Rampant Misery

Gearing up for Dragon Rampant, I have pulled my Dark Elves out of retirement. Generally, the paint jobs hold up - certainly not enough for me to want to strip them and start again. You can expect shots of that warband shortly.

But obviously I need an opposing force; how to decide? The freedom of Dragon Rampant is a kind of trap in itself as it can lead to a kind of paralysis. I therefore unleashed my secret weapon - my firstborn. I opened a bunch of browser tabs showing all the possible options - undead, dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins, skaven, pretty much everything - and let him decide what I would build.

He chose orcs.

I'm not displeased by this, as I can throw in a few of my old miniatures (assuming I can find them) and orcs and goblins are always fun to paint. The mantic miniatures also look as though they will be cheap enough to bulk out basic troops.

Before buying anything, though, I hied myself to the garage to dig through the piles of accumlated stuff. Lo and behold I found something I have no memory of buying:

I therefore cracked out the paints (and my notebook to try and remember my recipe for Orc skin) and got stuck in.

The first thing that struck me was the flag on the standard bearer. It reminded me somewhat of Les Mis (showing my musical theatre background, there):

There was, then, only one way I could paint him - which I duly did (apologies for the slightly dodgy photos - taken with assistance from a 4 year old):

It also gave me the name for my Warboss, Miserable Les. When looking at all the options in the GW kit, I decided that - in true Orc fashion - less is not more. More is more. So we have a spear, shield and sword. Mmmmmmm, spikey. 

So the next step is going to be putting a couple of units of Orcs together and then we'll probably throw in some Goblins for seasoning. I also have a couple of Oldhammer warmachines, squigs, fanatics and wolf-riders kicking around somewhere. In the meantime, the full warband looks like this:

Expect updates at the usual glacial pace.