u/Front_Waltz_8582

I recently got put onto Kraut Cover basing pots by someone in our gaming group. I previously had a “frosted mud” aesthetic on my bases but army-wide it started to make everything feel too drab. I’ve added some of KCs “meadows of purity” and think it’s given the bases a nice face lift! I’ll maybe finish off with a light white drybrush just to tie it into the “frozen Middenland north” vibe I’m going for on my army. Some Middenlander Demigryph Knights and auxiliary crossbowmen from heighbouring Hochland shown.

Anybody got any recommendations for further improvements or good basing stuff?

Starting (another) new unit of State Troops and pretty happy how these guys have turned out so far! 😁

A Drakwald Patrol, by those lucky enough to survive it…

Otto Brandt had been a soldier long enough to know that “secure the high ground overlooking a proposed new trade route” was officer-speak for “die in a forest nobody will ever build a road through.” He’d said as much to the Lector that morning. The Lector had blessed him anyway, which Otto took as a bad omen.

It was, he had to admit, a handsome enough patch of nowhere. A bald green hill swelled up in the centre of a moody Drakwald clearing; their hill, the Captain had insisted. Off to the right, hunched on a rise, stood an abandoned watchtower with its roof caved in. The Company’s two cannons had been wheeled up behind it, dug in like dogs sheltering under a dead tree. Away to the left, past where the knights were forming to protect the far flank, a little stone church sagged among the pines, older than the “trade route” would ever be. And everywhere in-between, the Drakwald reached out with stands of black-trunked trees, dense enough that a man could lose his file in them. The Captain had deployed the Demigryphs in one such wood, where they crouched and seethed, a thin screen of archers loitering out front scanning for ground sign that might indicate enemies nearby…

As if the archers had been tempting fate, the Beastmen came out of the Drakwald the way damp comes through a boot. Slowly, then all at once, then everywhere. First a thing the size of the watchtower itself, with too many brawny limbs, came loping into the clearing and straight at the cannons. Just as the crews scrambled to light touchpaper to breech, a foul voice seemed to whisper over the trees and turn the war machines stone-cold. Then a whole filthy menagerie crested the hill in the middle: Dragon Ogres, Centigor and Bestigor, hooves tearing the green to mud. The hill the Captain had specifically told them they were meant to be standing on.

“That’s our hill,” said Pieter beside him, rolling his shoulders.

“Was,” said Otto, as he unslung his shield and tested the grip on his sword.

Far to the left of the beleaguered infantry, hard by the leaning church, Preceptor Wulfgar of the Knights of the White Wolf raised his hammer to the grey sky and bellowed the name of Ulric. The Wolf-God, he was certain, was watching. The Wolf-God watched everything, especially the brave, and what better place to be seen being brave than in the shadow of a house of the gods?

His squadron of knights wheeled out from the treeline they’d been sheltering in, to threaten the flank of the Bestigor now advancing on the centre of the Company’s line. Beside him and to his right, the Demigryphs of Preceptor Black broke from their wood, hissing and clawing at the loam; ready to charge the beasts the moment they closed on the trees.

Wulfgar’s accompanying Road Wardens cantered out ahead of the heavy cavalry, weaving between the pines, and emptied their pistols into the mass of Bestigor, driving three of them into the mud amidst piteous lowing. Wulfgar laughed. This was going splendidly! But the Drakwald, which has a sense of humour, answered his mirth by vomiting a herd of screaming Gor out of the trees behind him.

Back in the midst of the combat by the watchtower, Otto and the rest of the Company’s infantry were frantically wheeling to attempt to face the giant horror barreling down the cannons. Their screening archers bravely attempted to gain its attention and lead the monster away from the artillery, succeeding by launching a volley of arrows at its eyes, striking one and causing the Ghorgon to barrel after them. The plan worked perfectly. The archers died to a man, somewhere between the hill and the watchtower.

“He’s shown us his arse now” Pieter noted, pleased, as they charged into the flank of the monster, forcing it back a step over the corpses of their friends. Otto decided not to dignify this with a response, his breath coming in short bursts behind gritted teeth. Instead he got his sword into the beast’s withers, felt it bite, felt the thing scream through several throats at once, and thought: the Lector blessed me. The Lector blessed me!

