The Saga of Symbaroum

If you don’t like using miniatures in RPGs, look away now…

There’s a few characters that have been requested for the next RPG session, although a couple of them will actually find their way into my Saga Warbands.

The first character is Captain Lindra of the Queen’s Rangers. Now, bear in mind because of spoilers I don’t know anything about these characters beyond a loose physical appearance. I know very little about who they are or what their motivations are. Captain Lindra, I was informed, is a large, gruff looking female and also a bit of a grizzled veteran. I was also asked to make her slightly more heavily Armoured than the rest of the rangers. This was a really hard miniature to find and I scoured every range of fantasy miniatures I could think of, although I deliberately avoided both Reaper and Dark Sword because the scale is not appropriate to the rest of the collection. Dark Sword are much closer to 32mm scale and Reaper are all over the place. But I looked at the Oathmark, Frostgrave, Bad Squiddo and many more that I simply can’t even remember. There didn’t seem to be any female miniatures that had the medieval look I wanted in that sort of middle ground of armour. They were all either unarmoured or lightly armoured rangers, full plate knights, classic era looking greeks or viking shield maidens. Eventually I ended up getting this from the most unexpected of places – Wargames Illustrated. She’s part of the Giants in Miniature range and she’s listed as “Female Warrior”, but from the webstore image, she’s quite clearly Brien of Tarth from the HBO Game of Thrones show. She has some sort of plate Armour on her upper torso but over the legs she only has her gambeson. With a little greenstuff I added a cloak and voila a captain for the Queen’s Rangers. Being a captain and a veteran it makes a certain amount if sense that she might have earned enough money to invest in some plating but that she wouldn’t go for a full suit of plate Armour for traipsing around the forest. I painted the model in similar colours to the rangers and opted to paint the armour plates in purple, similar to the Pansars’ (Queen’s Guards) breastplates but as with the rangers, I mixed a little brown into the base colour. The rest of the model is painted with the same colour palette of dull browns and a forest green cloak.

The next on my list is Captain Marvello and I do have a little information about him. Formerly a captain in the Thistlehold Town Watch he has recently taken up a position in the Queen’s Army. How or why I don’t know but I do know that he wasn’t a particularly nice individual and was more than happy to leave more dangerous tasks to private citizens (i.e. us, the player party) rather than actively deal with problems himself. He’s a soldier though and needed a soldiers miniature. Rather than buying anything new, I used this which coincidentally is also from Wargames Illustrated’s Giants in Miniature range. I have had this sat around for several years and decided to use it for Symbaroum. The actual miniature is supposed to be Orlando Bloom’s character, Balian, from the film Kingdom of Heaven and the heavy, thick chainmail that he’s wearing along with the surcoat are just a perfect fit with what I am looking for in the Queen’s Army. Scale wise he is actually a tad large, especially stood next to some of the Footsore Miniatures, but I don’t really mind that. He’s a character model and sometimes a slight increase in the scale of the model actually helps to draw attention to them, a sort of manifestation of their larger personality/presence. This model will also work quite nicely as a dismounted warlord for the Saga army so it will have a longer term use.

The next item on my list was “a female elf mystic”. Literally that was all I got. As is so often the case, fantasy Miniatures can be hard to find. If you do a search for things like “Elf Mystic” or “Elf Sorceror” the overwhelming majority of matches look like they’ve stumbled out of Age of Sigmar, D&D or World of Warcraft. They are very stylised and that’s really not what I was going for. Even the GW Middle Earth Range was quite limited, not least because quite often with the characters they come as a pack of three or you end up with one on foot and one mounted and you have to pay for a load of stuff you don’t really want. Also, I couldn’t find an elf that looked suitably “mystical”. I actually have the old metal Galadriel and Celeborn set that comes with the mirror, but I didn’t want to break into that set and repurpose a third of it, essentially making the rest useless. So I turned to my 3D printer for a solution. I found this, aptly called “Elven Witch” by The Printing Goes Ever On”. This is an interpretation of Galadriel as she responds to Frodo’s offer to give her the one ring, and I think the pose is perfect. She looks mystical and powerful in her posing, slightly elevated from the ground but also grounded and believable in her appearance wearing a simple dress with relatively little affectation added to it. To emphasise the levitation, I actually drilled a hole into the bottom of the model and pinned her to the base using roughly 1cm of brass rod. Colours wise I wanted to keep in theme with the rest of the Iron Pact, because again she will be used as part of that warband. In the RPG I believe she’s actually a leader but in Saga she might end up being relegated to a Sorcerer instead (because it doesn’t seem to easily facilitate Sorcerers also being your warlord). The main colours for the Iron pact are gold Armour with green and brown clothing, with the cloaks of the Hearthguard being a deep green. So I decided that green is going some kind of important colour to the Iron Pact, a mark of status or other significance so I gave her a green dress. I added some gold coloured trims to it, such as the belt and around the neck line and then to maintain the colour trio I gave her ted hair. I couldn’t resist blue glowing eyes to reinforce the idea that she’s currently in the middle of casting a spell that’s going to make someone’s day much worse than ot otherwise might have been. Unfortunately, I ran out of spray varnish and it would seem that my MicroFlat brush on varnish is not very flat at all and is, in fact, quite glossy… I may remedy that when I finally get hold of some varnish from somewhere as there seems to be a shortage around the local area right now.

Finally I needed a Barbarian war leader, both for the RPG session but also Saga. This is the war leader for the northern confederation (Enoai, Gaoia and Godinja clans) and I have painted him in similar colours to the Godinja clan. I was asked for a Barbarian Leader with a 2 handed warhammer, but that was proving very difficult to find without going down the furry underpants barbarian route (and even then I would have had to 3D print one). So I used some creative license and found this guy with a two handed axe. Officially the model is Ariovistus, a Germanic warrior from ancient times, by Warlord Games so he’s from the right barbarian culture to go with the German/Dacian mix of the Godinja. I actually quite like this model, it’s got a certain sort of old school charm to it, being a single piece. It was a lot of fun to stick some paint on him although there are a few areas on the model (luckily they’re hard to see) where the model is a little messy.