Tribal Spears Regiment

Bringing an old unit up to date

The Brutocracy of Mykretenae started off life as a WFB Beastmen army.
Full of enthusiasm and ideas about a Graeco-Spartan themed army and the availability of new plastic Hoplites from Immortal Miniatures and Victrix I picked up a box of each to form the backbone of the army.

The plastics themselves were lovely, scaled well and had enough components to allow me to customise them to a more beastly aspect.

I obviously wanted to keep the hoplite shield as an iconic piece of kit that would give the unit a common look, one I'd hope to replicate across the army as a whole.
So with the bodies and legs in one piece and the shield arm set in stone, the main options therefore to turn them into beasts were the heads and the weapon arms.

After a bit of playing around with several options it was clear that Ungor heads were a pretty good match up for the (slightly smaller scale) Hoplite bodies.
Finding spear arms that fitted the miniature scale-wise and looked sufficiently beastly proved to be a bit more tricky. The original arms that came with the Hoplites looked a bit weedy for the scale-creep I'm used to but lots of other WFB options were waaaay over-sized for the torso.
That was until I came across the spear arms for the Island of Blood Skaven. It was perfect. Scale was sufficiently large to look imposing, but not too big. The blades of the spears had a nice variety and looked suitably brutal, to emphasise the beastly nature of the army. They even had a small patch of fur on the arm to further 'beastify' them!
(Here's a decent view of the arm on a Skaven...

(picture taken from http://taleofpainters.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/tutorial-how-to-paint-skaven-clanrats.html)

So after a judicious amount of bits purchasing and swapping and bargaining I managed to get together enough heads and arms for the unit.

When it came to painting I wanted to ensure it didn't look too uniform. The armour and especially the hoplite shields would give the unit the feel of solid ranks that I wanted, but I still wanted it to have the appearance of a unit of beasts.
Starting out like as an Ungor unit, I also wanted them to have a lowly look and so I mixed up the skin colours across the unit, hopefully giving it that beastly 'mongrel' feel. Greys, off-whites and browns all mixed together.


After painting up the first few test models, it became clear that the Hoplite shields needed some decoration on them. Free-hand in any decent fashion is way beyond my skills as a painter, so I needed transfers. I looked around for all sorts and eventually came across Veni Vidi Vici's line of Ancient transfers. (http://www.3vwargames.co.uk/upshop/shop/hellenistic25mm.html)
A quick browse through and I saw the transfer design for Tanit, a Phoenician God and it looked spot on.

For a start they were red, like the classic Spartan lambda beloved of films and recreations of Spartan Hoplites. They were the right scale at 25mm and by turning them upside down, they even had a look of a stylised aspect of a bull's head. Perfect for an army being led by Minotaurs!

Still a number of them to add to this unit, but here they are in place on the front rank:

So there you have it. One Regiment of Tribal Spears.
In game I often give them the Diadem of Dragonkind to represent them using throwing spears (plus I like to have a breath weapon somewhere!)

NB - These were based up for use in WFB originally and so are on individual bases. It's my intention to rebase these onto a unit base. I want to rank them up a bit more tightly, possibly adding some more models to the unit (I know, going over and above the model count is not usual!) and making it a bit more dynamic looking.
I just need to find time to cut 25+ models of perfectly good individual bases... :/