Lloyd's Varangians / Kevin Rus' Army Build

I’m taking a break from working on the Mounted Warlord to get Harald Hardrada ready to lead the charge, I use this guy as my warlord to unlock the Varangian option on both the Viking and Last Roman battle boards in Saga. But until now I’ve not really had a mini set aside for this and have been using a standard-bearer as a stand in.

All that changed about 2 weeks ago when Gerry ( @avernos ) rocked into Sunday gaming with this guy from Footsore Miniatures suggesting he might be a good option, as he’s Dark Age with a touch of a Roman look to him. I think Gerry said he was a Visigoth.

I got to say, I think he was right so was more than happy when he handed over the mini for free!

Once home with the mini I did some internet searching to get an idea of what sort of Harald Hardrada I could make and decided to make a few alterations.

First up I cut some lines into the front of the padded shin guards so they would look like the plate metal type you see in images of Varangians. I basically did this with just a hobby knife but found it was easier to use one that was more on the blunt side than sharp as the metal was actually pretty easy to cut into and a blunter blade made a wider gap/line.

I left the backs of the guards as they where. The metal on these sort of guards didn’t go all the way round, you still need to be able to move after all.

Also I used some wash as I was doing it because it was hard to see what I was doing with everything shining bright under the hobby light.

Although the mini looked class with a sword I needed to give this guy an axe, a BIG AXE. In Saga Harald is listed as having a two handed heavy weapon, so I grabbed the biggest Dane Axe I could find from my spare sprues and chopped off his hand.

This bad boy pictured below was a left over from a box of Plastic Vikings from Gripping Beast.

With the change to an axe I needed to fix the fact that he now had no sword in his sheath. So it was back to the left over bits to grab a one which I cut the hilt and handle off and then cut down some more so it would fit on top of the sheath and under his arm.