The Zoidyssey – Adventures with Warriors of Athena

I’ve been ordering miniatures for this for a while and will have loads more than I need for WoA but will likely also start pulling forces together for OGAM as well.

Here is the first haul, my Christmas Foundry order and a trawl of the Pile.

Working from left there are a range of character models down the left hand edge including; Warlord Games (Sacrificing priest), Crocodile Miaitures (female and owl in tree), Reaper Bones (Priest adventurer), Crooked Dice (Perseus and Bubo), Lucid Eye (Odysseus), Ral Partha Europe (Harpy) and at the bottom Theseus and the Minotaur by Foundry  Next to them are the Wargames Foundry Argonauts (top) Lucid Eye Achilles and Myrmidons with Relic Calibos and then more Foundry below, harpies and two blisters of Greeks, Spartans and Athenians.  In the middle there are Relic undead with some shield transfers and below them more Foundry, satyrs, Trojan characters and Aeëtes with guards.  In the bags are some Lucid Eye Sea People and Amazons as well as some Wargames Atlantic skeleton sprues and then bottom right are some Amazon and Ptolemaic command bases which are mostly Forge of Ice (next to the Krautcover Soil of Sparta basing material), and finally a couple of Foundry columns and tropaion from Footsore.

Still more to come of course 🙂  I have my preorder in with North Star for the books, gods and some other bits. I have also got an order in with Element for some Reaper monsters.  According to the video previews I’ve seen on YouTube I’ll need up to 15 bees and 3 cyclopes for the first scenario.  I’ve therefore had to order a couple of extra cyclopses from Alternative Armies and I’ll need to go back to North Star for another couple of sets of bees.

To harness some of the prerelease excitement I’ve got some inspirational reading together.

Broadly there are two categories, the military history books and the myths.  I find artists particularly inspiring and there are some of my favourites illustrating some of these; Angus McBride, Peter Connolly and Alan Lee (he illustrated the Rosemary Sutcliff book and she was one of my favourite authors when I was young).  Clearly as this is a fantasy game there is no need for historical accuracy but I do also game historically so I’ll try and paint humans is vaguely believable fashion.

The Osprey Myth series has three excellent titles covering in a succinct and no nonsense way the three main hero cycles of the Illiad, Argonautica and the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Highly recommended.  The myths are all traceable back to the Greek Bronze Age (1800-1100 BCE) or possibly even before that.  The Trojan War is usually placed within the dating of Troy VI ending @1300-1280BCE.  Therefore, if I’m planning on depicting named heroes from the Trojan War, I’ll need Bronze Age miniatures in boar tusk helmets with tower or figure 8 shields and maybe even Dendra armour (although that feels like something an end of level boss should wear).

It is my intention to have an anachronistic approach, i.e. mixing up miniatures from different historical periods.  This will help a bit with the fantasy feel as those of us with some historical understanding won’t be able to pin the forces into an historical time frame.

Finally the backup plan is also in place.  I’ve got a copy of “Of Gods and Mortals” which will be the rules I fall back on in the unlikely event that I don’t like the new ones.