The Saga of Symbaroum

The Curia has three distcint branches;  the Clergy, the Templars and the Inquisition.  As I was already going down the medieval route, it seemed only natural to look for historical comparisons for this faction.  The best analogy to the Curia of the Church of Prios is the Roman Catholic church, even in so far as being Monotheistic (although they do accept other Gods exist, they just don’t worship them and consider Prios to be Superior).  The colours in the the artwork are predominantly red and gold, also colours that are very common among Christian priests, particularly Catholic and Orthodox.

The Clergy

I started out looking at the Clergy and it was surprisingly easy to get what I needed, although I had to source from several manufacturers.  Even finding some females to add to the mix wasn’t overly difficult as there were a couple of wizards in the Frostgrave range that I thought looked perfect for priestesses.  So in the end I had miniatures from Frostgrave, Perry Miniatures and V&V miniatures.  Do I need 7 priests?  Possibly not. Is it nice to have them?  Absolutely.  Although if I ever build a full Ambrian army (it’s definely more than an idle thought) it will be nice to just dot them throughout the army so they may have a use.

I tried to go with a set palette of colours, mostly red, gold and beige across the whole set.  They were all contrast painted and brown washed at the end.  The exception being the two characters who I am calling the Cardinal and the Abess, for want of any better titles.  These were painted using traditional methods but sticking to a similar colour palette

The Templars.

The Templars were the easiest to find models for as there are a good selection of crusader miniatures available already from companies like 1st Corps, Crusader Miniatures and a small selection from Baron’s War.  Because I was already putting an order in I went with Baron’s War miniatures, however I have also marked Templars as a possible Age of Magic warband so this might expand in the future.  The upcoming Baron’s War Outremer kickstarer could be a fantastic source of miniatures for that, but that’s a future article.  While most of the miniatures are Baron’s War miniatures, only 4 of them were officially “Templars”, I added a couple of footknights in there and swapped out the shields for some with embossed sunbursts.  I also had a spare miniature from the Wargames Illustrated Giants in Miniature range that seemed to fit perfectly so painted him up as well.  To lead them, I then took a Bishop miniature from the Baron’s war range as I thought that stand out a bit from the rest of the troops

When choosing a colour scheme I tried to follow the same colours as the  priests but I wanted them to look a little more battle hardened and worn.  So I used a deeper shade of red and for the most part did away with the brighter red and gold.  The resulting colour scheme matches the character of Benedictus quite well and isn’t a million miles away from the livery used by Balien of Ibelin in Kingdom of heaven.

The Inquisitors

The last faction was the Black Cloaks, the Inquisitors.  These were a bit harder to design because there isn’t really much to go off in the book in terms of artwork.  The only unifying feature seems to be that they all wear a Black Cloak, hence their nickname.  I decided to throw in a mixture of different model types here, some that looked like monks and some that looked more like warrior-priests and the only place I could really get what I wanted was Baron’s War, although I did deliberate over some similar models from Gripping Beast.  Ultimately I did buy the faction leader from Gripping Beast.  I have looked through Saga Age of Magic and there’s a really cool unit type in the Great Kingdoms army archetype call religious zealots so I think in future these might form part of the Tempar army where they will be my religious zealouts unit