Fortified Chapel

Hi, folks. Here's another bit of terrain for our Kings of War table. It's a fortified chapel made from a Pegasus Hobby Gothic City Building Large Set. I added crenelations with some 1/2 inch foam core. This was another mostly done project from a while back which I finally finished. I did final touch-up painting and added some print-outs of stained glass windows from the Hirst Arts site which I resized in GIMP. 

Well, there's another finished piece of terrain thanks to Kings of War.

Modular Pink Foam Castle

Pink foam castle

Here's a little castle I made with 1/2 inch insulation foam. I watched some really good tutorial videos on the Wargaming For Fun site. They used two inch thick foam for their castle but all I had was the 1/2 inch. I scribed the foam with a pencil to represent the stones. The walkways are 3 inches wide to accommodate the unit's movement trays. The walls are 7.5 inches tall to the tops of the merlons. The towers are simple boxes with the crenelations added. I had to add the buttresses to the walls because they tended to fall over in the breeze from the ceiling fan. It was painted with black craft paint, an entire 8 oz bottle, and then drybrushed with gray craft paint. It took forever to scribe the lines and was a kind of tedious project, but it cost next to nothing. I already had several pieces of foam insulation, all I needed was a $3 bottle of paint. It comes apart into 4 sixteen inch wall sections and 4 towers and weighs about nothing. I still need to make a gate and maybe a portcullis. I may also add a few more courses to the tower bases so I can add doors from the towers onto the walkways. 

That tall tower in the center courtyard is a modified Hirst Arts Prison tower my son Mark made. It's pretty cool. We may be able to use it in some kind of rescue scenario. And of course, Kings of War has some siege rules.

Thanks for looking.

Armies for Kings of War

Here's a little bit on our King of War Armies. We're using a mix of old Warhammer minis primarily, Mantic does not yet make a Kingdoms of Men line of minis, so I'm using some old Warhammer Empire minis. I had some already painted, but most were not.

First I started out making some movement trays. There is an excellent tutorial on YouTube on The Kings of War Channel. If you haven't visited this channel, you should check it out. It's excellent. Entertaining and informative. Anyway, I had made homemade movement trays in the past, but never ones where the minis are glued onto the movement tray. I really liked his method, especially the way he used the blended flocks and matching the flock to his battleboard. I spent a day making a bunch of movement trays for our units.

At the same time I was pulling out all of the old minis we had, and grouping them into units for the different armies. Then I found a really cool, free online site for building Kings of War army lists. It's called EasyArmy.com and here is a link to their Kings of War page.This is an excellent resource that lets you make lists using the latest rules and items. I was using it to design the army lists based on the minis I had available and looking at the army lists let me figure out how many and what size movement trays I needed. Kind of a circle of life thing. :)

Here are some of the Kingdoms of Men units.

First one is the General on a Winged Beast. It's a GW Empire Knight conversion mounted on GW's Louen Leoncoeur's Griffin. I finally finished painting the Griffin for use with Kings of War.

Another old GW mini. This one was painted about 10 years ago I think. He will be a General mounted on a horse for KoW. It's nice to have models matching the different equipment options available.

 Another old GW mini, a wizard on foot for KoW.

 Wizard mounted on a horse. 

Wizard mounted on a Pegasus. This one is a Heroscape mini. I just added flock to the base. That covers the options for Wizards,

 Cannon. More old GW minis, painted long ago. I based them on a piece of vinyl floor tile.

 Ditto, with an old Hellblaster. Sat around unpainted for about 10 years. 

And a mortar, too.

Pole Axe Regiment.  Another old GW unit. This one I just finished painting. I made their movement tray using the method from "The Kings of War Channel". It was very helpful, gluing that Standard Bearer down to the tray keeps him from falling over all of the time. The emblem on the standard itself is one I googled, brought into GIMP and reversed colors from a black Maltese Cross to white. Then I printed a page of the emblems, cut them out and glued them to the standards. When dry, I sealed the standards with gloss decoupage.

Here's a Spearman regiment. Movement tray done the same way. Same deal on the banner. These guys were a departure from the usual way I paint minis. I bought a can of blue spray paint and used that on them. The paint was darker than I thought it would be but I'm okay with it. I then picked out the breast-plates, skin, shields and spears. I may start playing these guys as a Pike Phalanx.

A hoard of Footguard. Half of these were painted a long time ago. Same deal on the movement trays and banner. 

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for looking. 

Kings of War is our New Game

Hi, folks. First post in a long time. Real life has been kind of sucky and I haven't been up for blogging. Now all of a sudden Mantic Games' "Kings of War" has got my mojo back. :)

I think Mantic is the successor to the Games Workshop mantle. At least for me. I had a lot of GW minis sitting around gathering dust for the last 12 years or so. Kings of War has given them a new "life".

If you're not familiar with Mantic's "Kings of War", it is a Fantasy Mass Combat Tabletop Wargame. Mantic has an excellent, free ruleset you can download from their site, written by Alessio Cavatore. If you google them, you can find lots of positive reviews.

Anyway, after watching some excellent YouTube videos from the "Kings of War Channel" and Wargames Supplies, I started reviving those old Warhammer Armies for use in "Kings of War". So far, my sons Stephen and Mark and I have played several games of "Kings of War", using an old GW Empire army for the "Kings of War" Kingdoms of Men faction, an old Vampire Counts army for KoW Undead, Dwarves, Warriors of Chaos, High Elves, and Dark Elves (Mantic Twilight Kin) .

To me, KoW plays so much better and the fact that we can use old GW armies in KoW makes it that much more attractive. I'll be posting some articles on Kings of War soon.

Thanks for looking.