Saga – My Vikings

I used the warlord model from the Gripping Beast box, gave him two swords and decided that that could denote his berserker status. I gave another guy two axes and used the dane axes in the set to complete the 4 models i would need in game.

After a while i revisited them and decided that they just didn’t stand out enough on the battlefield. To remedy this I put some Frostgrave barbarian spare heads on the base as severed bloody evidence of their savagery.

This did help make them stand out but I soon realized that a lack of armour or care for your own safety is a big element of the berserker attitude and also that the dane axe models would be really useful for my Anglo Dane army i was planning.

With that in mind i bought some metal berserker models at Salute one year and added two of those. The Dane axe models were removed and I am happy with my current team of berserkers.

Whilst looking for inspiration I discovered that a ring pull from a can of Redbull has a punched design of their symbol so I used a thin fineline marker to give me the shape on a shield. It might be easier or better to use with an airbrush, but i don’t have one. Not sure that the stylized images of animals as they were at the time really would have shown a bull to be this shape, but it was certainly fun to try out.

The most fun was looking into shield designs on Google. It is said that historical games painting can be restrictive. The uniforms of an era would usually have been in a limited range of colours and that some historical gamers might criticize you if you get it wrong? Well I know that you may run the risk of this against some opponents, but when you go as far back as the Dark Age, the amount of available and reliable written history is pretty limited. The freedom to go nuts on the shield designs is within reason completely yours. I found myself limiting my pallet for clothing to muted browns and linen colours because i researched that some brighter dye colours were so rare that only royalty could afford it.

I bought the Gripping Beast Viking plastic box set. I looked purely at the price and the miniature count and thought it was a bargain. It was a bargain but now that I know more about the game I realise that all being in full chain mail looks as though they should be classed as hearthguard troops. To make an army you should have a mix of levies, warriors and hearthguard. At the time though I was having a blast looking at shield designs and stretching my freehand efforts.