Sunday 22 November 2020

Normans For Saga

 I got a bit side tracked here- for this post I am rolling back the timeframe a few hundred years from the English Civil Wars to the 11th century.


 Many moons ago I picked up some Conquest Games plastic Normans in part because 28mm plastic kits for historical war games was just starting and I went a little crazy (I still have several boxes for various periods I probably will never get around to playing).  Most of the Conquest Normans got some conversion work and ended up recruited into some petty kingdom in Al Andalus during the Taifa  period. Some of the leftovers are presented here.


The mounted Norman Knights kit was Conquests first plastic set and at about a decade old suffers from some of the faults common to early plastic kits- obscured detail, stiff posing- but still holds up well. In Saga terms these four horsemen are a unit of Hearthguard.

Conquests Medieval Archers kit is an improvement in sculpting from both their Norman Knights and Norman Infantry box sets. These 6 are a half unit of levy archers (the other 6 still under construction).


The only big problem for this kit is Conquest's head design. The head has a "foot" at the bottom of the neck where it is meant top be glued onto the torso. You get a good solid gluing surface but it looks weird as it only fits naturally if looking directly ahead, and not if you want the head looking in the direction the archer is shooting in. Some head /torso combos work better than others.
I had another set of Renedra's wattle fencing which I took the opportunity to paint up; very handy stuff to dress up the medieval or renaissance war games table.



Now back to tidying up that ebay purchase of ECW figures...


16 comments:

  1. Nice work on the Normans, and the Renedra fencing have come up beautifully.

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  2. Beautiful Normans and fences, congrats!

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  3. Normans in SAGA eh?

    I'd play using your troops as I don't have any right now.

    There's some Norman horse here somewhere ...

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  4. Nice work! SAGA? I have not seen SAGA BatRep on a blog in a long time. As Lawrence says, the fencing looks great.

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    1. Studio Tomahawk has just released Saga: Age of Hannibal so it is getting a bit of a boost right now. Myself, I haven't played in about 7 years.

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  5. Nice bit of brushwork, I do like painting Normans!

    Cheers
    Matt

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  6. Troops and fencing are both very nice!

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  7. Thank you everyone for the nice remarks.

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  8. Very nice Normans and fences. I have the same stuff in my dark ages collection. Normans are one of my favorite armies. 😀

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  9. Lovely job. I also like the proportions of the horse - very nice.

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  10. Nice looking Normans! I bought them when they came out, still in the box! Fencing looks good too!
    Best Iain

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  11. Very nice indeed - toyed with the idea of plastic Normans a few times, but do I need to start yet another era?

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    1. I am sure you've seen Victrix is releasing their Norman cavalry, possibly in February. They look to be fantastic.

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  12. Wonderful looking Normans. I love that they're plastics too.

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  13. Thank you DeanM. As I mentioned in the above reply, Victrix Normans look fantastic; hopefully archers are in the pipeline though I don't recall seeing renders for them which means if they are coming they are still a ways off.

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