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[Image] Empire troops from GW's Warmaster game
My eighth submission to Curt's Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge was connected in a way to the fantasy engineers in my last submission. I was rooting around my hobby pile to find them, and came across as exciting discovery of a long-lost "I'll get to this next week project" which has stretched into years and years - Warmaster!


[Image] Remember these fantastic rules?
[Image] Crossbow regiment in front, Halberdiers in the middle, and the Knights at the back (will counter-charge when these lads are run over...)
Yes, Warmaster, GW's ridiculously fantastic set of macro-level fantasy combat rules.  Remember Warmaster? The rules alone were fantastic, serving as the inspiration/basis for many subsequent sets of rules to follow.  But it was more than great rules. I also recall the figures - 10 to 12mm collections - that GW released to support these rules were also just tremendous. They had lots of character and variety. Warmaster was a lot of fun and there were many games played among our group back in its time.


[Image] I just loved the sculpts GW released to support this game...they captured the setting perfectly, with tons of variety and character - a (rare) example of GW getting something right
Great rules, and great figures...sounds like a recipe for success, right? Enter #lolGW. Warmaster was around for several years, but ultimately succumbed to GW's gold-into-coal black touch along with the rest of what were then called "specialist" games.  The prices for the models entered the stratosphere, so they didn't sell, so GW cancelled the game, because it wouldn't sell...


[Image] Really basic paint job on these Knights - hope to get more colourful and less grim with the subsequent units
When Warmaster first came out, I collected and painted a small Empire force. In 2010, I resolved to re-paint it up to a higher standard, and re-base some of the models. This effort lasted through some Knights and some characters and artillery pieces, but not much more - you can find the last blip in this effort in the dusty archives of this blog, back in February of 2010 - seven years ago!  Needless to say, other things distracted me, and the Warmaster efforts faded to the background, and these figures when back into storage.

Meanwhile, GW killed off the Specialist games.  So many Warmaster units I had hoped to collect - Kislev, or the super neat figures representing Araby! I settled for grabbing a few more units from Ebay, and have purchased a few more here and there since then, but in classic wargamer fashion, I have hardly touched the models. In the intervening years we moved to a new house, but these figures stayed in the box, gathering dust, or still in their blister packs, with the plastic turning yellow :)


[Image] My updated Empire forces, with these new units added... Having encountered this little stash of models once again two weeks ago, I figured the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge would be a fine time to take another crack at this.  So I dove in, and have been sawing away with the brushes on figures that haven't seen sunlight, much less paint, since 2010. I painted a unit of halberdiers and a unit crossbowmen, a did a touch up on an old unit of Knights. I have also spent some time re-basing models I had already touched up, so I can have a sense of coherency among figures which have a seven-to-ten-year interval between painting!


[Image] The Knights take their place...and a wizard is on hand [Image] That Crossbow regiment is a little lonely - will need at least one more for the basic Empire force requirements [Image] Empire hero on a griffon - he'll finally have a force to command after almost 10 years! [Image] Various heroes and officers, ready to lead the Empire army to battle!
This submission included 60 foot models and 12 mounted models in 10mm.  However, the Knights were a touch-up job, not a real paint job and didn't count. This submission counted for 60 points in the end.


Another five or six regiments and this will be a fine 2,000 point Empire force, fit for a good-sized game of Warmaster with the group at some point.  I think Dallas has Dwarves, and I have unpainted Orcs and Chaos figures...hopefully we can get a game in this year.