Fantasy Warlord - A Wargame Dead Before it Ever Lived

Fantasy Warlord is one of those games that feels like it should have had a real shot…and then simply didn’t.

Released in 1990 by Folio Works, it was the work of two ex-Games Workshop employees: Ian Bailey and Gary Chalk (Chalk also did the illustrations; which are polarizing, some like it, some really don't). They left GW because they didn’t like the direction the company was heading: more commercial, more product-driven; and decided to build their own alternative to Warhammer Fantasy Battle. On paper it had a lot going for it: simultaneous movement, a proper command-and-control system built around brigades led by characters, fog-of-war rules, and an attempt at more balanced magic and army construction. It even had its own setting (Vortimax) and a short-lived supporting magazine called Red Giant (a none-too-subtle dig at White Dwarf). The promise didn't match up to the reality however. 

And then it was gone.

The game was out of print in roughly eighteen months. The planned supplements never appeared. Only two issues of Red Giant saw the light of day. Folio Works itself was dissolved in early 1993. In the grand scheme of the hobby it barely registered. Most people who were playing fantasy wargames in the early ’90s simply never saw it, or saw it once and moved on. I was in the later, I recall seeing at Crazy Egor's around 1992/92ish.

I have a fair amount of sympathy for what Bailey and Chalk were trying to do, especially as someone who came up playing 3rd Edition Warhammer. Fourth Edition was a pretty abrupt turn. The game moved away from the more historical-miniature-gaming roots and into a cleaner, more simplified, fully fantasy product. A lot of the older texture got sanded off in the process. Fantasy Warlord feels like it was aimed at players who still wanted some of that earlier complexity and command friction. Whether it actually delivered is another question, but the impulse behind it makes sense when you remember how sharp the break between 3rd and 4th Edition felt at the time.

I only remembered the game several years back and grabbed a copy off eBay for something like $20. To me it felt very natural in the sense that the miniatures looked familiar. They are quite decent sculpts and fit the style of 3rd Edition armies quite well. It’s also interesting to note just how “early” they were with this: by which I mean there are clearly GW miniatures in the photos of the rulebook. That is to be expected. If you look carefully on page 139, that’s quite clearly the Warhammer Mighty Fortress forming the walls the cavalry is charging from along with Bretonnian knights AND other GW figures.

This doesn't bother me in the slightest, it points to just how close to the ragged/bleeding edge this enterprise was.

Warhammer Mighty Fortress...err, FANTASY WARLORD FORTRESS!

One aspect of Fantasy Warlord that still lives on is the miniatures it spawned. To this day they can be found on the Alternative Armies website. The sculpts are good and look very much in line with the 3rd Edition Warhammer miniatures ranges.

One last point. The art. As I noted up-thread either you loved it or hated it. For my own part I'm of the opinion that Chalk's black and with stuff is very good. There are a lot of great pieces that feel very gritty in that Warhammer kind of way. Its his color stuff that is much more divisive.  

To close? Sometimes the market doesn’t care how good your rules are. Sometimes it only cares who got there first and who has the louder voice. Fantasy Warlord is one of those quiet near-misses that still deserves a footnote.

So, any other folks out there that remember Fantasy Warlord? 

Warhammer - A Mighty Fortress...Sort Of...

It is important to first note that this is not that Mighty Fortress.

In fact this castle came about from missing out on that terrain piece back in the day and even recently on eBay... at least at a price that I'm willing to pay.

This Empire style castle originally started out as my attempt at recreating Castle Wittgenstein from Death on the Reik. In the end life got in the way and it wasn’t really going to be practical for anything other than playing the module. I got as far as the part which would become the gatehouse seen above, which corresponds to The Guard Tower (areas 28-29 / page 70 of the module).

While I did not finish the entire castle, I did set aside the work I had done, not knowing what I might use it for in the future. Seasoned terrain makers know this: never throw anything away. You never know when it might be needed.

It is also important to point out the timeline for this particular castle. I built it in January 2025 but have not blogged about it till now. After utilizing the same construction methods for the Guard Tower for T1- The Village of Hommlet I decided to go back and chronicle this one too.

In a way it was an idea to create an iconic castle from the RPG world in the same vein as the Moathouse from the fame of T1 - The Village of Hommlet that has come full circle. From the first attempt at Castle Wittgenstein inspired by the Moathouse to this to the Guard Tower in T1. As the band said, what a long strange trip it has been.

