Escalation League – Undead Legion Pt. 1

Over the next 3-4 months I’m going to be building out my Undead Legion army as part of our local Escalation League. I’ve not done an escalation league before but anything that adds variety to the hobby is ok by me. I’m not familiar enough on how others do escalation, but basically we are building/painting/playing 500pts/month. In January we’ll play 500pt games, February 1000pt, etc. And I’m taking on a pretty ambitious project with the theme of this army.

THEME

So I won’t go into my general and his backstory just yet, but in broad strokes I wanted this army to be:

• Skeleton Heavy

• Look completely unlike VC or TK armies

• Incorporate skeletons of many many different races from across the Warhammer world.

THE LIST

So the first thing I had to do was write my 500pt list for January. I’m going to be playing with their equipment a bit so I won’t post that here.

2 Units of 5 Horse Archers – Core skellies are better chaff than they are tarpits, so I wanted skeletons that might do some damage early on, and then could act as chaff. I thought about just skeleton archers, but wasn’t satisfied with them being one trick at this point level.

1 Unit of 14 Grave Guard – Same stat line as black knights but I sacrifice movement for numbers, and can bunker a tomb prince for the +1 WS. Banner of Barrows is also obvious.

1 Tomb Prince – for what he gives to the grave guard.

GRAVE GUARD (O&G)

I didn’t only choose the list for how it works, but also for the models I found for the different units. First off, the grave guard.

Titan-Forge Miniatures have these amazing O&G skeletons all armored up. You may have also seen them in a recent O&G Undead army painted up by GMM Studios.

They are beefy as hell and were an obvious choice for grave guard. And they fit part of my theme.

They are $30 for 5,  resin plastic which isn’t my favorite, and they are a bit hellish to rank up. Each of these guys is posed in a very specific way to fit together and it’s difficult for the next rank back as well.

Right now I’m filling ranks with skellies because they are easy to fit and cost a bit less.

HORSE ARCHERS (Centaurs)

Next up are the horse archers. Now i don’t know if I saw inspiration for this somewhere else or simply saw it in the models themselves. After I started thinking about it I could only find 1 or 2 instances of someone attempting this for their Tomb Kings army. Unlike the standard horse archer kit, I wanted these guys to be jumping and full of energy.

So I started playing with the kits and seeing if i could ‘animate’ them a bit more. Seeing that the prototype worked, I had to have them jumping over something. You don’t just jump in the middle of an open field. So I put some pointy stick barriers (Chevaux-de-frise) on the base.

I used skewers, adhesive caulk, and rocks to give me the muddy battlefield look i was going for. And I think ended up with something pretty dynamic. I have a second unit of horse archers to build and I’m tempted to go a different direction than centaurs. Maybe Nippon?

Let me know what you think of my List at 500 points. If you know of any great non-human skeleton models from other manufacturers, please let me know. I’ve scoured the net and have a few more surprises i hope to share.