Hordes Anyone?

Everyone should know Hordes by now, a rip-roaring, beast-infused testosterone smack 'em up by Privateer Press who broke onto the miniatures scene catering to the 18-24 year old, anti-GW demographic. Warmachine came first, and we played it...quite a bit actually, but it tanked locally, and fast. We also played the Iron Kingdoms RPG more than a few times too, suffice it to say we liked the genre as a whole.

Hordes was just being released near the end of the Iron Kingdoms hey-day here. It was cool, it was different, and in a lot of ways it seemed to tweak (and improve) a lot of the rules issues that we found in WM, but I think the timing was too little, too late for us.


The warbeasts of my first foray into Hordes, the Legion of Everblight. I got these thinking they could pull double duty as some horrid backworld Xenos to harass Colonial Marines or the like. The models were certainly cool looking.


Here's a couple of the Legion's Warlocks and a Minion Solo. I was going for an overall desert kind of look, and I was going to paint all of the Nyss (Winter Elves) as Drow. Something about the Legion didn't stick with me though, maybe it was the playstyle or whatever, but I soon traded them off for...the Skorne.


The Skorne were very cool in fluff, of which I only knew a little about, and their visual style was even cooler. They have a whole retro-fantasy Samurai thing going on with the Skorne themselves looking very much like a cross between Klingons and Cardassians. I liked this army even more, but again, it just didn't stick. It eventually ended up in Chris' hands, and unlike the shape they're in above on my shelf, he's done a knock-out paint job with them.

It's funny, because I even went with the Circle Orboros after I tried Skorne. I had bought up a large sized force from Plycon's Keep in the $150 dollar range and had plans to put it together from the ground up. It may work for some people, but buying up a large, unpainted army all at once was just too overwhelming in the long run for me and I sold it off. At this point I sold all of my rulebooks too, and kinda shelved any further Hordes notions.


Now, more than a couple of years later, Eric H. over at the Adept's Forge has this recent post about the above Bear and Dwarf team that really got me thinking. If I were a rational being, which when it comes to miniatures I don't think anyone is, I would just buy this two-fig box, paint it, and be done with it, because the two of these models side by side just look that cool.

We don't play Warmachine or Hordes anymore, but some part of me still would like to put together a small Trollbloods army just for the fun of it if nothing else. Plus, they're the only faction I haven't tried yet, heh. I've ebayed off all of my stuff, it's long gone, but I know a couple of folks in the group still have some semblance of armies, like Oz and Andy. Rucht is still pretty into it, but he moved away, so those games would be quarterly...at best, but I'd suspect closer to bi-annually. When we were playing, it was a blast.

Making a new army for a game we haven't played in a long time? Probably not a good idea, but for the fun of it I did put together a small army list of Trollbloods using the models that I absolutely love the look of and nothing but. They might not have the best stat-synergy or whatever, but I've always gone for aesthetics first, then worry about tabletop effectiveness second. I'm not a huge figure painter, but these are the kinds of figs I would look forward to painting. If nothing else I'll get the above Minion Warlock Dwarf Cragback and his big ole bear, Lug. It might be fun to paint something other Dark Angels for a change...