Materials List

• Cardboard
• Posterboard
• Crescent board (it is thicker than poster board)
• Balsa wood
• Thin card (from cereal boxes and cracker boxes)
• Foamcore (this is critical for keeping the weight down; used in the towers and walls)
• Popsicle sticks
• Toothpicks
• Finishing nails (rivets for the gates) 
• 1/2 gallon milk containers (towers) 
• White glue
• Super glue
• X-Acto knife
• Single hole puncher
• Saw tooth pattern scissors
• Coping saw

That’s it. it really doesn't take much more than that to create terrain pieces.

 

Finishing the Gatehouse 

When I did pick this back up the main task of the gatehouse was the upper wooden structure itself. I decided to make it removable and with vertical wooden walls inside and out. The six windows per side were an easy matter of cutting square toothpicks.

Gatehouse under construction

While the removable roof was a long process I actually enjoyed it. The roofing is standard and I have done it numerous times on terrain pieces. The only difference here was the angle. Simply cut some thin cardboard, overlap and glue. When I got to the inside roof however? For some strange reason I used Popsicle sticks and balsa wood to finish it off fully. While it will never really come into play during a game it does have the added benefit of having made the roof very strong and square.

The doors to the gatehouse were a bit of trouble as I bought some small metal hinges to make them swing open. The trouble from this arose in the fact that I had not initially intended for them to swing open. Rather they were going to be a solid static piece that would be removed for access. I wonder if that would have been the better route to go but on any event I made it work.

A special note is the jagged tooth scissors I had worked wonders for the patterns on the front gate. It was a simple matter of cutting them out of poster board and stacking several layers and later painting a rusty metallic color.

Construction

With the gatehouse roughly complete I was able to create the walls and towers easier. In a single night I was able to cut and assemble the foamcore basis of the walls and line up the four 1/2 gallon milk cartons that would become the towers.

Rounding to form

From there I figured out a way to make the battlements easier. Being that the walls were straight I simply made two posterboard templates. One was slightly taller than the other allowing for the angling of each battlement "tooth" echoing the Mighty Fortress kit. The key lesson was to only lightly score the bottom portion of each space between each tooth. This had the practical effect of making sure that each battlement section was a uniform width. From there it was a simple matter of placing the taller template in the back and the slightly shorter one towards the front edge of the wall with a slight overhang.

The overhang was needed for the machicolations which turned out to be easy to do. I simply measured
the length of the wall section in question, cut a piece of crescent board, and then used the single hole puncher being mindful of the spacing. Glued at an angle and done. I repeated this for the other three walls and two small wall sections near the gate.

One thing I wanted to do to add distinction to the towers was create a pronounced arrow loop on each external facing. These proved to be surprisingly easy to do and in the end added a lot of character.

Once the walls were complete I pondered just how to construct the walls themselves to look like stone. As a test I mixed up some concrete with a lot of glue. The results were less than impressive. The mixture did not adhere well and fortunately did not damage the walls. Even before I attempted this I knew I was going to have to cut and glue everything stone wise. I was simply looking for alternatives to the monotony of cutting and gluing.

WIP after the walls completed

About a week later I had barreled through the task of adding "stone" to the walls and towers. From there I tested the fit of each wall section and how they lined up before creating the balsa wood doors on each tower and double checked they lined up again.

Painting

After the failed attempt at the concrete mix I was a bit more alert on painting the castle proper. To start I used one of the smaller wall sections that flanked the guardhouse as a test. By this I mean I dry brushed it in succession: dark gray, medium gray and very lightly white. From there I did another dry brush of a very light mid orange and then washed it with watery black.

Once I had it down the next step was to repeat it on the walls and towers and add grass and rocks to the base of the walls.

In my opinion the color scheme works. I was surprised it was the light orange dry brush that pulled it together to echo field stone rather than plain solid gray. Too much gray makes a castle look fake and uninteresting. By doing it this way it pops more.

Taking Stock and Lessons Learned

Overall this was the fourth castle/fortress/tower I have built from nothing more than the material list above. In each case I learned something new and fair number of ways to not construct things.

