Fantasy Regiments Orcs

The next addition to my Orc force is from way back in 1987. 

Six more jolly boys

Fantasy Regiments

When it was released we thought the Fantasy Regiments box was rather wonderful.  It contained ten sprues, each holding an orc, a goblin, a Skaven, a dark elf, a wood elf and a dwarf. Each had two head options and the melee troops (orc, skaven and dwarf) had a second weapon option. That's sixty minis in one box!

Although the detail was slight compared to modern plastics, they were great ways of building cheap units. There's some variability with the head and weapon options, and packs of metal command minis were available to round out units. There was also a sprue of embossed shields.

I had two boxes worth plus oddments back in the day, and you can see both the orcs and the dwarves fighting at Orc's Drift here. I remember painting the dwarves, elves, orcs and goblins. I'm not sure about the skaven and I know I never touched the dark elves, though I use some of the heads on the wood elves.

Of course, most of these went in one or other of the culls (though I still have a lot of unbuilt dark elves), but I did find a handful of orcs and a couple of the metal command minis ( Commander Holbrog and Luglud the musician) in my current ongoing clear-out. Enough to build a unit of six certainly, but how well do these old minis hold up today?

Planning 

Like the Big'uns, there's not a lot of different colour choices on the plastic troops. They do have a bit of a tunic below the mail coat (avoiding the chafing that Bodvoc commented on with the Big'uns), otherwise it's skin, metal, belt and a pouch. The command have more choices,  though the only significant amount of cloth is the leader's trousers. I decided to go for blue or red for the troops' tunics, and stripes on the leader's trousers. Both command minis also have 'hair', but I'm going for the WH40K idea of this actually being artificial. Maybe not squigs, but certainly not natural hair. In fact Luglud's hair sort of reminds me of the Beetle wigs popular in the sixties. Anyway, since it's not actual hair, it can be any colour, so light blue for him, and pink for Holbrog's little topknot.

Painting 

I used my standard orc method, but there were a couple of problems. The shallower detail and rather smooth surfaces meant that it wasn't as successful. If you check out the darkest skinned trooper you'll see that the highlights are pretty messy. The idea of extreme highlights doesn't really apply when there aren't any sculpted extremes.

Also I tried a different highlight on top of the VGC Goblin Green, by lightening it with VGC Khaki. This looked okay (subject to the lack of well defined highlights mentioned above) but once the shade wash was applied, I didn't think it looked great.

Still, I'm happy with Holbrog, and I can add better highlighting to Luglud at a later date.

Shields 

My original unit used 'Bad Moon' designs from the included sprue with a few of the larger Marauder shields for variety. I'm honouring that choice, with the addition of some blank shields to which I added a more modern Bad Moon icon. As with the Big'uns here I  gave the shields a 'field' reflecting the original owner. I'll paint some of my other forces using these designs, and I've sneaked in a reference to Bodvoc's dwarves on one of the shields.

That tuft of grass has got to tickle a bit

Commander Holbrog

Luglud

I usually say how much fun these were, and how pleased I am with them. That's certainly true of the metal minis, the leader in particular. The plastic orcs are OK. I think my technique isn't really effective on these, and I certainly didn't try anything like this on the original minis, they'd have simply been drybrushed metals (just chainmail silver, no bronze accents), then flat colours for everything else, Goblin Green skin of course. These are certainly no worse than my original effort.

Anyway, another unit of six, and I've since found a couple more who will soon get painted up to join them. I'd quite like the other two metal minis, standard bearer and champion, but since there's no great visual link between the metal command and the plastic troops, it doesn't really matter.