Updates from the East: Wainrider

Tolkien's discription of the Easterlings is fairly sparse compared to most of his other cultures, but the one thing he does note is that they are famed charioteers. Yet on the battlefield, nary a single wain can be found. Riddle me this GW, how can you have Easterlings and forget the chariots?

Apparently it's not as hard as one would think, since you have to come up with your own - or just steal a khandish one. I decided to settle for just stealing the Khandish king rules and modifying a warhammer chariot from ebay to suit my purposes. It probably won't see a whole lot of action, but I think it's pretty cool.  My full size (1000+pt) Easterling force is very heavy on the cavalry/monstrous mounts - specifically designed to counter other cavalry-heavy armies.

I had to trim a bit off the back and move the wheelbase up in order to make it fit on a 60mm base (acquired from Secret Weapon Miniatures). Nothing too fancy on the paint job, just (GW) scab red, and (GW) shining gold, with my (GW) chaos black/(P3) pig iron mix for the other metal parts.

side view - to show alterations

I'm still trying to decide on how to convert the Easterling king. My inclination is to start from an easterling archer, due to the specialized bow rules for chariots, but I'm still looking for inspiration for the appropriate embelishments - I'm not really a huge fan of the giant bull horns that adorn most of the Easterling heroes. I'm really tempted by the bits that come with the new kataphrakt set, but I already have seven of the old metals - making it a bit hard to justify spending $35 for a couple bits - especially since I already have sufficient models to create a 1500+pt force (a point level I'm not likely to ever play since most of my fellow TMAT gamers are at the 500-600pt level).


In other news, I started the long messy slog of stripping paint off my pre-owned Easterlings to begin work on my second batch of Dragon Guard. After hours of research to look for a decent paint stripper that won't damage plastic, I discovered that a soak in Pine-Sol worked pretty well (after testing on other surplus minis of course). I can't vouch that Pine-Sol is fit for hours of soaking for plastics (my metals did amazingly after an overnight bath), but 30 min was enough to get about 97% of the paint off with a stiff brush. It might need a second soak if you are determined to get every last nook and cranny completely cleaned out, but it was sufficient for my purposes.

Ready for a new life as Dragon Guard