The tally of castles, fortresses, and towers stands as follows:

• A castle for Warhammer Siege for my buddies back in our high school days. It is long since lost in various moves from the house I grew up in. I built this one around 1990/91. It was all one unit and not modular. From its bulky nature I learned not to do that again...
• A watch tower I made from a 1/4 milk carton (still have that one), circa 2001.
• The Nippon castle  for my Nippon army in 3rd Edition Warhammer. As documented on the blog from 2012 to finally finishing it in 2020. This is modular for the walls but the central keep is not.
• A Dark Ages fortress that started simply from me noodling around whittling sticks. Finished in 2021.
• In 2024 the simple Watch Tower from page 43 of the How to Make Wargames Terrain book from Games Workshop.
• The Guard Tower  at Area #31 in T1 - The Village of Hommlet, July 2026.

Through all these I have learned three simple lessons: make it modular, keep it light and keep the materials list simple. And again I can’t stress it enough: make it light.

Final Thoughts 

All in all the project came out well considering its stop and start beginnings as an entirely different terrain piece. One of the things I am most happy about is how everything fits together well due to making it modular from the start. That and the fact the long straight wall sections are also useful for role playing games like AD&D.

The color of the whole thing was a surprise but a pleasant one. If it is a bit on the orange side in the photos that is OK. In person it is fairly subdued and works well with the color of the gatehouse roof.

Maybe someday in the future I will try again with Castle Wittgenstein but not now. The scale of Castle Von Wittgenstein which I initially based the terrain off of? It would be massive. Based on the illustration on the cover of the module and the comparison of the maps inside (which do not really match up at all) it was a bit off.

The cover art for Death on the Reik is iconic in fantasy games but the grandeur of the castle does not really translate well to 25mm scale in my opinion. At least that is what I found with the initial attempts.

That said, who knows what the future holds.

The Citadel Giant Saga- Part II: The Citadel Giant That Shouldn’t Have Been Found

THE Citadel Giant after the first pass of paint removal.

Every collector knows the feeling:
“If I’d been five minutes later, it would’ve been gone.”

This was not that.

What happened with the Citadel Giant wasn’t a near miss, or good timing, or even great luck. It was a sequence of events that—taken together—should not realistically occur in the normal life cycle of a collecting hobby.

Here’s why.

Not One Improbability — A Chain of Them

Most rare finds hinge on one unlikely thing going right.

This required many, and every one of them had to succeed for the outcome to happen at all. Miss any step, and the chain collapses. 

Think of them as “gates.” If even one stays closed, the Giant is never found.

I should add I was doing these in real time in about 20 minutes start to finish. Checking and referencing sites, is this a legitimate sale? What should I offer? All the while what amount I should offer as I raced the clock knowing that someone else might find it and get a claim in before me.

Primary Seller Gates (Shipment 1)

These gates describe everything that had to go right before the Giant was ever discovered.

Gate 1 — The Giant Had to Exist in the Wild

This was not a standard retail Citadel Giant. It was an internal-cast example pulled from legacy molds—never sold through normal channels and almost never seen publicly. Most collectors will never encounter one at all.

Gate 2 — The Owner Had to Let It Go

Owners of items this rare typically keep them, trade privately, or pass them quietly to other collectors. In this case, the owner chose to sell it openly instead.

Gate 3 — It Had to Be Listed in the "Wrong" Place

Rather than appearing on eBay or a specialist forum, the Giant was listed on Bonanza, a low-traffic marketplace that most collectors do not actively monitor.

Gate 4 — The Search Had to Use the “Wrong” Engine

The discovery depended on using DuckDuckGo instead of Google. DuckDuckGo indexes and ranks obscure listings differently, often surfacing results Google suppresses or ignores.

Gate 5 — The Listing Had to Sit Unnoticed

The Giant needed to remain unsold long enough to be discovered — not snapped up immediately, but not hidden forever either.

Gate 6 — DuckDuckGo Had to Index It at All

Low-authority marketplaces are not always indexed consistently. DuckDuckGo had to successfully ingest and surface the Bonanza listing.

Gate 7 — The Result Had to Appear in a Narrow Visibility Band

The listing landed deep in the results — far enough down to avoid early interception by other collectors, but not so deep that it was functionally invisible.

Gate 8 — A Nonstandard Search Phrase Had to Work

The search phrase used (“The Warhammer Giant 1983”) was conversational and imprecise. It did not match catalog-standard naming and would normally fail to surface an obscure Bonanza listing.

