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| Snooty Bretonnian knights! |
EDIT: 7-19-26, in the years since this post I did indeed finish the unit bit as Bretonnians after all, go figure.
One of the coolest things about 3rd Edition Warhammer are the rules for Allies and Mercenaries. While not perfect, I think they are the closest they have ever come to being truly playable in the various iterations of Warhammer.
This post is about the Old Worlder Mercenary Contingent, but first a bit of backstory.
As I noted here, my very first step into Warhammer Fantasy Battle was in 3rd Edition. Since the other guys had already picked armies and we did not want to duplicate any one army I had a few choices to go with, all on the "good side". I had always liked knights back in the day so Bretonnia it was. A few stops at the local game stores left me with the following for my very first games (around 1988):
- 10 Chevaliers D'Honneur
- 22 Archers
- 1 cannon and crew
- A bunch of assorted models I recall fielding as Brigands.
I only ever recall playing against Dave's Skaven before converting them to an Empire force which would become my first real army. Jeff had some he sold me some Empire halberdiers I think to bolster the force and aid the conversion of the army. As knights of the Empire I used epoxy glue to add aluminum foil to paint barding! Ugh. The lengths we went through to make the models WYSIWYG. Nowadays I could pull it off with green stuff but back then my skills at modelling were not so good and no one knew what green stuff was.
After a while my dislike of all things Bretonnia grew as well as eventually creating three 10+ units of Empire Knights which the need for Bretonnian knights standing in as Imperial ones diminished. Even so, I bought some 5th Edition Bretonnian horses a number of years later repainting and remounting the knights; and then promptly did nothing with them. I was fortunate in that I did save the original horses having a vague idea of using them as steeds for a paddock and stable terrain piece. A casualty of them sitting at the bottom of various bits boxes for years was that almost all were missing their tails. No big deal as I recreated them with green stuff that came out quite well. Moral of the story: never throw anything out!
Now this brings me to the present. A month or so back I stripped down the archers and primed them just for the hell of it. But in doing so I got to thinking. About six months ago I reassembled one of my Bretonnian cannons that I saved the frame for 20 years (the barrel was part of a crappy home built steam tank, now since destroyed). Did this mean I was going to reassemble my Bretonnian? No. With a perusal through the 3rd Edition Warhammer Armies book it became clear it would be more fun to paint them up as scummy mercenaries! This has the added benefit of the fact that I am the administrator of Dogs of War Online, homeland of mercenaries!
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| Free Foresters at the ready! |
A few nights of stripping paint, redoing horse tails and finding shields and we were all set. Note the shields will be repainted; some of them sport their crappy 1988 paint jobs. Paint jobs reflective of me not knowing what the Hell I was doing back then.
So now the force becomes:
- 10 Tilean Condotieri or 10 Estalian Caballeros
- 22 Archers now equating to 20 Free Foresters*
- 1 cannon and crew (probably will just end up as a small diorama type piece)
- 9 crossbowmen I've had for odds and ends to form a small unit of Tilean crossbowmen.
- Going to add 20 pikemen from either the Pike and Shotte range or the Perry Miniatures range*.
- 20 Bretonnian brigands. I did have a few here but foolishly traded them, I'll need to reacquire these guys.
- I also was able to rehab 10 unarmored 3rd edition horses; I'll be looking for more knight figures on eBay sans riders to fill them out.
- Still need to decide on a mounted contingent commander.
- Yes, the rules say a maximum of 20, but I am not too worried about the 3rd Edition Warhammer police breaking down my door at 2 AM for rules violations....
** Perry miniatures obviously seamlessly integrate with the other minis. Minis from the Foundry line are another possibility.
