Minifigs Knight Hospitaller

one of those old Minifigs knights, dehorned, re-lanced and repainted. I wasn't too precious about the freehand- I think a certain quickness about the whole thing is better when painting in this simple style, or you risk it looking overcooked. Or perhaps i'm overthinking it, as is my wont! I have to say I think this horse is one of the finest sculpts I can think of - I love it!

Turcopoles (or maybe Saracens) in the post

While daydreaming about yesterday's post, and the idea to do a 25mm shiny old school crusades army, I found myself browsing eBay. Before I had quite snapped out of my reverie the pictured regiment of lads fell into my basket an is now en route to me. The seller isn't sure if they're Essex or Hinchliffe, and I wouldn't presume to know better myself, but I love the look of them. They'll either be Turcopoles fighting as allies to my Milites Christi or they might do double duty as Saracens at some point. I'm looking forward to a nice bright colour scheme of pink, yellow and bright blue I think, with dark chestnut horses and white accents. Lovely stuff!

Minifigs knights to strip and repaint

I'm hoping in the next week or so to get my 10mm KoW army finished to 1000 points. After that's done, I've an urge to start a new army in the usual Kings of War scale. I do have ideas for a Nightstalkers army of scratchbuilt weirdness, but I'm also feeling an itch to do something medieval that I can use in other systems too perhaps a Milites Christi army of Templars and Hospitallers and Kingdom of Jerusalem with Turcopole allies and whatnot. They'll be usable in KoW Historical, Saga C+C, Lion Rampant, Hail Caesar and just about anything else. Add in a pegasus or two, a griffin maybe and some other weirdness and then I can use it in KoW, Dragon Rampant, etc. as well .- One possibility is to build on the test mini from a few days ago and use mainly Fireforge plastics. This is not a bad idea- I have lots of Fireforge ready and waiting on the sprue, as well as bits of an old army that would be easily rebased and touched up. They're nice models and I know I can get them looking good reasonably quickly. However, I've a real hankering to expand the 'shiny retro toy soldier' look I've used for Frostgrave and skirmish stuff into a whole army, and the old 25mm Minifigs stuff (still mostly available from Miniaturefigurines.co.uk) is just beautiful- to my eye at least. It's true 25mm scale though, quite a bit smaller than modern 28s, but as result it looks much better on the 'standard' wargaming base sizes: 20mm square for infantry and 25x50mm for cavalry. The Fireforge plastics require quite a bit of planning and nudging to sit happily on those sizes without tails being rammed against the muzzles of the next rank.

As it happens, I have a regiment of old minifigs Nevskiy knights bought cheaply that I can have a play with to see how they'll look before buying new ones. They'll need their horns snipping off so they look a little less Teutonic, and I'd like to replace those lances with wire ones- do lead lances ever look properly straight? First things first- into the Biostrip20 to get the paint off.

Fireforge Knight Hospitaller

Not sure if this is a one-off or a test mini for something bigger (Lion Rampant, Saga Crescent & Cross, KoW, or the imminent KoW Historical maybe?). I've been reading a little about the Knights Hospitaller and knocked one up quickly, represnting a brother knight from around the start of the 13thC. Love the Fireforge plastics.