Yet it worked.

Gate 9 — The Timing Had to Be Right

The discovery happened late on a Friday night — a low-competition window when fewer collectors are actively searching.

Gate 10 — The Search Had to Be on Mobile

DuckDuckGo’s mobile search behaves differently from desktop, favoring natural-language phrasing and long-tail results. The search was performed on mobile, not desktop.

Gate 11 — A Deep Scroll Had to Happen

The listing appeared several pages down. Most users never scroll that far, but in this case, it happened.

 

Interlocking Market Gate

Gate 12 — No One Else Could Find It First

During the narrow window when the listing was discoverable, no other collector ran the same search, using the same engine, at the same time, and scrolled deep enough to see it.

If anyone had, the story ends there.

THE Citadel Giant, stripped down of paint.

Secondary Seller Gates (Shipment 2 — The Parts That Shouldn’t Have Appeared 

Together)

After the Giant was secured, a second, unrelated sequence unfolded — one that depended entirely on the first.

Gate 13 — Another Seller Had to Have Loose Giant Parts

A separate seller happened to possess multiple loose components from the same rare kit — something that is itself uncommon.

Gate 14 — A Casual Purchase Had to Spark a Question

A non-rare head variant was purchased, which prompted a simple follow-up inquiry: “Do you happen to have any other Giant parts?”

Gate 15 — The Rarest Head Had to Be There

The seller’s unlisted inventory included the Feral Beard head, the rarest of all Giant head variants.

Gate 16 — Multiple Rare Hands Had to Be There Too

That same unlisted inventory also contained both rare non-club right-hand variants — parts that almost never appear together.

Gate 17 — The Seller Had to Respond and Agree

The seller replied, confirmed the parts, and agreed to sell them — rather than ignoring the message or declining.

Gate 18 — All of This Had to Happen Quickly

The entire secondary sequence unfolded within six days of the original acquisition, before circumstances, attention, or availability changed.

And if this weren't enough? Two different sellers, two different locations and shipping methods. Two separate paths through customs and two different sets of delays in shipping? Both arrived at my door within hours of each other on the same day.

Why This Matters

Any one of these gates opening would be unremarkable. All of them opening? In order is not.

Add to this all of the gates are not weighed evenly. Some like 6,7,8,10 and 11 are beyond absurd that they worked out that way. Gate 6 in particular? I found the giant on page 5 of my search results. DuckDuckGo had indexed it just enough, but not too much to get to a "Goldilocks" zone for me to find it after being diligent enough to drill down.

This is why the story of the Citadel Giant isn’t just about finding a rare miniature. It’s about a fragile chain of conditions that almost never align, aligning once.

And then closing behind it.

Part III will deal with the math behind such an unlikely turn of events. When I said at the onset this "should not realistically occur in the normal life cycle of a collecting hobby?" 

That's not even close to the true. You could run this time after time and the numbers become astronomically rare. I lived it and I still don't believe it really happened.

Note: His restoration progress will be taking place at Oldhammer.org for updates. 

The Citadel Giant Saga- Part I: Or, How Probability, Patience, and USPS Collided

There are purchases, and then there are events.

This was the latter.

"The BIG Giant!"

What began in late November 2025 as a straightforward (if ambitious) acquisition of a 1983 Citadel Giant turned into a multi-week exercise in probability theory, logistics archaeology, and patience-testing uncertainty, capped off by an ending so absurd that it deserves to be documented properly.

This post is that documentation. A follow-up post will contain the mind bending series of improbabilities that led to me finding the giant, but that is for a last day.

Now, because the story needs embellishment, it really doesn’t, but because it illustrates something collectors understand instinctively and outsiders rarely see: the journey matters almost as much as the object.

The Find

The giant itself needs little introduction to Oldhammer collectors. Early Citadel giants are iconic, heavy, and un-apologetically of their era: full of character, strange proportions, and sculptural craziness.

 

What made this one unusual wasn’t just condition or completeness, but the seller’s claim of provenance:

• Cast directly from original Citadel molds

• Not a retail release

• Produced long after normal production had ended

• Originating from a former Games Workshop staff member

That combination alone put this piece firmly outside the normal collecting pipeline.

I made an offer.

It was accepted.

And then… shipping in late November/early December “happened.”

