Last year I had a request to do an Army Showcase for my matched pair of armies based around Alan Garner's novels 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' and 'The Moon of Gomrath'. Published in 1960 and 1963 respectively, these were popular childrens' fantasy novels when I was at school in the 1970s, but I never got around to reading them until I was an adult. They are set in Cheshire, in the area around Macclesfield, contemporary to the time they were written, and concern two children, Colin and Susan, who, whilst staying with friends whilst their parents are overseas, become embroiled in a magical conflict between good and evil. A lot of the concepts, creatures and characters are drawn from the mythology of the British Isles.
It's always hard to do this kind of army showcase without giving away spoilers, and I don't plan to summarise the events of the novels. Instead I will do a post for each of the two armies. The HOTT armies make use of things from both books, gleefully thrown together. Inevitably some things were dropped, simply because there weren't the points to allow for them.
In this post I will showcase the Forces of Light. Here is the army (you can click on the picture to make it bigger):
Here's the two main characters - Colin and Susan - along with the wizards Cadellin. The children would work as a cleric - one of them has a protective artifact - but this would hinder the magician in HOTT. But they also infiltrate the villain's stronghold and evade their minions so a sneaker works just as well. Colin is a plastic model railway figure whilst Susan is, I think, a Peter Pig French Resistance fighter with the gun filed off. Cadellin is a pretty standard literary wizard in the Gandalf/Merlin style, so I used a generic wizard figure from (I think) Irregular Miniatures.
I've noticed that in some games I run them as warband, thus showing that I don't really know my own lists. They work as either troop-type.
In the next post I will showcase their opponents - The Morthbrood.
Those are lovely and look forward to seeing their opponents:)
ReplyDeleteGreat figures, thanks for sharing with us.
ReplyDeleteVery nice indeed. I will as brought up in and around Cheshire in the early 1960s and have a nostalgic fondness for the Alan Garner stories. I only realised recently that "Alfar" is a corruption of the Anglo Saxon word for Elf. And yes, Susan is a PP French resistance fighter.
ReplyDeleteNot only Susan, but also Sarah-Jane Smith in my UNIT army as well :)
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