Kings of Hobby – Ben Stoddard

As far as being a King of the Hobby, I’m not sure if I fit that role, but I do have a lot of ideas for cool armies rolling around in my head, and this segment will give me a reason/excuse to actually go through and finish one of my more ambitious ones.

I have done a few armies in my time, and I consider myself to be a decently quick painter who paints to an arguably okayish tabletop standard. I’ve been practicing on my multibasing feng shui over the past few armies, and with this one I figured I would try and push myself even further and really play around with the ambiance surrounding my little toy soldiers.

So what army am I going to do? What vision do I have in place for this segment? I know you’re all waiting with baited breath so I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Drum roll please….

SAMURAI ELVES!!!!!

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Yes, I can feel the judgemental stares and the combined effect of your squinting eyes has ruffled my beard furs. Don’t worry, the judgment will be heaped on even thicker as you see this project progress. I promise.

In the past, glass cannon armies like elves have always been my bane. They can hit hard, but elves have always eluded me in that they can’t take what they dish out and this has always caused me untold amounts of grief. I like my stocky dwarfs and Varangur who can either punch hard and stick around for a bit, or can take whatever punishment you can dish out on them then shrug off a large portion of it with their high defense wall of iron.

The elves, though, man the elves and I have a very love/hate relationship. But I love the idea of their style of gameplay that requires precision to make the most of your units. Please note that I don’t think it takes a different level of skill to play elves, but rather the style of the elves is what has eluded me, and this project will force me to work on that so I can hopefully become a more well rounded player who has a better respect for the armies he fights against.

Now, the models I’m going to be using for this project are a mix of Titanforge miniatures and Warlord Games miniatures. Titanforge has some amazing minis, but they are super fragile and suuuper expensive. They look great, though, which is the main thing. I was able to get in on their Kickstarter ages ago because I thought the minis looked cool and I figured this was as good a time as any to bring them out. I will freely admit that I am cheating a little with this project as I had already come up with the idea and even painted up a test unit of Palace Guard some time ago, but the project never got much further than that. In fact here’s a picture of what I came up with here:

My goal here is to follow the same paint scheme that Mantic uses on their elves for their studio elf army, with the green and white combo. Beyond that, the scenery that I wish to evoke is that of a Zen garden, with cherry blossom and dogwood trees in full bloom and small shrines scattered about, maybe a koi pond or two if I start getting really ambitious. I don’t plan on using the Palace Guard as part of my army for this project. But I am currently working on the inevitable horde of archers that will be marching to war with my elven warriors, and here is a picture of them as they are still in process and at the time of this writing aren’t quite a quarter of the way done.

Since this picture was taken I’ve finished a few more archers and I’ve added a cobbled path leading up to the shrine in the back. I apologize for the quality of these pictures, I’m investing in a light box in the near future and will hopefully have better pictures in my next post or shortly thereafter.

My plans are to include copious amounts of scenery in my army and then at the end to work that all into an army display board (we’ll see as the year progresses how that actually ends up turning out). But I already have a rough idea of the list that I’ll be building. I won’t post it here, yet, as I need to play some games with it before making the final commit as to which units I’ll be building but I’m pretty excited for this project.

As always, I have a story that explains the background for my army. These elves are some of the shattered remnants of those that survived the sundering of the Twilight Glade and its violation at the hands of the hellish Nightstalkers. They have since fled to the east, beyond the Mountains of Abkhazla where they have discovered clans of their long lost kin who have been fighting among themselves for supremacy of their small domain which has been surprisingly sheltered from the wrath of the Abyss and the cataclysmic heavings of the Nighstalkers emergence on this world. When these refugees arrived and shared the story of their fate, several of the various clans of this orient felt sympathy for their newly discovered brethren and have since banded together under one banner to unify their war-torn realm before once more preparing to march back on the Twilight Glades and reclaim their ancient home from the horrors that now secure it.

That is the basis for my army. I plan on adding to it as the project progresses and new ideas strike me. I hope you guys like it and I look forward to hearing what you think of it as the army progresses! Please feel free to hit me up with additional ideas and thoughts as to what I might do to add even more flavor to my army.

Until my next update…