strewart said:
Unless your plan is to make a cheap army and avoid GW products?
Ah ha, you have worked out my cunning plan. Yes I wanted cheap - because I felt I couldn't explain to my partner spending the cash on official figures. I got bargain bucket plastic toy dinosaurs and such from pound shops. Oh, and the Pygmies weren't too expensive ether (I think they came in packs of 10).
@ Scarloc: Yeah, there is little detail on the toys, but I find their basic simplicity endearing. I had to scratch what texture there is (i.e. a little bit of fur) onto the Gorillagors. Thought you might be interested in just how bad for detail the original 'models' were. Here's a picture of them in the early stages of conversion work...
Ghastly in many ways, yet fun in other ways.
As soon as it occurred to me that I could have a Pygmy army I just had to do it. Converting an whole army worth of figures, however, was not my idea of fun, so I bought the Kallistra pygmies. I searched a LONG time for suitable gorillas to be Saurus warriors, and although I found these three for Kroxigor stand ins, there is nothing out there the right size for saurus. (Apart from space suited sci fi chappies!!)
@ Cracken: It’s a legal force when considered in terms of ‘counts as’. These are basically Southlands’ Halflings, but function mostly as skinks, with the same weapons, stats and rules, though perhaps different reasons for the rules. Take Cold Blooded, for example. I’ll stick to the mechanics of the rules, but say it works so not because of their ‘cold-blooded’ lack of emotion, but because the pygmies are ‘stubborn little buggers’ who fight that little bit more ferociously for the very reason they are so small – if they didn’t they’d not survive!
First up, Swarms – easy enough: they’re just the same…
..but I have put some spiders in there too to bulk out the lizards. If the Pygmies come from a part of the Southlands world with no Saurus only a handful of skinks then I reckon they might be a bit short of smaller lizards too.
For Salamanders it’s simply a matter of replacing the skink handlers with pygmies, armed similarly with little javelins. (The Salamanders were plastic toys that I just had to paint – they’re kind of cute, until they breath fire on you!)
The three Skink priests are not your usual figures. They’ll have the fluff that they’re an unusual spawning, a different species but part of the Skink genus (sort of thing). This is because they’re actually really old Slann models from the early 1980s! They're not really painted in my modern style, and they're gloss varnished, but I like that as they seem to be wet, which is apt for aquatic creatures.
I’ll probably go for two units of skirmishers, 14-20 in number according to the total size of the army. Here, once again, blowpipe armed Pygmies take the place of the Skinks. Same stats - but as I can’t work out why they would be aquatic, I think I’ll just say they’re not. No opponent is going to complain if I get rid of some abilities and thus make them worse than usual! I used to do this with them in our old campaign.
Now here is the most ‘dodgy’ one. I have rebased my pygmy boar riders and use now use them as ‘counts as’ Saurus. I know they’re Str 4, but the boars look like they might well be. I know they’re supposed to have a 5+ scaly skin save, well I’ll keep that and say it is actually the usual 5+ save for mounted plus thick skinned. And finally I know they have two attacks – well, fine, that’s one from the rider and one from the boar. Their non cavalry movement rate can be due to their ridiculously short legs! The only really dodgy bit is the fact that both attacks are Strength 4 - I think maybe in a friendly campaign, I'd do one at Str 4 (Boar) and one at Str 2 (rider), but in a straight game, I'd just say they 'count as' Saurus and get on with it.
I felt I had to do this as the army won’t really function without them, not now that the new list has ditched Southland’s variant Horned One riders which these guys used to count as.
Now for my favourite ‘new’ unit: Skinks with Kroxigors. I’d already modelled my gorilla versions of Kroxigors, called ‘Gorillagors’, and now realised they’re hands scraped the ground, meaning a front rank of Pygmies wouldn’t fit. So I took 6 pygmies, broke them off their bases, and repositioned them so that they could stand before the Gorillagors. I even had to gauge chunks out of the bases so that the gorillas’ hands wouldn’t be knocked out of place.
I like them so much here’s another picture:
Finally, the last two units. I don’t think three Skink Priests and a tribe of pygmies could keep an engine of the gods running, so their Stegadon is your basic giant bow model. Yet again, however, it’s a toy plastic dinosaur converted …
The Terradons, however, I didn’t like the toy options I found, so I bought the GW ones and put pygmies on their backs. I do like these and might have a Tic-tac-to (spelling?) equivalent, but I’m not sure. I don’t like units who might never turn up. I’d rather have ‘em from the word go and build a more solid plan around them.
They never, ever won a game as a Southland’s variant from the old book, what with no ranks for the FC Horned Ones (my boars), but now I have stone dropping Terradons and a unit that counts as Saurus.
Way cooler then boars.