I've finally finished up my archery dream team and knocked a project off of my Undead to-do list. You've seen the Tomb Prince Selketta in a previous post, but the unit champions and banners for the skeleton archer units are painted and ready for battle.
The champion is a conversion of the same metal skeletons used for the rank and file troops. The only metal remaining, however is the torso and shoulder armor. The legs and arms are plastic Tomb King seletons, and the head is a modified plastic grave guard head. The chain mail skirt and sleeves were sculpted overtop of the legs and arms.
I used some banner bits for the wrappings on the head so the champion would have a bit of a mummified look since skeleton archers are a Tomb Kings unit after all. The idea here is that the traveling Tomb Prince has animated some "local" skeletons in the Empire, and his lieutenant skeletons are leading the regiment, imbuing them with the ability to fire bows.
The unit is designed to field either as two 10-man units or as a single 20-man unit. In Age of Sigmar, skeleton archers may fire twice if the unit has 20 or more models, so it's not really beneficial to split them up unless I use them in Kings of War or classic Warhammer games. I've already played a few games and they do quite well. The tomb prince (technically a king in the rules) can give the unit +1 to hit, or a wight king can give them +1 attack. So that's either 60 shots hitting on 5s and wounding on 4s, or 40 shots hitting on 4s and wounding on 4s. Either way, the average wounds inflicted is about 10. I've fielded them with a wight king leading them. I'll have to try the tomb king option and see if if "feels" any different when rolling. I know the averages should be about the same, and that more attacks does have the potential to inflict more wounds, but it feels bad to have to discard so many 4s when rolling the hits. Ah, the joys of Math-Hammer.
Check out these links to previous posts about how these units came together:
Modeling: Skeleton Archers shows how I converted the gothic-looking archers using classic metal skeletons and some plastic parts.
These guys look great! it is a shame that everything is OOP (GW does not even sell regimental bases!), but hopefully some sort of skeletons will come out in the future. (that are not ogre sized bone/stone/magic conglomerations with magic flaming snake arrows)
Thanks! I'm looking forward to some new undead models, and I'm hoping it will be along te lines of "normal" undead. Maybe some new zombies or bats. But it will probably be themed like the Morghast constructs.
I think the zombies will look like the Blanche zombie illustration in the VC book-- more like constructs nailed together than simple animated corpses. If you look at the zombies pulling the corpse cart, they have a similar "nailed together" look, with peg legs, spikes through their necks, and weapons grafted onto their limbs. and they'll probably make the new zombies to match those in scale, detail, and parts count.
These guys look great! it is a shame that everything is OOP (GW does not even sell regimental bases!), but hopefully some sort of skeletons will come out in the future. (that are not ogre sized bone/stone/magic conglomerations with magic flaming snake arrows)
ReplyDeleteThanks! I'm looking forward to some new undead models, and I'm hoping it will be along te lines of "normal" undead. Maybe some new zombies or bats. But it will probably be themed like the Morghast constructs.
DeleteYes, that is my expectation too, if and when they get around to a new zombie box, it will be heavily "boned" like the ghouls at best.
DeleteI think the zombies will look like the Blanche zombie illustration in the VC book-- more like constructs nailed together than simple animated corpses. If you look at the zombies pulling the corpse cart, they have a similar "nailed together" look, with peg legs, spikes through their necks, and weapons grafted onto their limbs. and they'll probably make the new zombies to match those in scale, detail, and parts count.
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