Forged in Battle 15mm Early Germans

This was an unplanned project, but Infamy, Infamy generated so much buzz when it was released earlier this year that I decided to look closer at it. Now Martin already has a large 15mm Early Republican Roman army painted many years ago, but we never really had a chance to take them out for a spin. It occurred to me that we could possibly play Infamy, Infamy in 15mm.

What we needed, aside from the rules and necessary counters, was an opposing army. It turned out that Martin had a couple of packs of Forged in Battle (aka West Wind) 15mm Early Germans and some Litko DBX bases lying around, so that made the decision for us on which barbarian army to raise. Had we started from zero, I would most likely have gone for a Gallic army and made a diorama of Asterix's village...

I painted the two packs of Germans, bought another two packs to make up the bare minimum to field a German army, and after a few weeks of work, had this ready:

I decided to use DBX basing as Martin's Romans are already in DBX basing, and because it's an old habit. The rules require warrior units to have the same frontage, while skirmisher units have a wider frontage, although I suspect that is less important as they should not be in melee if things are done correctly...

The round houses are actually pdf paper models of Celtic round houses - I cannot actually find photos of what pre-Roman German village dwellings look like, let alone models for them. The paper models have a nice texture (several options are included in the file), and they can be scaled to various miniature scales. I wanted to give some sturdiness to the houses, so in addition to giving each a PVC foam sheet base, I used cut sections of a plastic water bottle to form the wall of the house.

The photo above shows a Status III leader (with a 25mm base), three Status II leaders (with 20mm bases), and a musician and a The Sign of the Boar retinue figure. A Wailing Women base would have been great too but West Wind did not have a pack.

Here are the seven warrior units I pained. Now I dislike painting irregular/non-uniformed armies as the lack of a uniform colour scheme gives the units a messy appearance when viewed at wargaming distance. I used a number of "natural dyes" colours for the clothing, but to tie the whole force together, I used only red, black, and white for their shields (except for a few leather brown ones). I also decided to give almost all of the shields a unique pattern - as a result one of the figures actually hold a shield that looks like a pokeball.

Barbarian warrior units come in ten figures, but DBX has warbands in four figures on a 40mm x 15mm base - this meant that to make a warrior unit, I needed two bases of four figures, and one of two. For this 'third' base I decided to base two figures on a 40mm x 20mm base, and leave an unflocked square on one side of the base as a die-holder to track the Fervour of the unit.

Here are the three skirmisher units I painted. Unfortunately West Wind does not make German slingers, and their slingers from the other nations have too distinct a look to fit into the army. The menhir is the background is a resin piece painted by FG.

Getting the army painted is of course just the... second? step in the process: we still have to see how the game plays in half-scale with multi-basing - although a straight 1" to 1cm conversion makes the most sense in terms of frontage, I feel that at that scale the playing area will look too small.

I am also planning to use the 20cm grids I have on my mat for terrain placement, and use the neoprene area terrain FG bought; these cover about one grid each, which makes them perfect for my plan.

I have read the Infamy, Infamy rules twice, and I feel I have a basic understanding of how they work, so we will try to muddle through a game soon.