The Black Dragon of Wallachia

Giving spring and summer a miss I have gone into fall, with the full weight of spooky season, and danced a bit with the idea of Slavic horror. Delving into the spirit of the month I created the head canon of this army being led by the bastard son of Vlad III of Wallachia and a vampire, thus creating a dhampir child (like the comic book character Blade or D from the anime ‘Vampire Hunter D’).

Digging up odds and ends of history I’ve decided to make the purpose of the army to be the continued support of the Order of the Dragon in defense of Wallachia. Owing to the contradicting idea of him being an “evil” being leading a “righteous” army I resolved it with the idea that darkness is best fought with other things from the dark. With that it mind I will add more things to widen the field of the fantastic. A quick addendum, I won’t be adding any Warlord skeletons as I have donated all the sprues from the Harryhausen Amazons to my FLGS.

Inspired by Rodge from Rodge Rules on YouTube from his great library of work on SAGA I have followed his lead on plastic Byzantines.

I’ve made definite executive decisions regarding armor on the sculpts. As far as I’m concerned the infantry should be right with lamellar and some banded mail due to the Mongol influence. I’m not a fan of sculpts with figures sporting padded armor so they’re just right out. Seeing artwork of cavalry in the area from that time it also lead me to rule out using cataphracts. Other details I’ll get to in time. I probably will add further trimmed clothing for unarmored figures for unit commanders.

Visually I’ll also modify the overall uniformity of my troops and have a mix of Orthodox crosses and decorative shield transfers. This would reflect members of the Romanian Orthodox Church allied with other people in Wallachia who may or may not be part of the church. Mercenaries and opportunists standing up against the Ottomans weren’t in short supply.

I’ll put some thought to non humans later.