interests. In my case, the young me had an interest in history, but the military side was very WW2 because that's what was in all the comics - helped by family stories as I was born just a few years after the end of the war.

Then one day I picked up a comic that wasn't about WW2 and suddenly I was hooked on Greeks and Persians - and this is the actual comic, still in my possession after, what over 50 years.

There is no date, publisher or any other info about it Even the author is simply credited as Xenophon, whoever created this version or the artwork is long forgotten.

But, there it; one of the major influences of my wargames career.

The Republic of Cataplana

I may have been neglecting this blog recently, but I've still busy. Which is why I've been neglecting the blog, but mainly it hasn't been a wargames related busy.

Anyway.

Went to Portugal this year and it has inspired an army, the Republic of Cataplana. It doesn't exist, never has, but if it did it wasn't a Republic. Republic just sounded better than Kingdom. Which is as good a reason as any.

Right, the background.  A cataplana is a sort of covered cooking dish. It sounds good and is close enough to Cantabria to sound authentic. Secondly, the inspiration for the army was a story they have in those parts. This is the Rooster of Barcelos,

The Rooster of Barcelos tells the story of  how an innocent man was (sort of) saved from hanging by a miracle in which a cooked cockerel crowed...

So I went for a medieval army. Tourist models of cockerels provide the centre point of the army and it seems quite quirky.

The King and his knightly guard. The shield blazon seemed obvious but I've limited it's use to this unit because it takes too long to paint. Plus my eyes didn't appreciate it.

Strangely, I thought it was a priest who had been accused but that doesn't seem to be the case. Still, I had the figures already painted so used them. I'm not sure who made them.

I wanted a vaguely Tercio feel to this army so used Aquiland pikes as the basic infantry unit.

The cockerels were bought ready painted. The front figure is a bird that was obviously very well fed and is used as a flier, the others are a beast element and represents, well, a flock of irritated chickens.

The only section of the basic army still unfinished are the missile troops - I'm basing them as basically equivalent to Sparabara rather than just bows or Ps so will put them 2 ranks deep on 60m bases. The army colour scheme is based on the ready-painted cockerels except without the black.