Progress is being made on the hobby front, but most importantly I’ve made some decisions on the make-up of the warband, so thought I’d share my thoughts, which have also made more concrete what I must get through hobby-wise.
The Spells
So the Wizard will be an Elementalist, which feels most appropriate for the shaman-style model I have for him and his apprentice. For his spells, I chose Destructive Sphere (doesn’t get more orcy than causing a wave of energy that hurts everything nearby), Elemental Bolt (I see energy spewing from the orc’s mouth) and Wall (which I’m actually hoping to make look like a pile of rocks). For aligned spells, I firstly took Animate Construct as I have a scaled down version of this Forge World model in mind as my construct (again, mostly just a pile of rocks – there’s a theme). Next up, looking at the Summoner spells nothing really grabbed me, but I thought Plague of Insects fit my theme (although I think Leap would improve playability, as it always seems to be a handy spell) and for Chronomancer school I took Crumble as a nice destructive option. For the last two spells, I chose Familiar from Witch, I was originally going to take Brew Potion but I got a cool mini-squig with the Wizard model and thought using it as a Familiar would be an excellent excuse to paint it up. Lastly I took the Sigilist spell, Push, to Hand of Gork some enemies away from me.
The Warband
With spells done, next is to work out what I’m going to put in the warband so I can get to building (spoiler alert: I’ve built them). I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and had many, many rough drafts of trying to fit everything I wanted in (curse there only being 500 gold and 10 spots in the warband), but settled on the following as the opening warband:
4x Thugs
2x Archers
1x War Hound
1x Barbarian
One of the thugs will be dropped for the construct if I manage to animate it, but I think having a guaranteed 10 strong warband was worth the 20gc investment. Ultimately, as the warband develops I’m expecting to swap out two of the thugs, one for an Apothecary (I have a cool model) and one for a Captain or Knight (part of my Mierce Miniatures order). The other thugs may eventually get upgraded to more specialised roles later on, but we’ll see how things progress.
First Playtest
I took the warband out for a spin at Axes and Ales to get a feel for how it would work in practice. Long story short, I got comprehensively beaten by Tom with a slightly advanced Necromancer warband, due to some poor play on my part and my lack of familiarity with how my spells work… One thing I really missed was the mobility that Leap brings to my usual summoner warband, so I’ll be swapping out Plague of Insects for that. Destructive Sphere was great and I’ll definitely be keeping it, but it only damaged my minions (of course), so wasn’t super effective – and of course my wizard was killed in short order after casting it. I think my key mistake though was playing with unpainted models which no doubt angered the dice gods, so the priority is to get some paint on these boys.
Until next time….
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