The Waiting Begins

Once the package actually entered the shipping system, things accelerated — and then immediately became opaque.

There were two shipments tied to the giant:

• Shipment 1: The giant itself

• Shipment 2: A secondary shipment containing rare hands and two heads including

the feral bearded head; the most difficult of the five to acquire.

 

Tracking information oscillated between “in customs,” “shipping,” and “somewhere that definitely exists, trust us.”

At various points, both packages appeared to be:

• in New York,

• not in New York,

• cleared customs,

• not cleared customs,

• and possibly sitting on a pallet that both existed and did not exist simultaneously.

Schrödinger’s pallet, if you will.

The Absurd Resolution

Then, on a quiet Saturday morning, reality intervened.

At 9:19 AM, right within my normal USPS delivery window, the giant arrived.

No warning.

No accurate tracking update.

Just… there.

A fleeting phone notification earlier that morning hinted at something “giant”-related, then vanished. The databases hadn’t caught up, but the truck had.

Later that same day — while we were out shopping — Shipment 2 arrived as well.

Both shipments.

Same day.

After weeks of uncertainty.

The system didn’t announce victory.

It simply delivered the boxes and pretended nothing unusual had happened.

Perspective

The giant is really cool. The heads and hands are fantastic. The odds involved were absurd enough to be memorable. But in the end, this was a good problem to have, and one that resolved without loss.

Before paint removal but having safely arrived.

Actually when I say the odds were absurd? That’s an understatement. Part 2 of this story will contain the roughly 18 steps of improbability that I successfully navigated to come out the other side with a complete giant…in six days. This shouldn’t have happened even once, but it did.

Epilogue: The Name

The giant has been named:

Duncan the Drunken.

He currently resides downstairs in the man cave, awaiting his turn on the painting table. There will be tartan. There will be red hair. There will be decisions made slowly and deliberately.

For now, though, the saga is complete.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s a simple one: Tracking is advisory. Reality does what it wants. And sometimes… it’s just Saturday and an ultra rare citadel miniature shows up at your front door.

I Painted the Dwarf Allies…And Broke Warhammer Allies (1988)

From White Dwarf #108: "Eradicated Gremlins GW? More like they lived on for nearly 40 years."

 

There I was, happily painting up a Dwarf Ally Contingent from the 3rd Edition Warhammer Armies Book from 1988. I had a handful of figures left over from my six thousand point Dwarf army, so it felt like an obvious project. This also tied into my larger plan. I have been trying to collect all eleven armies in the book (Norse from White Dwarf #107 eventually too) and every Ally and Mercenary Contingent, each with its own dedicated set of miniatures.

As noted on the blog previously, years ago, I consolidated and rebuilt my Dwarf Mercenary force using leftover Battle for Skull Pass figures from the later editions. Even after that, I still had extra metal models from the period, along with plastic Dwarfs from the old Warhammer Regiment box set. You know how this hobby goes. A few Quarrelers, some Ironbreakers, a hero, and you think you are ready to field a proper contingent. That was the plan, at least. I was wrong.

While I was finishing the Dwarf Warrior unit, the question hit me. “Okay, who can actually take these guys?”

It seemed simple. Open Warhammer Armies from 1988, check the ally lists, match these stout warriors to the army that could field them, and move on with the project.

Except this is where the wheels came off: no one can take them. Not one of the eleven armies in the book.

• Not Empire.
• Not Bretonnia.
• Not even the Dwarfs themselves.
• No Army AT ALL.

That could not be right, or so I thought. But it was. By painting a simple ally contingent, I had stumbled onto one of the most quietly funny and completely uncorrected design mistakes in the entire 3rd Edition era.

The best part? It was right there in plain sight for thirty seven years and nobody ever noticed. ETA (12/3/25): turns out despite my best efforts to source this out, someone else did notice! So no shame here, credit where credit is due! Oldhammer discussion

How I Found the Break Point

After rereading each army entry and its allowed ally list, I decided to reverse the logic.

Rather than asking “What allies can this army take?”
I asked a different question. “Which armies can take these allies?”

I doubt Games Workshop ever approached it this way. I will talk more about that in Part II. I went contingent by contingent and built a full matrix. As the list grew, the pattern became obvious. Army after army had nothing but empty space under the Dwarf Allies category. The Dwarf Ally entry is fully written, fully pointed, and laid out just like every other valid contingent, but no army in the book is actually permitted to use it.

