Anno Domini 1666 - The Old World without the Warhammer

The Royal Musketeers are one of two French factions available in the game, the other being the Cardinal’s Guard (and the Cardinal is even more than he seems that he was in the original novel, more on that in a later entry).  Each faction is split into two troop types, personalities and commers, with 4 personalities available for each out of the box.  There are additional personalities available, should you choose to buy them, all of which are drawn from some kind of literary, televisual or cinematic work (or in some cases both).

To get myself into the swing of things, I started with the commoners for the faction. These are, I should stress, fairly low quality PVC miniatures, for anyone wealthier than I looking to play this game, you can buy it with metal miniatures.  Normally I would just slapchop or speedpaint my way through this sort of thing this time I decided to paint things the old fashioned way.  There are only 7 miniatures per faction (I have purchased the extra commoners) and of those 7, only 3 are dungers.  Because the economy of scale that I would get with speed painting isn’t there, the associated loss in quality that goes with speedpaint simply isn’t worth it (in my opinion, and right now that’s the only opinion that counts). But boy was it hard work.  The details are so incredibly soft on these and because they come pre-assembled, you often find that certain parts are very hard to paint; the faces on the two that are brandishing their muskets for instance, are obscured by the musket itself – you can see the face but it’s very hard to paint the face.

That said, I am happy with how they turned out, and rebasing them onto the plastic cobblestone bases from Renedra has helped to lift them up a level.  I also like some of the attention to detail on the sculpts, even if the details  themselves aren’t quite up to scratch.  The fact that the guns have a firing match on them rather than the a flintlock is nice to see as are the cartridges hanging from their bandoliers.  And I love the guy who is holding the musket to his face (the one on the left) as if shielding the match from the wind whilst he blows on it to perhaps rekindle the flame.  I remember watching the BBC’s Musketeers show and Aramis did the exact same thing when loading a musket and lining up his shot.

For the bases, I took the cobblestone bases from Renedra and sprayed them grey then  gave them a dark brown wash.  You can use any washes you like, I personally use citadel.  I would, however, caution against using Army Painter washes because they have a glossy finish and which means you will have to add an additional step in near the end to give them a matt varnish (unless you’re happy with shiny bases in which case carry on).  Then I drybrushed them up with increasingly light shades of grey.  I used some of the brown-greys in the army painter range, castle grey, filthy cape and stone golem.  The final step was a thinned green wash (I used Poxwalker for this) and I wiped the surface afterwards which cleaned most of the wash off the raised areas, leaving only a very thin coating, like a glaze but allowed it to still pool in the cracks and crevices between the stones.  The final step was to use a very fine brush (like a 000) to apply some PVA glue into some of the crack onto which I then sprinkled green flock to create the impression of moss growing between the stones.  This will technique will be used throughout this project, although I might vary the colours slightly between different factions