Lumineth Vanari Regent - Commander for Age of Sigmar

Vanari Lord Regent, ready to lead the Lumineth Host to battle.

Over the past month-and-a-bit, I have been putting together and painting up a basic force of Lumineth Realm Lords for GW's "Age of Sigmar" game. It has been built around a box set, an impulse purchase made at the local game store in Sault Ste Marie, called the "Vanari Shining Host". Throughout April, I have been working my way through the various units included in the box, saving the most dramatic figure for last, and here is is - a Vanari Lord Regent.

An impulse buy from the local hobby store - now assembled and painted!

Throughout this project, I have been struck by the level of complication and detail in the Age of Sigmar figures. You may love or hate the look - in my case, I do quite like these models - but wherever your opinion/preference falls, I think you would find these are complicated figures by the standards of general, multi-part plastic kits. Even the most basic models, the Vanari Wardens, have a lot of small details - on their armour, their shields, their helmets and helmet plumes, even the basic "pike" has some flash to them. 

These models are complicated...here you see that the piece containing the reins for the mount also include a piece of the mount's face...boy, I hope that thin piece of plastic doesn't break...

So, if the basic infantry will have bling at that level, then one would expect the figure representing the senior, heroic commander of the force to have a commensurate, and much higher, level of detail. And so it is with this kit - which in fact offers two options for the build out. One option is a sort of generic commander - that figure is holding a sword aloft - and the other is closer to the build you see here, a named character, Lyrior Uthralle, wielding a beautiful lance (with a nice sword handy for backup). You have a choice of different heads for the warrior, for the mount, and different weapons to wield.

Uh oh....

I don't object to complex figures like this as a matter of course - after all, GW continues to take multi-part plastic to a new level, and this can be a lot of fun. But this tendency also leads to build options that include several fine, small plastic pieces that fit together with more than a dollop of hope. Small, thinner pieces of plastic are vulnerable to warping, and to breaking. If they break, they are not easy to work around and/or replace. In a situation with a complex kit, this can go very badly, very quickly, and did so here. In this case, it was the reins, which also included bits of the face of the mount...these small plastic pieces broke in ways that were not reparable...

The plastic piles up as I try and sort out the model build...much of this is the neck of the mount, which had to be carved away to make room for the replacement...

This lead to the need switch heads for the mount - but the time to have made that decisions was much earlier in the build. I now needed to replace the neck, which was already covered by armour segments, which required some drilling...and a fair bit of colourful language...and then a work-around to make the reins still sort of line up with the rider...anyway, we got there in the end! We all know that paint covers many sins, and it certainly is my hope that this applies here...

Moving on from the modelling efforts, we put paint on things to cover up the problems...

This model took a fair bit of time to paint. There is the obligatory huge chunk of terrain that seems to increasingly be part of many command figures be they Age of Sigmar, 30k or 40k. I'm not a big fan of that trend in general, but I confess to enjoying the look of this specific terrain chunk here. It looks cool, it matches the visual theme of the Lumineth not-High-Elves very nicely, and also helps to ensure the mount is fastened securely to the base.

We got there in the end!

Here you get a sense of how important the terrain chunk is for keeping this fellow mounted securely on his base.

Another view of the "blind side"

Charge!

 

 

Since this model is wielding the lance, I believe this is actually now the named character, Lyrior Uhtralle, but I don't, at least at this stage, know why it would not be able to take to the field as a more generic Vanari Regent. Either way, I now have all of the basic elements required to put this lot on the table for a game of Age of Sigmar down at the local game store. We all know what happens with newly-painted figures, so I expect the results, when this happens, will be suitably grim - but that said, I hope to take some pictures and report back later this month! That is all for this post - thanks for visiting, and I hope your hobbying is going well, wherever you are!