A few random vikings

 I was ratching* about in my boxes the other day, when I came across this set of vikings, which were mostly painted but had never been finished. Always happy to get a result with little effort, I applied the last few touches and the shield transfers, adding another half dozen vikings to my collection. I have recently thinned my collection, offloading quite a few old painted figures to eBay, so I am happy to say that I now have got back to six points of painted figures for Saga.

The two central figures are by V&V miniatures, still my favourite manufacturer by a long chalk. The others are by Victrix Miniatures, which offer a decent, more affordable alternative. The shield transfers are by Little Big Men.

Here’s the single point of hearthguard, with the temporary leader (Thor is a busy guy and he can’t play this role forever). At some point he will be replaced by a suitable, more historical figure. I chose to restrict the shields to red, black and white to tie the unit together a little. I have another unit of hearthguard with great weapons that are not yet painted. 

*ratch is a Cumbrian/Scottish/northern dialect word, meaning search or looking for. I was hoping it was Norse in origin, but it seems to be medieval of unknown origin.

Twelfth Day of Beardmas

 My original intention in this little series was a finale of a newly painted mini, a type I don’t usually paint. However, it is not yet finished and I don’t want to rush it just for the sake of a blog article, so here’s plan B instead. A little compilation of other beards I painted throughout the year. 

 

It’s not a particularly large selection of beards, because I didn’t actually spend that much time hobby painting this year. The first photo of vikings, about half were completed in 2020, but I like the photo of all the berserkers together so why not show them all off. The trio of adventurers, one is obviously smooth chined, but again I liked the photo of them all together.

Not the finale I had planned, which seems quite fitting for 2020. 

Vikings renovation

 I think I mentioned recently that I was overhauling my viking collection. Out with the old and in with the new. I sold my old figures some time ago and have been slowly painting up their replacements. The figures available now are far nicer than in the past and life is just too short for crummy figures, that's my reasoning at any rate. 

Here's the first batch of "new"recruits. Only the front rank are truly new. The two on the left are by V&V Miniatures, while the ale quaffing figure is by Mierce Miniatures. These are my two favourite makes of Norse/viking minis, top quality all round. The rear rank are by Drabant Miniatures. At one time these were the best vikings available on the market, but they have been superseded. Still, it was worth spending a little time touching up a few highlights and rebasing them to match the new guys.

It's good to finally get some minis painted for myself. I think my mojo must have melted in the heat of the summer, but finally it seems to be returning. Partly this was due to being able to game face to face again after a trip round to Matt's dungeon (which is now more a palatial barn, I'm sure he will blog this at some point). I fielded a confederation of bearded warriors (vikings and dwarf allies) against his marauding beastmen. Unfortunately the photos I snapped on my phone were pretty poor so hopefully Matt's blog will come to the rescue. 

One of the units I fielded was this block of berserkers. We were playing Dragon Rampant so I fielded them as bellicose foot. This contains a good representative sample of my collection as it stands today. There are resin V&V, metal Mierce and plastic Victrix all mixed together here. And for the most part I reckon they work well together. Hopefully my enthusiasm for painting them continues, I would love to pit them against a small force of these brutes.

Small is perhaps the wrong word to use in this context. Vikings fending off trolls, coming soon. Some time this decade at any rate. 

Tree and scatter terrain

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on some new terrain. Now that it is finished I thought I would show it off with some minis. First though, a straight shot of the terrain I put together. The trees I covered in my last post, the dwarf head statues are made by Scibor Miniatures and the bases trays are made by warbases.

Here's a picture of rangers of Oakenheim patrolling the borders of the forest, ensuring there are no incursions by pesky goblins or foul undead.

And finally a photo of a few of my vikings emerging from the forest. 

I just have to get them on to the battlefield now, though who knows how long it will be before that is possible. At least the new stuff will not die horribly in their first game.

Berserkers

These viking berserkers are happy to be out and about, enjoying a bit of fresh air and socialising with the locals. Hopefully things won't get too out of hand. And I am happy to have finally painted something, it's been a struggle recently. I might even get to game with them at some point, that would be a real treat.

These are mostly victrix miniatures, though the extra furry guy on the left is V&V miniatures. They scale together well. They are all based on two pence coins.

They paint up nicely, I used my usual method of thin coats and glazes and it worked just fine. In fact, I have a couple of videos in preparation to show how paint chain armour and how to make and paint realistic bases. More on those soon.

It's a viking thing

Hat's off to you if you got the "joke" title. If you didn't, not to worry, it wasn't very funny - thing is an old Norse word for assembly or meeting. Told you it wasn't very funny. Anyway, here's my vikings assembled together. This is my collection as it stands today, though the archers are missing from this shot, they are not really free men and hence barred from the meeting.

