Viking Warband for Ravenfeast

At the end of last year Little Wars TV released a free set of skirmish Dark Age wargame rules called Ravenfeast (which you can download from their website – http://www.ravenfeast.com/). This month the Little Wars TV also launched a painting challenge for its Patreon members, with the theme being a 28 mm Dark Ages warband of roughly 20-40 models, suitable for Ravenfeast. Both of these factors have given me a thinly veiled excuse to grab some Viking miniatures.

The painting challenge starts this month (Feb 21), with final showing off of completed models in July. That’s quite a long time span for a relatively small number of models, but it suits me fine as I can fit them in around other projects. The first month is designed for purchasing and preparation, and I’ve ordered some Drabant Vikings from Old Glory UK, and a few others from Footsore, bringing the total planned model count to 21.

The Footsore models arrived last week, and as I think the Drabant ones will be a little longer in arriving, I’ve started painting the Footsore models already…

My first four models for this project are four archers by Footsore. Since uniforms aren’t a thing for these guys, my approach was to pick a set of four main colours and vary how they are used across the models. Hopefully this gives a degree of coherence without too much uniformity.

Basing was done using one of base ready mixes sold by Geek Gaming.

The last of my Footsore models is a berserker, as every warband needs at least one frothing lunatic.

Quite happy with now the wolf pelt turned out. I started with a medium grey base coat, and then realised wolves are not that grey, and had to go find a few pictures to put me on the right track.

Some of my Drabant Vikings arrived towards the end of last month, so I’ve been busy painting them up. Still got half a dozen to finish, and then shields to add before they’re ready to share. But since this chap doesn’t have a shield, he’s the first one done.

The Drabant models were good fun to paint, lovely sculpts that practically painted themselves. I used the same colour scheme as I did with the archers, but had decided that the shields would be used to add more unity to the warband.

A pair of characters for the warband. I can’t decide which one should be the leader, and who should be a champion.

I decided that shield patterns would get more complex depending on the ability of the warrior, so both of these are more detailed than those on the shields carried by the bondi.