The “Lord of the Green Dragons” blog has a series of posts going which detail the armies of certain Greyhawk notables, including Rob Kuntz’s character Robilar.
In case you’re wondering what his army might look like (if I fielded it anyway), I think something like this (as always, click to embiggen. Sorry for the blurry images, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this and rushed through):
Clockwise from the center bottom we have: two stands of heavy cavalry, two stands of medium cavalry, for stands of light cavalry, two stands of mounted light crossbowmen, two stands of foot crossbowmen, four stands of orc heavy foot, four more stands of orcs with polearms, two stands of orc archers, and finally in the center four stands of conscript light foot. Robilar himself is not pictured, but I would just use a nice RPG figure (on a “sabot” base if FOG uses full sized bases for leader types, I don’t own those rules).
The figures are a little mismatched, in that the orcs are 25-28mm Grenadier, Ral Partha, and Citadel orcs, and the humans are all 1/72 plastics (=about 20mm scale). Also, all my orcs are based on 60x40mm stands, which is twice as deep as need be, but in HOTT, my rules of choice, they’re all Hordes anyway. But the post suggests using FOG, which is a fairly solid set of rules by Richard Bodley Scott (who co-authored DBM and HOTT too).
Here’s a few close-ups:
Now, if this same army were fielded in HOTT, rather than FOG, it might look like this:
Left to right that’s six Riders, four Hordes (mix of human conscripts and orcs), two shooters (orcs and humans) and two knights (including Robilar as knight general) or if Rolibar is a Hero General (more likely) drop one knight and use the other as Robilar.
By the way, 1/72 plastics are still fairly cheap and not too hard to find.
Thanks for taking the time to put this article together. It is nice to see what it actually looks like. I have recently been learning the FoG system and using markers for the army bases.
The Commander-in-Chief does use a 60mm square base. In fact, the main sizing issue for bases is that they be 60mm wide and the depth can be variable, dependent upon the models.
I am just starting my shopping list for miniatures to create my own. Thanks for the links.
Ciao!
Grendelwulf
60mm — not surprising. That is the “standard” set by the Wargames Research Group or WRG (which published HOTT, the various DBx rules, and before that a series of rules sets called WRG). In fact pretty much every set of wargames rules follows that standard except skirmish rules (which use individually based figures, naturally) and many fantasy wargames (Warhammer comes to ming). The C-in-C on a 60×60 gives plenty of room for a nice mini-diorama (the leader of the army of darkness is on a 60×60 base too).
FoG — it looked a little more complicated than DBM, to me, but I’d like to give it a whirl some time. It is great that they are published by a “real” publisher (not a games publisher) so you can actually find them in bookstores, and very well illustrated.
1/72 plastics are a natural for army building. Some day I’d like to reorganize my 1/72 historicals into Hyborian armies so they might actually see some use.
Greyhawk! Yay!
Piker,
I recognize I was pretty dismissive of Gayhawk. I still wouldn’t want to play in any pre-fab game world (least of all the monstrosities developed by TSR/WotC marketing!) but I do think there is much to be learned about the hobby and worldbuilding by examining actual campaign worlds (e.g. Greyhawk as run by Gygax et al., and Arneson’s Blackmoor, and so on).
Thanks for stopping by.
Hey Mike,
Looks great, as always! And now I need to find myself some 1/72 figures–that site is a treasure trove.
Thanks,
Brenton
Very nice treatment on “my” army. Splendid choice of colors.
RJK