It's been quite a long journey to get to this point. When I first started collecting vikings the figures available in the market were quite mediocre. In recent years that has changed quite markedly and there are now several options if you prefer good quality figures. I have previously blogged about my preferred options in this post.

I am slowly getting my vikings organised. Some are painted fully, some need a little more work, some need shield and base replacements. Some are still in the box. There's a fair bit of work to do, but it helps me to get them all out and arrange them like this so I can see what I am working towards.

There are five different manufacturers in this photo, though one is a proxy. The bulk are the excellent V&V miniatures, my absolute favourites though expensive resin pieces. Next most numerous are victrix, highly affordable plastics, and finally there is a smattering of Drabant metal figures. At the back you can see a Mierce Miniatures character glugging on some ale, encouraging the troops. And finally the leader is Thor! Yeah, he's the red herring, from CMON Blood Rage box game, until I get my V&V command group together. More on the vikings soon.....

V&V Miniature Vikings Gallery

In my last post, I mentioned that V&V Miniatures were my favourite manufacturer of viking miniatures. I have posted photos of them on the blog in the past, but as I had the camera set up for some comparison shots, I decided to get them all out for another photo session. Not that there are that many as yet, just these twelve. I hope this photo conveys why I like them so much.

Each and every figure is a character in their own right. There are no clones. You can see that the sculptor absolutely loves his subject. There are so many little details, from the laces on their shoes to the inscribed belt buckles. They really are superb figures. I have tried my best to bring every one of them to life, as they deserve.

One of the things I like is that they are not all the usual bearded, long haired archetype that most manufacturers seem to churn out. The warrior on the far left, for example, is quite young and has his hair shaved up the back of his head. The figure second from right in the rear rank, has a distinctly Gaelic or Irish look to him. Vikings raided and settled all over Europe, so there's no reason why they should always be depicted as bearded Scandinavian types.

I use these figures as my beserker unit. Anyone who goes into battle topless or wearing an animal skin has to be a bit mad! The figure second left, with no shirt and two axes, is one of my favourite figures of all time. 

Just twelve of these wonderful figures are painted at the moment, though I do have more underway, mostly armoured figures. And since I bought them a couple of years ago, the range has expanded and there are more to choose from. V&V have also started a range of Rus figures, which are very, very tempting. The allure of the vikings has not faded.

Victrix vs V&V vs Drabant vikings

Viking miniatures comparison pictures!

There are a lot of viking miniatures available out there, in metal, plastic or resin, with many different styles to choose from. These three ranges are my personal favourites.

On the left is Drabant Miniatures, metal figures sculpted in Russia. There are about twenty figures available in the range. There are also a range of Rus (Eastern or Varangian vikings). In the UK, they are sold by Old Glory. A good choice if you prefer metal figures.

In the middle is Victrix vikings, plastic miniatures made in the UK. A vast range of armoured and unarmoured figures, twelve different bodies and enough parts and weapons for almost limitless poses. This is the range that most wargamers will go for, cheap, plastic and good quality. One packet includes 60 figures, enough for a warband.

On the right is V&V Miniatures, resin figures from Ukraine. There are about 60 sculpts available from the vikings range, including a few less common types such as shield maidens and ulfhednars. These are top quality miniatures, a little bit larger than the other two ranges. These are my favourites of the three, though the most expensive. In the UK, they are sold by Mezzers Minis.

Two more Victrix vikings

Two more vikings from the plastic set painted up, just 55 left to do!

I painted these up quite quickly, I didn't want to labour over every detail like I  do with the V&V miniatures. Although I did add a simple trim design to the tunic/shirt of the bald headed figure. The shields are transfers.

I feel that unarmoured vikings are sorely lacking in the vast numbers of viking minis available, so it's good to finally find some that are both cheap to buy and that look good when you put them together.

A trio of Victrix Vikings painted

I finally managed to get some paint on to the Victrix vikings. They paint up really nicely, the details are nice and sharp. Just three armoured figures to start with as a tester. The shields are a mix of transfers and free hand. I will be moving on to some unarmoured figures, hopefully in the near future.

I have decided to try my luck with these on ebay, if you are interested then here's a link to my auctions.

Victrix Vikings as fantasy figures

Following on from the previous post, a review of the new Victrix vikings, I thought that some gamers might be interested in seeing how the new figures compare with some fantasy figures. Clearly, the scale is nearer to 28mm or 30mm than some of the bigger fantasy offerings, which makes them a good match to systems like Lord of the Rings.

