Six more mounted Shieldmaidens

 This time unarmoured ones.

These are also Bad Squiddo minis, and they will be joining their armoured sisters as the cavalry arm of my Shieldmaiden army.

As I have said before, I'll be using these for troops in a number of different rulesets, particularly Saga Age of Magic, Lion and Dragon Rampant, and probably for other things that I haven't even thought of yet. I am very keen on having figures that can serve multiple purposes.

These were finished a few days ago, but I was waiting for the weather to become less wet to avoid fogged varnish. As you can see, they have come out fine.

The tufts on the bases are, once again by Gamer's Grass, available from Bad Squiddo.

Finally ............. I have painted something; Lagertha and three shieldmaidens

I posted a couple of weeks ago about why I wasn't painting, but I am getting back on track again. 

This is the mounted Lagertha (also known as Lathgertha, Lagerða and Hlaðgerðr) by Bad Squiddo. I painted the foot version of her about a year ago. 

Here she is from the other side.

To add to my existing unarmoured Shieldmaidens, here are three more armed with spears. This gives me a total of 12 spear-carrying Shieldmaidens (if I add my single armoured one as a unit leader) who will make a nice single unit for Lion and Dragon Rampant.

I am so glad to be painting again. I think that I needed to do this for my mental health, which has taken a big battering over the last couple of months.

I have eleven mounted Shieldmaidens prepped now, six unarmoured and five in mail. I will add the Lagertha figure to the latter to give me two groups of six riders, again primarily for Lion or Dragon Rampant, but they will also, together with my existing Shieldmaidens be perfect for Saga: Age of Magic.

Not played Saga in a while, until Sunday ...............

................ so here is what happened.

I got totally annihilated.

So, I'll show you the pictures of my Bad Squiddo Shieldmaidens, acting as generic Vikings and then just chat about the game a bit.

OK, so what actually happened? Well, the simple answer is that I rolled rubbish dice over and over again. My Saga dice rolls only gave me the rare S-shaped Sol (Sun) rune once in the entire game and when I really needed to roll high in combat I invariably failed to do so, thus losing my Hearthguard and Warriors to little effect. I also failed to realise until it was too late that the brown felt square in the final photo represented an area of Hard Cover, which meant that my bow Thralls had difficulty in killing off any of their opponents, but the Anglo-Danish archers killed off my Shieldmaiden Legendary unit without any difficulties at all. Perhaps charging across the table with gay abandon wasn't a good idea in the first place. They disappeared almost as quickly as my Berserkers usually do.

It didn't help that my opponents were Anglo-Danes, who seem to always defeat my Vikings, even when I use the board to boost my attacks. It seems to be one of those cases where the two boards tend to cancel one another out, leaving the dice pixies to decide who wins.

Still, it was nice to see my Shieldmaidens on the table again, I really love these figures. I think I'll love them even more when I start using them in Saga: AoM, but I need to get my mounted Shieldmaidens painted first.

I have finally finished all my Freyja's Wrath shieldmaidens

Well, it has been a bit of a long job, mainly because I really wanted to do these lovely figures justice, but I have now finished them. I have enough for a Saga Viking warband, with some optional changes to the basic band.

Anyway, here are the final sets of figures. First, here are 12 archers, who will be classed as bow-armed Levies for Saga;

Next, eight unarmoured Warriors with axes;

And finally, eight unarmoured Warriors with spears;

Obviously, I will be fielding these as Vikings, but they could also serve as Anglo-Danes or Jomsvikings (without the archer levies).

Regarding the colour palette I used, once again, I wanted to keep a few unifying touches, therefore, the spear-armed shieldmaidens have predominantly black and yellow shields and the ones with axes have shields that are mostly red and black. I also kept to a basic set of three or four main colours for the clothing and I did a fair amount of dry-brushing to tone down the brightness of their appearance. I think that this has worked pretty well, they are not too subdued overall, but they are reasonably understated.

Now they are finished, I have a game of Saga arranged for next Sunday at the club.

These will also find a place in my Dragon Rampant plans for 2019.