I still did not believe it. So I checked my notes again and kept cross checking online. The result never changed. I even checked the Norse list from White Dwarf #107, which is an official 3rd Edition army. They cannot take Dwarf Allies either.

Then I pulled out both of my copies of the Army Book, the hardcover and the softcover. The same gap appears in both. I will come back to that in more detail in Part II.

Surely This Was Fixed in an Errata?

That was my next thought. I went straight to the web to look for it. This had to be a known issue. I expected to find a long forgotten White Dwarf sidebar, a footnote, a FAQ, a designer comment, or something buried on an old website. Anything at all.

There was nothing.

So I turned to the two White Dwarf issues that are always cited as containing the 3rd Edition corrections for Warhammer Armies from 1988.

• White Dwarf #107
• White Dwarf #108

And guess what?

Still nothing. Not a single word about Dwarf Allies. Those errata entries only address small housekeeping items. They mainly correct point values and attribute scores for Dark Elves and Skaven. The Dwarf Ally issue is not mentioned anywhere.

The only conclusion I could reach is that the Dwarf Ally Contingent was and still is completely orphaned. It is a dead entry in Warhammer Armies from 1988, and none of us caught it. I have handled that book thousands of times and never noticed it.

And now that I see it, the whole thing feels right in line with the era.

The Most Oldhammer Thing Possible

Welcome to 3rd Edition, where Chaos mutations contradict their own points formula, where Fimir somehow ally with Norse in ways no scholar of fantasy biology can explain, where Nippon mercenaries can be taken only by Dark Elves for reasons known only to the gods, and where the best way to understand the rules is to accept that nobody in 1988 was paid enough to cross index the ally matrix.

This is peak Oldhammer. Creative, chaotic, brilliant, flawed, and absolutely perfect all at once.

Why I Never Noticed This in the ’80s, Even Though I Used Allies

I used allies all the time during the 3rd Edition years. Wood Elves, High Elves, Halflings and Norse saw plenty of table time for me, but I never once used the Dwarf Allies. That alone explains why this flaw stayed hidden from me for almost forty years.

There was another reason as well. Everyone else in my group had started playing before I did, and we had a simple rule. No one could play the same army. I took Empire because it was still open. That choice dictated the allies I reached for. When I looked at Dwarfs, my attention went straight to the four dwarf cannons from the Dwarf Mercenary Contingent. That was the obvious path for an Empire player.

The Dwarf Ally Contingent itself did not help matters. There is nothing in it that you cannot already get from the main Dwarf army list:

• 
  
  1 Contingent Commander
• 0–40 Dwarf Crossbowmen
• 0–10 Ironbreakers (really, what are you doing with just ten???) 
  
• 10–80 Dwarf Warriors (that's like a whole army!)

It is a perfectly serviceable group of troops, but nothing that would tempt a player who had better and more cost effective options elsewhere. 

So What Now?

Well, in my case?

I fixed the oversight in my own matrix I created. Dwarfs are available to Empire and Bretonnia and Dwarfs themselves as Allies (see here).

But the real fun was the discovery itself. I set out to paint a few allies… and in the process, I broke Warhammer Armies (1988). I didn’t just paint Dwarf Allies. I painted a glitch in the game’s original source code.

Not bad for a weekend project.

Warhammer Levies, next to useless, but fun to paint!

"Go and get um' lads! There is only one and there are thirty of us, what could go wrong? CHARGE!!!"

All too often the biggest, the baddest and the most cool units in Warhammer get all the attention. After all that kick ass unit that wins you game after game gets the glory, as it should. But this post is not about those glory soaked units. In fact we are going to talk about the other end of the unit spectrum: levies!

We all know about the High Elf Dragonkin in 3rd Edition Warhammer, the Daemons of Khorne or even the incredible stat lines of vampires (see below) or treemen. So instead, how about levies! In this case a peasant levy from the 3rd Edition Bretonnian Army list in Warhammer Armies.

Before we get into it, first things first, the stat-line for the unit, in this case, Rascals (sorry about the low light photo of the entry):

WS2, BS2, I2, there is no way around it, levies are bad and not in a good way. Their only redeeming feature (if you can call it that) is that they are cheap at 4 points per model. Spears and shields costing .5 points a piece do not really do much to bring them up to even being remotely useful. On top of that they are compulsory troops (yes White Dwarf #137 had a revised page for the Bretonnians, but going with this for now).