Then the ground shook, and three Dragon Ogres came down off the high ground through what was left of the Company’s second Halberd detachment and into the veterans’ rear. All of a sudden everything became very confusing and very loud.
Almost as if on queue, off by the watchtower, a one-eyed giant the beasts had brought with them had begun lobbing stones from the crumbled watchtower, and a boulder meant for Otto’s company went sailing over the hill and into the empty church instead.

As the flung boulder crashed into the church behind them, Wulfgar turned his knights to face the Gor and ordered his trumpeter to blow the reform in line. Outnumbered as they were, they would need to make every hammer count when the enemy decided to charge.

Charge they did, boiling up out of the pines in a mass of stinking fur, saliva and sharp axes. What followed, Wulfgar would later describe to anyone who’d buy him ale, was a miracle. The beasts hit them in a roiling wave. The beasts hit him. Four, five six times a blade or horn or club came for the Preceptor, and six times his Twice-Blessed armour turned the blow aside with a sound like a smith’s apprentice dropping the tools. Two of his knights fell. The rest reaped the Gor like Middenland wheat. The herd, despite relatively few casualties compared to their overall strength, miraculously lost their nerve, rolled their eyes and bolted back into the dark trees they’d come from.

“ULRIC PROVIDES!! THE WOLF GOD FAVOURS HIS SONS!” Wulfgar announced, to the church, to the woods, to his surviving men, to the indifferent sky.

In the centre of the Empire line however, Ulric was not providing. First the Demigryphs began to get dragged down, one by one in the furious melee with the vicious Bestigor horde. The Road Wardens, seeing the danger and charging in like heroes, were cut to ribbons against the churchyard wall. The only two survivors fled, screaming, into the trees. Then Wulfgar, his blood singing and over-confident from routing the Gor herd, trotted his two ranks of knights along the back of the woods to deal with a group of Centigor that had crept out of ambush behind the lines. Oblivious to the destruction of the Demigryphs away to his left.

After finishing off the last of the Demigryphs, the Bestigor hit him at the gallop, out from the shadow of the church. Eight White Wolves died in the time it takes to say the Wolf-God’s name. Wulfgar and one other fled the field, hammersstill in hand, mouth still full of prayers, neither answered nor, he suspected, particularly heard. The day was lost, and so too, it appeared, was Ulric’s favour.

Otto’s last clear memory of the middle of the battle was being in a three-sided ambush, fought knee-deep in the ruin of the hill, with the Dragon Ogres at his back, a fresh pack of Centigor on one flank, and the one-eyed giant (bored of misthrowing lumps of masonry) wading in personally on the other. The Company began taking heavy casualties and fell back through the cannons beneath the watchtower, all the while maintaining good order. Which Otto thought was probably the single most professional thing he had ever done while soiling himself.

The cannon crews, shocked and dazed by the melee happening all around them held… mostly. The brave ones, anyway. The last remaining gun fired point-blank into the great Ghorgon and killed it, then put a shot through a Dragon Ogre for good measure, before the they charged in and silenced the war machine for good.

By the end there was Otto and a dwindling square of swordsmen who refused to die, backed up against a pile of dead Centigor, with the hill lost and nothing but the enemy in front of them. Then, amidst the panting and barely contained sobs, the Captain’s pet wizard began to mumble and chant. Finishing his incantations, he thrust his staff towards the giant cyclops lumbering towards them. At first, nothing happened, then the monster simply came apart, screaming as it exploded into untold gory fragments mere meters from their line.

Silence.

Both armies, bled white, looked at each other across the ruined field: the trampled hill, the broken watchtower, the church with the new hole in its roof, the road that would never be built. Impasse. The master of the Beasts, as yet untouched in combat but retaining his senses, roared something unintelligible and the remaining beastmen melted into the trees.

“…well we got close to the hill” rasped Pieter, gasping for breath and clutching an axe wound across his face.

“Yes… we got close to a hill that we still don’t own, watching a road that doesn’t exist, for traders who aren’t coming… If we pile the bodies up, we might be able to make our own hill and call it quits” said Otto. He sat down in the mud, with his back to the watchtower and the lost hill in front of him. The Lector came round and blessed him again.

Otto really wished he wouldn’t.

(Armies in first comment)

Another three knights for the Grand Expeditionary Company of Middenland. Used Vallejo TMM for the first time and now these guys look like they’ve spent all day polishing their barding compared to my other Knights 😅