Something wicked this way comes.

The first step of any army build is to delve into the army lists and develop the army.

As this is for a tournament, I need to create an army to the correct specification. Thus use the Magna rules with a maximum of 8000 points.

As I am looking to convert my Saga Scottish army, it was only natural that I look at the options around early Medieval (Dark Age) Scottish forces. The beauty of MeG is there are over 650 different Army lists, so I knew it was not going to be a problem.

I went to the Early Medieval – Britain this covers “British” armies that were active in the British Isles from around 407 CE (or AD if you prefer) Post Roman through to 1167 CE with the end of the Norse Irish. (Note the Normans are covered in the Frankia list.)

https://lurkio.co.uk/meg/meg/wp-content/uploads/MEG2022/MeG-Army-Lists-32-Britain-2022-01.pdf

In this set of lists there is an option for Early Scots which covers the period 850-1128 CE. Perfect for my Army.

Now I have chosen the Army, I have to decide on the date of the army and give it some character. Given the title of this Project I am sure that some of you have guessed that I decided to chose Macbeth as my theme.

Macbeth (or Mac Bethad mac Findlaich) was the King of of Alba (the pre cursor of Scotland) from 14 August 1040 – 15 August 1057. most people will know him from the play by William Shakespeare, although this play is not exactly accurate and could be said to be a complete hachet job on him. Anyway its nothing worse than Hollywood does today (Braveheart being such an example of swapping reality for fiction in the name of entertainment).

That said I have decided to use a bit of Shakespear in Theming my army as you will hopefully see later in the project.

The Army I decided on has:

• 4 Commanders – 2 x Talented and 2x Competent – this gives me a total of 14 command cards which is a good number.
• 11 Tactical Unit Groups (TuGs)
  • Knights
  • Mounted Warriors
  • 3x Units of Scottish Thegns
  • 3x Units of Galwegians
  • 3x Units of Spearmen
• 6 Skirmish Unit Groups (SuGs)
  • 2x Light Horse
  • 2x Archers
  • 2 Javelinmen

The Army has a breakpoint of 6 Units a Pre battle of 7 Cards and a Scouting rate of 4 – which is pretty balanced.

The full army list is here