Rangers of the North Part 1

"An increase in blog posts is directly proportional to the increase in hobby activity."

--Me, 12/05/2014

I've been getting some time in at night to work on hobby stuff over the past two months. One of my goals is to whittle down the huge pile of 15 mm fantasy figures. I pretty much grab things and try to paint them up.  Recently, Splintered Light has been putting out a line of RPG characters. One of which is their Warriors of Nature. It consists of combination of rangers and barbarians, with two druidy-looking dudes for good measure. It inspired me to paint up a big collection of rangers that I have accumulated over time from various companies. Here are some of the first ones finished so far:

Demonworld Miniatures

The dude above is a Demonworld ranger from their Empire group. Now that Ral Partha Europe has taken over the line, you can buy smaller sets of them rather than the complete sets, which were pretty darn expensive. There are several poses, and this is one. He is wearing what I perceive to be scale armor, which is a nice alternative. They seem a little larger than the others, particularly Chariot Miniatures, but it doesn't bother me that much.

Chariot Miniatures

Chariot Miniatures

Next up are two rangers from Chariot Miniatures. These are now made by Magister Militum. They come in two poses as seen above. They are a little on the small side compared to other manufacturers like Demonworld, but again, its not dramatic enough to be that big a deal. All of the manufacturers that make rangers both in shooting and not shooting poses. I will show more of the non-shooting poses in another post.  

Grenadier

I am almost certain this last is a single figure from Grenadier, which I painted a couple of months ago. It was from their barbarian mammoth model. There were two passengers, the archer shown above and a spearman. I showed off the mammoth in a previous post. Mirliton has yet to make the barbarian line of Grenadier 15s, if ever. I remember when Mirliton took over that line, there were a lot of groans in the 15 mm fantasy community especially about the pace of production...basically non-existent. I guess I should be happy that they have put out the ones that they did. The war mammoth they do sell on their site is not the same as this model. I have nothing against Mirliton. Their medieval line of 15s is fantastic. I just feel that if you are going to take over an existing line, you should manufacture the whole line.

Anyway, back to the above figure. He and his comrade did not look barbarian enough for me. I still have not figured out who to man the mammoth. I did like this guy and thought he'd make a good ranger/hero type. All my fantasy characters are mounted singly. I will probably include his spear-wielding buddy as a ranger, but a part of the rank-and-file.