From this first photo you can see that they are a very good match to plastic uruk hai, while the Gondorian looks small featured. Bear in mind the slight difference made by the different bases.

In the second photo, the Mordor orc (left) looks quite a bit smaller, while the Morannon orc (right) is a far closer match in height and head size.

In this final photo, the vikings are up against Oathmark goblins, which are plastic and scale well with Mordor orcs. The vikings are slightly taller, though the goblins do have hunched over poses - they are fairly similar in height if you look to the shoulders.

Hopefully that will be useful to some players. Perhaps they could be used as wildmen of Dunland, or the armoured figures used as Rohan or Dunlendings? And of course, they could also be used in any of the many games rules available these days, such as Frostgrave, Erewhon and others.

Victrix Vikings Review

I have been waiting for these figures to release since the day they were first announced about a year ago. I pre-ordered a set a few weeks back, and now here they are. More details on the contents are on the Victrix website, these are my thoughts.

The figures arrive in a plastic bag with a card stapled along the top. On the back of the card are some basic instructions, which bodies are compatible with which heads, that kind of thing. As you can see, I also ordered a couple of sets of transfers and received a free flag for pre-ordering.

The warrior sprue, containing eight figures, with lots of head and weapon options and other bits. There are six of these per pack, making 48 figures.

The command sprue, containing eight figures, again with lots of options to play with. There are two of these sprues per pack, another twelve figures. In total, sixty vikings per pack - enough to man a longboat!

I assembled four figures and glued them to coins, as I do with all my figures. Note that there are no bases included in the pack. The photo is filtered to better show the details. And now some comparison photos with other vikings I own. I do not have any plastics to compare with, as to date I have never seen any that I thought were good figures to collect. These comparisons are therefore the Victrix plastics against metal and resin figures - worth bearing in mind when you see them side by side.

From the command sprue, Victrix on left, V&V (resin) on right

Standard sprue, Victrix and V&V (resin)

Standard sprue, Victrix and V&V (resin)

Victrix and Drabant Miniatures (metal)

I tried to build the Victrix Miniatures to match the poses of the comparison miniature as best I could. In each case, it's a simple matter of attaching two arms and a head to a body. I also added knives and scabbards as appropriate. In one case I trimmed the neck down a little as it looked too long to my eye. I also had to remove a sword hilt from the scabbard to make it empty. Other than that, they were very easy to put together and mould lines were easy to clean.

I am impressed with the level of detail and the quality of the sculpt, the proportions are very good. In terms of plastics, there are no others around that come anywhere close to this quality. I reckon they come very close to the metal figure in the last comparison picture - once painted, it will be hard to separate the two. The resin figures have a slight edge in terms of detail and sculpt, though of course the plastics are far cheaper and have more adaptability. 

If you are in the market for vikings, you cannot really go wrong with the Victrix vikings. At £38 plus postage for sixty figures, they are a complete bargain. Even factoring in extra spending on bases and shield transfers, they are well under a pound a figure. With all the options available on the sprue, you should easily be able to ensure there is no duplication in your collection. 

My first fantasy map

It's finally finished, my first fantasy map. Now the dwarfs of Oakenheim have a home, along with those pesky Red Hills goblins, the Lord of Bleak Fell and his Undead followers, the witches of WychenWood, and the rest.

For years I have been quite happy to play my games in pre-established universes, mostly in the Old World of Warhammer, or the villages of dark ages Europe. But recently I have been more and more interested in gathering together these fantasy and real world collections into one setting. One world in which dwarfs can fight goblins in classic fantasy style, and vikings can raid Saxons in classic historical style, but there's also scope for trolls raiding viking settlements, Saxons fighting off Undead - a world to include all my miniatures in one big happy collection. It's a map drawn with the dwarfs and vikings firmly in the centre of everything - they have been my main preoccupation over the past couple of years. The areas on the edges of the map, or indeed off the map, represent those figures in my collection that are furthest from being painted.

The basics of how I got started in this endeavour I have already covered in this post. In essence, it's been a process of drawing and refining in pencil, then going over it all using fineliner marker pens. I am quite happy with the end result. The overall layout and the features I am pleased with, the lettering was always going to be the most challenging and that proved to be the case, that is the weakest point in my eyes. But for a first attempt I am happy with how it turned out.

Headland!

A headland is a coastal landform, a point of land usually high and often with a sheer drop, that extends into a body of water. 

I started inking the map, working on the coastline, rivers and lakes. I was admiring my handiwork when I suddenly saw this shape. Now that's what you call a headland! When the hills and mountains and lettering are inked in, it will probably be a bit less obvious.

