Kickstarter - Dwarves at Arms

With less than three days left to go on the Dwarves at Arms kickstarter, I figured it was time to give it a wee plug on the the Mumblings, especially as I've been doing the concept and and design for it!

It has been the most successful kickstarter yet run by Macrocosm, who have three previous successful kickstarter projects under their belt. People just love dwarves it seems, though there are several rather fantastic non-dwarf add ons available too, but more on those later, especially the hobby horse riding ogres.

The twist with this particular take on dwarves is that the range is split up into dwarves from several historical eras. So far we have Crusaders, Normans, English Civil War, Late Romans, Vikings and Samurai. Each of these have several packs available. World War One Russian dwarves and Spartan dwarves are coming up as stretch goals. You can see pack 1 for the Samurai Dwarves below, which were designed by yours truly.

So, as you can see there's a massive range for dwarf lovers out there. The add on section bears special mention too, where you can add (deep breath) Jotnar (trolls) for the vikings, several sets of ogres, archers, cavalry, command, spearmen etc, WW1 tanks, treemen, a MASSIVE range of halflings, both fantasy and WW1, Monty Python dwarves, dwarf cavalry of various types, dwarf berserkers, a siege tower (chaos dwarf players should really check this out) and art prints. Check out the size of the trolls:

Huge eh? It also bears mentioning the kickstarter is really good value. There are a couple of other models I want to draw your attention to, as they are buried in over forty add ons. Look at these guys:

Ogres on hobby horses. Now, you might take your gaming a bit more seriously than I, and you may be thinking "What the hell, are you f*cking kidding me?" but for me, these are one of the best things in the kickstarter bar the dwarves themselves. A set of Monty Phyton Holy Grail dwarves and some of these lads, and you have a fine, fine theme for a warband. It also tickles me to think of these guys taking down some super badass chaos knights while making clip-clop noises.

As to the dwarves themselves, they are mostly multipart with several head and arms options, sculpted by the mighty Alessio Cispani.  Here's some examples:

Pretty cool eh? I'm sure the Vikings fans among you recognise the seer there. So, if you bear any love for the dwarves (or halflings, ogres or trolls), you'd be doing yourself a disservice not looking at this kickstarter before it ends.

Shadow Empire - Terracotta Warriors Complete

After a lengthy delay, my final unit of terracotta warriors is done. The crossbowmen give the army a little ranged ability, and fit nicely with finds made in the warrior pits. The Chinese crossbow of the time was incredibly advanced, mass produced, simple and reliable, so it would be remiss to omit them from the army.

With this unit my clay painting technique has moved on again. I've stippled more colours over the basecoat before washing and drybrushing to give the impression of the remains of paint. The original warriors would have been very brightly coloured, gaudy even. I added some flowers to the bases to give them a little more colour. After some discussion with the Scale Creeps, I went back and added some to my other units too, the colour varying for each unit.

With the crossbowmen done, that give me three infantry units, the halberdiers, swordsmen and crossbowmen, the guts of the army. It was a bit of a slog near the end, but I'm delighted they are done, and I'm very happy with them.

Here they all are, emerging from a hidden tomb entrance at LoPan's foul bidding, ragged pennants blowing in the wind as they await their new master.

Speaking of their new master, then next unit up is LoPan's retinue, which consists of LoPan himself, a jade mummy, 3 Yaoguai (demons) and a Yeren (beast). After painting so much pottery, I'm dying to paint something colourful!