Lords of WarCry – Untamed Beasts, Part 1

Dull drumbeats roar across Jagged Savannah of Ghur, calling the barbarian nomads to arms. Wild warcries mingle with the animalistic roar of the great beasts and are barely distinguishable. It's time to go and prove to Archaon the Everchosen as relentless enough to join his legions.

I've got into WarCry, too. I have been skeptical at first, but I could quickly learn a better one at my local dealer with a look in the new box (and in the rule book). The joint project "Lords of WarCry" here at Chaosbunker offers a nice opportunity to document the assembly and the painting of the really extensive box. Since Dennis will be the first to have a go at the buildings and Dino takes on his Orruks warband, I start with the Untamed Beasts warband.

The Untamed Beasts are by lore a nomadic tribe in the realm of Ghur, chasing wild creatures to gain their strength and cunning by eating the flesh. As wandering nomads in a hostile environment, they despise solid settlements and forged armor, which in their eyes are signs of weakness. The Untamed Beats believe, that Archaon as the Devourer of the Worlds will destroy the frail civilizations and the tribes of the Untamed Beasts want to be there as his chosen warriors.

The idea for the warband

Against this background, I quickly had an idea for my warband: as wild hunters and barbarians, the Untamed Beasts are dressed in robes of leather and furs of the slain monsters. This means for the painting: Many different shades of brown for different types of leather and possibly leopard or tiger stripes on the furs (I am just thinking of large saber tooth tiger). Here is a starting point to integrate the Rocktusk Prowler visually in the gang, by repeating the same pattern on the fur. Also, I have the opportunity to try different color recipes for dark or tanned skin tones with the warriors. The weapons consist of bones of hunted down monsters or wooden clubs, into which bone fragments were driven. That means a total of a warm color palette: many shades of brown and bone white. Or a completely different approach: with gray or blue tones desaturated colors for a rather dark overall appearance. Here I am still undecided and will still collect examples for decision.

First Steps: Preparation, Assembly and Basing

But before I brood too much on an appropriate color scheme, I started with the inevitable first step: the assembly. As Dennis has shown in detail in the first part of his review, all models consist of several components, but they are quite easy to put together.

Though the figures have small base elements, such as broken columns or spikes that protrude from the ground, I still wanted to make the bases a little more elaborate and have opted for cork. For this I took a coaster, which can be bought in a large Swedish furniture store, and worked it with pliers. Then the piece of cork was halved again horizontally with a cutter knife, otherwise it is too thick. The advantage of this approach is that you can keep the remains of the cork, which arise when breaking, and use as debris on other bases. Then the open areas, which are not covered with cork, were smeared with PVA glue and in the next step covered with fine sand.

I noticed positively: Also quite fragile elements, like the whip of the Beastspeaker or the leash of the javelin of the First Fang, have been stabilized and secured by additional contacts on the base or the model. For safety's sake, I have pinned some larger components for additional stability, this means connected by a small piece of wire.

Pinning the miniatures

A careless movement or tipping over of the figure while playing quickly dislodges a miniature from the base. Therefore, I put a special attention to the stable connection of the feet again with pieces of wire to the cork (here the example of an Iron Golem).

Magnetizing the bases

Despite these preparations, I dread the transport of the sometimes quite protruding miniatures in a box. That's why I bought a thin 0.17 mm white metal foil and a picture frame in a hardware store. The foil was cut to the size of the frame and primed with black spray.

Each miniature of the warband received a neodymium magnet (small, high-performance magnets) glued under the base. The frame functions as a kind of display board so that I can not only transport the figures upright but also put them in a showcase or on the shelf. The small neodymes are so strong that the figures also hold upside down on the foil.

This completes the preparation for the Untamed Beasts and I can start priming and painting the Untamed Beasts in the next article.

Until next time

Christian / Fritz