It's pure chance that it has emerged like this. The original shape was based on an approximation of the county of Cumbria, the Lake District in England - hence the lakes. At first I was trying to replicate the bodies of water exactly, but it was very cluttered and I abstracted to this form. The outjutting squiggle of a nose I added at random as I was inking. This will be the land of the vikings, though as it's a dwarf map it's not that detailed. Dwarfs don't have much love for water, or other folks for that matter, so they don't bother too much with little details like rivers, towns and such like.

Viking Longhouse WIP

Returning from a spring break holiday, I was looking for something quick and easy to do to get me back into the hobby groove. I know, I thought to myself, I will get the roof on the viking super hut, that should be simple enough. What a mistaken idea that was!

I bought the tiling sheets from the ever dependable warbases. They come in A4 size and are strips of a thick card, laser cut. You have to cut each strip to size and glue it on to your roof. It's probably quite easy with a standard roof, but with all the slopes and angles it proved quite time consuming. Two afternoons of pretty tedious hobbying later, and it looks like this. Almost there I think, I am pondering whether to put a beam across the apex.

It looks good, but it's definitely a job for the dedicated enthusiast. All future roofs will probably be turfed!

Viking Warband

Just about squeezed this in before month end - the last of the viking bondi. Another interesting sculpt, it's not very often we see a miniature wielding his spear two handed, though I have seen many a re-enactor fight in this fashion. I would think that wielding a spear one handed while holding a shield would be reserved for shield wall duty. In the photo below, with his bondi comrades, he thrusts from behind the shield wall.

So that's one Saga unit of eight bondi and one unit of four berserkers painted up for my new viking warband. They are all by V&V Miniatures, lovely sculpts and well cast in resin. These are, for my money, the best figures on the market at the moment. I have some more lined up to add to this little band, armoured warriors and a couple of characters. More on that in the future, though I am switching to some fantasy projects for the next couple of months.

Dark Ages village growing

More progress on the viking longhouse - I have replaced the mdf roof supports with twigs from the garden. These were leftover from a prune of my birch trees. The twigs were dried in the microwave, then roughly cut to size. I trimmed off the bark as I figured it would just drop off anyway over time. I chose a random size and positioning along the sides of the building, but the front has slightly straighter and thicker "tree trunks" to make it an imposing entrance for visitors. I might add some decoration on these entrance pillars. The work on this building is now almost complete, just the roof tiling and ground texture to add.

Two plastic buildings are also ready for priming. The lake town house I modified slightly by covering the leaded windows with wooden shutters made from coffee stirrers. There are still a few bits left over from the house boxset, which I will be using as walkways through the muddy ground. The other building is a Renedra ramshackle barn, which I built straight from the box with no modifications. There's also a cart, this was another Sarissa kit which I modified a little with balsa wheels and harness.

That's three quite imposing buildings to start my viking settlement, I think I need some more basic dwellings next, which I hope to scratch build. I also want to add more extras to really bring it all to life - fishing nets, benches, cooking utensils, and such like. And fencing, lots of fencing.

Viking Longhouse

I had quite a few viking gifts for Yuletide, one of which was the Sarissa Precision longhouse. It's a really characterful building, though as with all mdf kits can look a bit flat, something I wanted to attempt to remedy. So I decided to add some texture to the building walls, in the shape of wooden coffee stirrers. These are easy to cut, trim and glue, it just takes a little extra time to add some basic beams to make the building more lifelike, less flat pack.

If this had been a standard building, this could have been the end point, nice and simple to do. However, this is a longhouse, the residence of the jarl and it has a very fancy roof, which complicated matters a little.

The new beams made fitting the side roofing a little more challenging. The usual precision fit was affected by the addition of the coffee stirrers, resulting in some gaps where pieces would normally have butted together. I also had to trim some of the roof supports because the coffee stirrer beams had covered some of the holes where they were inserted - I had mistakenly taken these to be window slots. Not a catastrophe by any means, just a little extra work to get it all together. The roof gaps I filled with wooden poles from an incense jar. My vikings don't like the smell of manure, they prefer the sweet smell of lavender and pine.

With the roof poles added the build is nearly complete. The roof tiles will have to wait, I will probably buy some from warbases. When these go on I will make sure they fit right up to the walls, so all current gaps will disappear.

I am really happy with the end product. The little modifications have taken me some time, but I think it's well worth the effort. As I said, without the complication of the side roof it would have been really easy to do.

I think more modifications are needed, as the roof corners each need a pole to support it. And I am toying with the idea of replacing the rather uniform struts with something a bit more rustic, it shouldn't be too hard to do. Something to make it look more like the Trelleborg viking longhouse.