Frostgrave Combatants Pt5 – More Soldiers

I managed to pick up the following four figures off eBay at a reasonable price a few weeks back, obviously with my ongoing Frostgrave project in mind.

They’re all Citadel metal slotta based miniatures mostly meant for Warhammer. They span an interesting few of years of production. We start at 1985 and the 2nd Ed of WFB, through 1986 and the 1st Ed of WFRP and then beyond that into 1987 and the 3th Ed of WFB – aka ‘Oldhammer’.

First up is one of the ADD 6 Paladins from the TSR licenced AD&D miniatures range from 1985. These Player Character packs were obviously meant for AD&D rather than Warhammer and sold in blisters of 3, representing the same character from low to high level as they developed in the game.
I say that like it was actually a possibility. Most people played RPGs in the 80s with a GM who was a total dick and TPK after every session was the norm. That meant the other 2 better equipped miniatures were never needed…

I’m quite nostalgic (unusual for me) about this whole Citadel AD&D range however I disliked these Paladin figures at the time and I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to painting one now. I’m not totally happy with the finished paint job but it’s useable so I’m glad I completed it.

Next up is this C01 Fighter – ‘Aldred Fellblade’ from early 1986. This figure is probably best known from his depiction by John Sibbick on the cover of WFRP 1st Edition – presumably using all his fate points just to survive up to that point and run through the Ogre. He probably got finished off by a goblin in the next round…

I’d never really paid much attention to the miniature when it came out and remember the Sibbick illustration more. After looking properly at it now it had escaped me just how ‘Jes Goodwin’ the sculpt actually is.

The final couple are F2 Fighters from 1987 – ‘Ernst Stoutheart’ and ‘Altdorf Sergeant’.

Both these miniatures are from a time when the WFRP and WFB backgrounds were finally starting to mesh together in an uneasy union. Although the RPG game was a fully fleshed out ‘realistic’ world of socio-economic political intrigue, the wargame of fantasy battles struggled to find mechanisms to cope with the vast injection of fluff from the roleplay game.
So 3rd Ed WFB always felt stuck in the vein of classic fantasy, heavy with the presence of Orcs, Elves and Dwarfs rather than the grim dark Human centric Renaissance Period feel of WFRP. For this reason the two games sat uneasily side by side in my view despite their supposedly shared background.
Even the later Realms of Chaos books put the WFB action at the furthest points of Human influence – the chaos wastes or in the deepest of Empirical forest rather than the backstreets of Altdorf like WFRP had.
By the time WFRP was finally sidelined in 1992 GW had already taken the opportunity to pluck the easily workable bits from it to use with the forthcoming 4th Ed WFB (Bretonnian Knights for instance) whilst other concepts were slowly spoon fed back into the game as new additions (such as Tilean Mercenary units).

Anyway, both of these miniatures painted up okay and will work quite well as murder hobos in Frostgrave.