Add to this the rules from the Warhammer Fantasy Rulebook on page 99 shows that they have a special mob formation meaning they cannot expand or contract frontage. Basically the unit formation they appear with on the first turn? That is what they are going to go with the whole battle, no changing it.

So the natural question is what are they good for? The answer is really not much. On the battlefield I suppose one could use them to tie up a unit for a round or so, but the opposing player would have to be fairly dumb to get caught up in that. Barring that? They add a lot of character to a game and perhaps that is the best way to look at them.

Painting and unit composition: Aside from one brigand Games Workshop model as the leader, the rest are from the Old Glory Revenge line of medieval miniatures with a fair amount of weapon swaps from various GW sprues like the zombie and empire regiments. In a way these minis capture the look and feel of peasant warriors far better than what I could get from GW when they still did Fantasy Battle in the late 6th through 8th edition days. In fact they are fairly close to the minis of 3rd Edition at the time in terms of look and feel. Hand weapons were a bit too small, perhaps a consequence of GW over-sizing their weapons? But otherwise the proportions are a match.

I especially liked how the "front rankers" and the axe-men came out in terms of painting, and the leader most of all. I imagine him as a brigand who somehow got himself "elected" leader of this rabble and forced onto the field of battle when he would rather be in a tavern! The pitchfork minis all came out well too. Now there is a weapon! The Sword of Khaine, bane of the Elven race??? BAH, PITCHFORK!!!

In terms of color scheme I deliberately kept the color palette limited and muted, trying to make them look muddy and dirty rather than bright. I used a lot of dark washes and slathered it on deliberately. From there it was minimal highlights. Overall I kept it to various shades of brown, tans, a bit of green here and there and black. After I took the photos I noticed a few things and I am touching up the standard/totem banner. It is a bit dodgy in spots and needs a bit more attention in my estimation.

Actual usage: Well... never really on the tabletop. As I was the only "non-evil army" player in the gaming group back in the day, I was the only one that would have conceivably fielded these guys, but as I was just scrapping together models to get a force on the field, I did not. This is in spite of the fact that the first army I fielded was in fact Bretonnians for a few games before I converted over to Empire (in the early days we ignored the compulsory units to a degree for the first few games as we were assembling armies). Fortunately, I kept all the models and added these guys to the force a few years back.

Looking through Warhammer Armies I did actually use levies once, but never made it to the field. As I note here in our forays into Warhammer Siege using my Empire army, I fielded units of Landestrum, (aka Empire levies) for forage and support. I did not have models representing the units at the time though as it was not really necessary: they were only ever on the strategic map.

Finally, in terms of the armies that can field levies, out of the 12 (the 12th being the Norse in White Dwarf #107) they appear for the following: Empire, Bretonnia, Skaven and Slann in Warhammer Armies. In the case of the Slann, there are the Jungle Braves listed as a levy and the human slave unit which has the same stat line as humans, but a point cost akin to levies. Skeletons and zombies have comparable stats in the Undead army, but their special rules make them different in terms of play. One could make the argument that goblins and snotlings are close in the Orc and Goblin list, but not quite exactly levies per se, certainly with the snotling rules. Gnomes with their crappy Toughness of 2 for the Dwarf army are likewise close, but I do not think I ever even saw a single gnome miniature from GW. As such highly unlikely anyone ever fielded a unit, definitely not in my Dwarf army which grew to be quite substantial.

In the mercenaries and ally contingents section, the pygmy allies for the Slann are close with their S2, T2. The halfling ally section is similar as they likewise have S2, T2 in their stats, but make up for this with a BS4. If I ever get around to a Slann army and ever get around to a pygmy ally contingent, I would bump their BS to 4 just like the halflings, makes sense to me for the same point values. The fact that levies are not a fixture of that section stands to reason: whether hiring mercs or getting allies to your cause, one is usually not getting the dregs of a society's warriors; certainly not in the case of spending coin on mercenaries.

NOTE: From above, vampires in Warhammer? Forget sparkly Twilight vampires; check out the stat lines in 3rd Edition Warhammer, holy crap! Even the Level 5 ones kick ass, wow. Perhaps a post for another time.