RGD Gaming looks set to release three plastic sets this month that definitely fill niches in the wargames market.
First up are the Scythians, an ancient historical faction in dire need of a plastic set. The sprue look all-round decent - separate torsos, legs, arms and heads allow for maximum poseability, and 4 bows and quivers, 5 spear arms, 3 hand weapon arms and 5 shields per sprue means you can build up multiple units with different weapon options pretty easily:
Next are a set of Amazons, well-known to have existed in Greek mythology and rumoured to live in territories ruled by the Scythians among other places, probably a mythological allegory for Scythian women regularly joining their male counterparts in warfare, as per a lot of other Northern European 'barbarian' cultures. The Amazons sprue comes with a similar number of bows, one less spear, two fewer shields and 9 hand weapon arms:
As with the Scythians the leg poses are fine, and I'm pleased to see there is at least one female head with long hair here - so many female warrior kits give their girls Sisters of Battle-style hair or shorter, and as a greater appreciator of females with longer hair it's a breath of fresh air to see it represented.
However, probably the one flaw with this kit is particularly evident when you look at some painted examples:
I honestly think the weapons are too small - it's as if they aimed to shrink the hands for the Amazon weapons to represent smaller ladies' hands, which I can understand, but instead of just shrinking the hand part of the component, they shrank the entire component, so that the weapon also looks undersized. The swords look more like daggers and the bows look like children's toys. However, the maces and picks don't look so bad, and, as per RGD's earlier Faun and Centaur kits each set of Scythians and Amazons comes with one sprue of the other set, to add some Scythian women warriors or Amazon enslaved males to the unit, so you can easily give your Amazons some more appropriately-sized bows and swords from the Scythians kit, and hopefully the difference in hand size won't show too much.
Each set also comes with a sprue of 4 horses, all nicely posed and proportioned (and with interchangeable side pieces as well, I particularly like cavalry sets with this because it maximises the number of horse poses you can make), and legs to mount two Scythians and two Amazons on them:
Personally I'm not such a fan of this approach as it means you'd have to get at least a couple of boxes just to form a normal-sized cavalry unit of 8, which isn't the best way to represent a people like the Scythians whose armies were almost entirely composed of mounted troops, but once these kits are out and distributed across the world, it'll be pretty easy and cheap to buy additional horse sprues separately from numerous sites. Both kits will cost £25 for 40 figures (four of the main sprue, one of the other) plus the horse sprue, nothing to be sniffed at there.
Finally, my favourite of the three kits - the Satyrs:
These lads look great in my opinion, particularly as a Beastman player. I'd love to see a size comparison of these with a GW Gor and Ungor to see which unit they'd be best to add additional models to. RGD have already released a size comparison with some other models:
The Satyr looks particularly at home on a 25mm base and is significantly taller than either a Stormvermin or a Mantic Orc (though they do stand on 'puddle' bases so if you cut those off they'd be a little shorter than that), which, along with their stocky bodies made me immediately think they'd make good Gors, particularly if they were given GW Gor arms. However the more human-like arms these models have mean they could also fit as Ungors, particularly the Ungors that accompany the Gors in 6th Edition Beast Herds (but then, given Gors are Strength 3 anyway, same as a human, perhaps the arms aren't anything to worry about anyway).
Here's a shot of the sprue:
A great mixture of weapons there, with the ability to give them additional hand weapons or shields, and I certainly imagine some spare GW Gor shields wouldn't look out of place on these. I particularly like how they've given these a mixture of caprine, bovine, porcine and equine heads for these, which really fits GW Beastmen which in lore, despite the Gor kit consisting entirely of goat-men, actually consist of men mutated with all manner of beasts. There are also some fun elements such as one arm wielding a torn-off branch to bludgeon some hapless foe to death in the crudest way possible, a Greek Urn (no doubt filled with something for the road) and poseable mini horse tails!
Now, I do like GW's Beastmen a lot, and I still plan to pick up at least one box of their Gor models, but given Beastmen fare the best in units of 20+, it'll take a fair amount of time and cash to build up a force the GW way, even with their Beastman kits still being on the more affordable side individually (though it doesn't help that the Gor and Ungor kits have 10 models per box, where the 6th Edition Beast Herd kit that preceded them had 20). By contrast this kit has 5 of these sprues, meaning 40 models per box as per the Scythian and Amazon kits, for a similar price tag as the GW kit. If I combined this with one or two boxes of the GW Gors it would really get my fledgling Warherd up and running in the Core department, with big potential for kitbashing and perhaps even head-swapping. If you didn't have any of the GW kits and really wanted to build a Beastman army on a budget, you could easily combine this kit with their Fauns, which would fit well as Ungors, though personally I find the latter really too thin and spindly, especially as I have some of the GW Ungors already and think they are fine.
) and discuss various ways to play the Cloven Ones in rank-and-flank style battles. Do come and join us, for with every new Beastlord we grow stronger!
