I have a confession to make - I never liked Dwarves. Their lore, their aesthetics, their playstyle… all of it was almost antithetical to what I liked in wargaming. Dwarves were just an army that I never, ever thought I’d want to play.
…yet here we are. 3000 points of Dwarfs, almost all of it done in the last 9 months, by a player who can’t stop painting yet more of these stubborn little bastards!
So what happened? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it started with an idea. A dream of an efficient, easily transportable Dwarf Army using the Mantic range. An Army I could take on a plane without fear of it getting damaged on the way. The Mantic Dwarves are perfect for this, with their solid bodies and rounded helmets, so long as I avoided any weapons sticking out the top or sides of the Regiment bases. If i could manage that, I could achieve my dream of the easy to store Dwarf Stack…
The army had a rough start. It took alot of test schemes to settle on a colour combo I was happy with. In the end I went with orange fabric with black armour (mainly because I really dislike painting metallics). Then I got a bit distracted, and spent most of 2020 painting an entire Trident Realms army. Whoops. 
So by the beginning of 2021, I had barely 350pts and 3 units painted;
But with no other distractions I was committed to getting this army done. And as it turned out, the army was pretty easy to paint too. So it’s rapidly grown since then!
Over time the armies background started to evolve too. I’ve always been a fan of playing the bad guy. And as I read further into their background, it became clear that the Imperial Dwarfs were not nice at all, being led by their authoritarian, expansionist King Golloch. And so my Dwarfs became the Fists of Golloch - the uncompromising clenched fist of their rightful King!
As a fan of personalising one’s army, I couldn’t help but convert my units where I could. One example is the square shields made from plasticard (I really dislike the kite shields). The Bulwarkers in particular are a favourite of mine, with their tower shields and “efficient” spear-armed pose. 
My Earth Elementals are a unit I never intended to add (not so easy to transport), but became a necessity when I decided to take my Dwarfs to a tournament and needed to fill out points. They’re basically made from corkboard and paperclips. Super-cheap, but I’m very happy with how they turned out.
The characters are the only other units I didn’t try to keep compact, since they’re pretty easy to store regardless. It also helps them to stand out, which is a bonus.
I’ve also incorporated a steampunk/technological theme into the army, by using robots from the Malifaux range (like the steam arachnid mastiffs and mecha-pig, above) and progressively more models from the Forgefathers range. I’m trying to keep it mostly Mantic, so the Forgefathers are great for this.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll probably put up more pics later on, but this post is long enough. 
