When 4E was announced, I was hit with a wave of motivation, and happily threw myself into a new army project, slowly chipping away at a specific pile of shame that had sat idle in several boxes for several years now: Mantic Dwarfs!
Running multiple Kings of War armies already, and liking to explore every unit and unit size that I can, a brand new army probably isn’t the smartest call, but oh well, here we are. Painting has been going on for 6ish months, and now that my early basing stages are finally figured out and some units are becoming more table ready, I figured I’d show these off here. (More detailed updates can be found at my blog, which covers all my Kings of War exploits, including hobbying in more detail, and battle reports.)
I wanted a verdant, grassy Free Dwarf theme for this army, something bright and eye-catching. I forced myself into learning some static grass techniques, and really tried to push myself to use layers and highlights here, to get a much brighter and cleaner army than my normal efforts, which have largely favored washes. Free Dwarfs might not be the smartest call for the new Edition, but time will tell. Long, rambling introduction done, the first units table-ready are (fittingly) Berserkers of many kinds!
The troops here are likely going to be put to work in demo lists for my Mantic Pathfinder demo games. At this unit size, they do have some fantastic Nerve, and we might fit them into a proper list or two to test out sometime. I did not do a good job with their stands, but with some more flowers and tufts, we should be able to camouflage that more in the future.
The regiments are GW. I wanted the army to be mostly Mantic, but I like second-hand models and couldn’t say no to their price. They were a bit hard to rank up with their big, sweeping weapons and poses, but we managed to get 10 on each base, and it looks full. Almost all my purchases for the army happened years ago, so these are actually likely going to hit the table pretty frequently for me in the short term, as I am a bit short on Core units, now that list building has changed so drastically.
Next up are Berserkers on Brocks. The overwhelming majority of my models have been second-hand purchases, and the Brock bundles were rather short on arms, capes, heads, and even a few brock armor plates. This regiment got most of the missing brock bits, substituting with various round shields, and then the berserkers got arm substitutions and weapon swaps, green stuff fur shoulders to hide those bad connections, pauldrons to hide the poor green stuff work, and then head swaps. The bits are predominately GW, full of detail, but I opted to keep everything a more striking, basic silver here.
The next regiment was missing a bits on the brock saddles, so I threw a bunch of pouches and hatchets atop a blob of green stuff. I’ve got bits for two other regiments, but unlikely to hobby those up anytime soon, as I haven’t figured out how to get mileage out of cavalry yet this edition. Almost every charge has been hindered, which is not great for cavalry.
Next up are three Warlords. Oops. List building has changed in the years since the purchases were made… it’s a bit unfortunate, as I am likely only going to ever field one at a time. Still, early on, I’m likely fielding one of these all the time, so I can move some Berserkers over to help shoulder the Core tax, which is currently neglected a bit in the collection.
The Wizkids mini was somewhat of a test model for me, painted up quickly and used for some grass experimentation. I tried “sealing” the grass with diluted PVA on him, but did not like this approach, as I couldn’t get good consistency, and the grass got mushy.
The Mantic model on foot was fun, and worked out nicely – far nicer than the troops did with just the one stand to deal with! I built up a little milliput around him, and with some texture paste, everything went fine. Between the two foot lords, he is more likely to see the field.
The last warlord is the most likely to see the table early on for me, and is the Berserker Lord on Large Brock model from Mantic. Individuals have taken some rough hits in 4E, and with all of these competing for a likely singular Warlord slot, the mounted version of the Berserker Lord seems much more attractive to me right now.
This is it for now. All of these are still on the WIP side. They need base edges painted (black, probably? I can’t decide. Sound off if you have an opinion) and I’m waiting for more of the army to get to this level of “doneness” before I add the rest of my limited flowers and such. More to come soon!
I too want to like them but wow is the Dwarf support section overloaded! With cannons being the obvious choice and probably birds a solid second 
And as cool and appropriately costed as Faber is now, he too has direct competition from the two warlords riding on things …
