The Waistcoat Gamer Goes Undead!

Kalon Gramaglia, the Waistcoat Gamer, is a professional painter who was excited to see the variety of Classic Fantasy Undead sets we've released over the last months. He's combined several sets to build his Egyptian Undead army and lays out the process here: 

So with the release of so many new and interesting systems to play Rank and File Fantasy wargames I decided I was going to go back to an old dream of mine of having an Egyptian themed undead army focused more on the power of the gods and the immortal glory of their kings over some half dead blood sucker (who needs Vampires anyway?).

So with this in mind I did a lot of reading into a variety of wargame systems and the lore about all of their undead armies, and much like our own history they all have the same theme that the Egyptian undead are one of the first races of men to become civilised and created vast empires which then had to defend themselves against barbarian races from outside their kingdoms. With this in mind I wanted to have a unit themed around these Barbarian races that have been raised alongside the more 'civilised' forces of the kings.

With a general idea in mind I started looking through Wargames Atlantic's vast catalogue of files and found several that fit the bill for what I was looking for in the undead category. They had a selection of Skeleton versions of your common races, Humans (of course), Orcs, Dwarves, and Ogres. There were also Haflings but they didn't fit the lore I had of them being relaxed and homely people (what would they be doing in the desert???).

With the races selected next was moving onto wargear selection, in gameplay terms the unit was going to be armed with spears and shields but to represent the idea these were ragtag barbarian's and for variety I selected a mix of spears and hand weapons. The largest collection of minis in the regiment are Humans to keep in size and scale with the army as a whole.

Then I intermixed in some of the Dwarves and Orc skeletons to create some flavour, making sure to use weapons themed to those races, curved scimitars and spears for the Orcs and sturdy axes and pikes for the Dwarves (which conveniently were a similar size to the normal skeleton's spears.

Now for some extra details I raided my bits box for suitable parts and found some old shields and spears along with skulls that matched the theme perfectly. The only thing missing was a banner bearer but with some leftover spears, some clippers and a ta'da!   banner pole created, next will be something to act as a symbol or banner for them.

Now along with the Orcs, Humans and Dwarves I'd also decided I wanted to use the Ogre skeletons I'd found however the size was going to be hard to fit onto a 25mm base to keep them inline with the unit and their bulk would make it hard for them to rank up with their smaller brothers. So I settled on the plan of using a 'Unit Filler' something quite common in a lot of Rank and File games as a way to bulk up a unit and provide something interesting to break up the regiments in the army. So with that I arranged the Ogres on a larger 75mm x 50mm base and had them marching alongside the smaller skeletons.

With that the Barbarian Host of Isfoph is ready to take the field and march to eternal glory.

Check out his Instagram by clicking his face!

And if you'd like to recreate what he's done - you can find all these sets (not to mention our fantastic Skeleton Infantry, Cavalry, and Chariots in Hard Plastic!) by clicking HERE!