The walls of Malko need manning, for vengeful dwarfs are about! If you’ve been following the last year or so of posts on the blog you’ll know that I’ve been painting models and terrain for a Warhammer campaign set in the Border Princes region of the Old World. One of the armies I painted for this campaign is a small force of Bretonnians, not as a player controlled faction, but rather to act as a roadblock to players attempting to take the central map section: the town of Malko.
Alongside the new set of rules for Warhammer Old World an army list covering Bretonnian Exiles was released, which was both timely and very useful for adding flavour to this small army. The army list however requires the inclusion of a regiment of Knights of the Realm, either mounted or on foot. Horses not being particularly useful atop castle walls, I decided to opt for the foot version. With the new plastic foot knights kit being released a few weeks back (Australia has been getting delayed releases for all Old World stock unfortunately), I set about remedying my lack of knights.
These new knights are very cool models (Those axes are monstrous though! Talk about heroic scale!), and were a) fun to put together, and b) fun to paint! They are quite tall compared to older models, and my poor general is definitely “petit” next to them.
The box art for these and the transfer sheet that came with the box are geared towards the uniform look that Games Workshop have been proposing for Bretonnians in this era of the Old World, where the knights wear the livery of their lord. I opted for the old style rainbow knights where the knights wear their own colours, and regiments look like bowls of skittles. I was helped along there by having an old Bretonnian transfer sheet which had a lot of different heraldry.
Needless to say there was no batch painting these, I painted them one by one which was rather fun and a lot less monotonous than usual unit paint although it was a lot slower. You might notice that there are two main bodies in the photos above (barring the command models that is). There are five distinct bodies in the kit, which are repeated four times for a total twenty knights. I’ve only painted half the box so far (enough for the campaign army, the other half will come when I take the army to 1000pts), and to avoid repeating colours on the same bodies I made sure I painted the knights with the same bodies next to each other. This makes these first ten a bit samey, but hopefully as a unit it’s not too noticeable.
If you remember I opened this post with a mention of Dwarfs being about? This was not merely flavour, but a true representation of what is happening in the campaign. That’s right the campaign has finally started after all this preparation (just about a year’s worth!).
I’ve been recording the player’s moves on a digital version of the map that I drew way back in April 2023.
There are five of us, using the following factions (clockwise from top left): Dwarfs (green), Ogres (magenta), Beastmen (red), Orcs and Goblins (black), and Lizardmen (teal).
We’re up to turn four now, I’ve included the moves for turns one though four below.
Turn four is still in progress, because as you can see my Dwarfs have attacked Malko, and we need to play out that game, which was dependent on me getting these very knights painted. The campaign has been on hold since that happened, but now the knights are done we can resume!
I’m looking forwards to seeing these knights on the table, although I won’t be controilling them as one of the other campaign players will be playing them as my Dwarfs try to get into the city! Should be fun, and I’ll try to remember to take some photos of the game for the next post!
Lair of the Lagomorph 