Tuesday, October 11, 2011

On the Workbench - Resurrected Romans

Sometime deep in the last millennium there was a games shop in Liverpool.  With a certain mundane disregard for convention it was called Games of Liverpool.  I've spoken before of the cellar at Games of Liverpool with its evocative smell of slightly damp cardboard and its glass cabinets of microtanks and 25mm figures.

The 25mm figures were mostly by Lamming and as all the books seemed to suggest that you just had to do ancient wargaming I bought some Lamming Romans.  They were sort of Middle Imperial types, I think but I had this idea that I could convert them to later Romans by cutting down the lorica segmentata and painting them as it they were wearing uncured leather armour.

Eventually I realised that (a) my school-boy budget wouldn't run to sufficient figures and that (b) I was really interested in ancients anyway.  The Romans, initially based for WRG 5th Edition would later be rebased for DBA, repainted as Lunars for Hordes of the Things, and finally consigned to the box of old figures to be melted down and recast.  In fact I think a couple of them ended up weighting down my "flying stand" for 20mm aircraft.

However, Basic Impetus has resurrected my interest in ancients and I've dusted off and repainted those long-abandoned Legionarii.  And here they are on the workbench, glued to their element base but awaiting the final terrain treatment.

2 comments:

BigRedBat said...

Not too shabby! Clearly veterans. They make me think of the Playmobil Romans.

Counterpane said...

I feel like they're finished for the first time ever.

It's taken me thirty years or more but I think I may have got the hang of this painting lark. Not that I can't improve but I think I've learned when to stop trying to add more and more "improvements" to a figure. I think I may have reached the "less" that is supposed to be "more".