You don't get far as a Supreme Lord of the Undead with only five Zombies, and I had a very clear vision for how I wanted my Army of Sylvania to look, even before the Storm of Chaos rules appeared and set my choices in stone.
The Zombies were going to be Free Company inspired - I forget now if this was before or after the Zombie Pirate kitbag arrived on the scene - and the Skeletons were going to be the proper puff-and-slash Soldiers of the Empire with uniform weapons. Specifically, I wanted mine to be Spearmen.
There's a lot of to-do about spears in sixth edition Warhammer, with a general consensus settling around "there's nothing a spear gets you that beats an extra point of armour save for a hand weapon." To that I can only say... yes, but the hand weapons on the Skeleton sprue are a state, and the spears are nice uniform weapons for nice uniformed soldiers. My choice was entirely down to aesthetics and commonality with the Empire range, and to hell with whether it was any good or not. (And then the Army of Sylvania rules came along and made it clear that hand weapons and shields weren't an option - you'd get the spears free, but you were going to get them!)
The Skeleton sprue was important here, because I went hard on the kitbashing with these lads. There wasn't going to be a single tiny Perry scale human hand visible on these models, not even behind the shields. They were going to be Warhammer Skeletons, and that meant big hefty hands and heads that would never fit inside the humans who were ostensibly from the same range.
The first five were built over Christmas 2003, as a proof of concept kind of thing, and once I was happy with those, the Soldiers of the Empire and Skeleton Warriors regiment kits were picked up on one of those long two-free-periods-of-a-Wednesday trips to Games Workshop Plymouth.*
I'm pretty sure I built them all in one long, deranged, glue-fumey session, snipping off boots and hands with increasingly deranged glee, matching the one heavily crooked spear arm to the one puffy sleeve that cut off at the elbow over and over.** I gave my best attempt at the "front rank spears down, next rank spears out, back ranks spears up" look of the regiment, and deliberately built the command group as far back on their bases as I could so there was room for Lord Ruthven's giant swooshy cloak in the front rank.
Good plan, but it backfired slightly as the Empire kit's enormous plastic flag was quite heavy and didn't take well to being located off-centre. It didn't help that I accidentally got the musician and standard bearer bodies the wrong way round. As such, for the first decade of operation, the standard bearer was secured by a base almost entirely filled with pewter offcuts. I'd have a chance to fix all this later, but - we'll get to that in due course.
My second unit of Skeleton Warriors was the one that drove me completely off the rails. By the time I built those, the Army of Sylvania list had arrived, and it brought a hitherto unheard of option: crossbows! Naturally, nothing else would do. I had to have some, immediately, and they had to be built to the same inexpert but consistent standard as my spearmen.
This involved a box of Tomb Kings Skeletons - they were the ones with the open, crooked hands, originally meant to draw bowstrings, which I reasoned would do a good job of holding crossbows. Crossbows which had their stocks cut and very, very, very clumsily restuck around the balled fist of the bow hands from the same kit.
Let me be clear and unambiguous - let me put across something very important here. This was an INSANE choice. When I came back to these figures a decade ago, I marvelled at the patience my eighteen-year-old self must have had to put them together in the first place. Twenty-eight-year-old me was having none of it, and left them in their parlous and disassembled state for thirty-three-year-old me to hastily restore as swordsmen.
Time had passed, you see, and I was less interested in playing the purist Army of Sylvania than I had been. It was more use to me to have access to both spears and swords to play the bread and butter Von Carstein list. However, when opportunity knocked - when thirty-three-year-old me was contacted by a local mother of lads who'd unearthed her sons' stash in the loft and wanted it gone to a good home - I was quick to secure the twenty Empire Crossbowmen, the proper ones with the metal arms, from said stash and hang on to them.
These have metal arms, and there was absolutely no way I was about to piss about with giving them skeletal hands, after the devil of a time I'd had trying to restore the plastics. Neither was I going to fray my increasingly fragile sanity with giving them extended necks. These were going to have the newer, smaller, sleeker Citadel skulls stuck directly into the socket joint, and they were going to like it.
I accept this is the lazy option. Nevertheless, the circumstances of building these - restoring the army in a manic whirl of avoiding-sorting-my-life-out and getting-ready-for-a-very-special-game during the summer of 2019 - meant it was better to get things done than leave them festering forever to be not-done properly. And this lassitude in the matter of hands also encouraged me to mix some plastic Empire sword hands in with plastic Skeleton sword hands and actually build a full block of post-mortem swordsmen at all. Perfect is the enemy of done, and I no longer have the same brain worms I did at the age of eighteen. I have different, all-new brain worms, and those impose different conditions on my hobby activities.
Anyway, here they are. All of them together.
Lord Ruthven's Redoubtable Regiment of Foot dates to the reign of Konrad von Carstein, when Laibach Ruthven first arose as castellan and captain-general of Templehof, and was founded on the promise that Ruthven would make again four centuries and change later.
"A Regiment shall be Raised, that no Living Man need take up Arms in defence of this County while his Antecedents stand ready to do so. Thus your Lord Protector requests and requires: bring out your Dead!"
Traditionally, the Regiment is maintained at four score strong. The First of Foot, twenty-five dead under arms, carry the spear, and are the strong fulcrum around which Ruthven's Order of the Grand Cross of Sylvania turns its line. The Second of Foot, likewise twenty-five dead, carry the sword, and prosecute the battle with aggression, often acting as bodyguard to the Lord Protector himself. The Third of Foot, the final score, carry the crossbow and are a reserve, defending the walls of castle or pickets of camp, taking the field seldom in any but a defensive engagement.
The First have always fought under the escutcheon of the Grand Cross, and indeed double as the footmen of the Order. The Second are a more ragged bunch, with many bearing a black eagle; it is believed the original members were raised following battle with the army of Reikland, and many brought their shortswords and shields into service past the grave. The Third stand under a pennant of plain purple and black, theirs being ever the rearguard and not the van, glory thus slow in coming.
Nonetheless, the common folk of Lord Ruthven's protectorate rejoice to see the Regiment march by, for the historical promise remains upheld by their Lord and master. The muster and draft come only for the dead; it is the lot of the living to toil, but to live. By such means and others is the gratitude and goodwill of the populace maintained, and the protectorate secured.
* Incidentally, still under the same manager twenty years later, and staffed by two lads I went to school with who also wagged off PE to play Warhammer.
** I used to do this a lot. The peak of my folly was the time I broke open an Orc and Goblin army set and built the entire 2000 points in one day. The build up of solvent fumes in my room was quite something, and probably explains why I decided to speed paint the whole lot the day after, without even stopping to prime.
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