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| Lombards by Old Glory - the one shield I get the lines wobbly on, and it's the warlords! |
After a lot of delays due to home improvement work, I finished up my Lombard warband for
SAGA. The Lombards are an
Age of Vikings faction that uses the Goth battle board from the
Age of Invasions supplement. They vary, however, from the Goths in that they can
only take mounted warriors, but they are one of the few factions who have mounted warriors without a ranged attack (which means their armor is higher). This mounted warrior element is what attracted me to the Lombards, as I wanted to field a mounted host but didn't want the skirmish-y feel of mounted troops with javelins.
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| Old Glory Lombards. |
My Lombards, all by Old Glory, are a pack of Lombard archers, a pack of Lombard heavy cavalry, and two packs of Lombard medium cavalry. This gives me 30 archer figures and 29 mounted figures (the draco/standard bearer and horn-blower figures that come with the Lombard heavy cavalry are the same that come in their Goth heavy cavalry pack - but they luckily included two extra Lombard figures so I was able to mod one of those into a standard bearer).
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| Old Glory Lombards. |
I painted the banner based on a 9th or 10th century fresco in northern Italy of St. Margaret of Antioch, contemporaneous with the original Lombard kingdom.
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| Fresco on which I based my banner. |
St. Margaret's story (also called St. Marina) is so fantastical that even medieval scholars dismissed her as mostly a fabrication, especially the part where she was swallowed by Satan in the form of dragon, but because she was wearing her crucifix, his stomach opened and she emerged unharmed. The fresco and thus my banner depict this emergence.
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| Lombard archers. |
Literally the day after I finished basing the Lombards, I had a game against Andrew's Last Romans (Byzantines) (historically accurate conflict!). We played the 'Desecration' scenario where each side tries to destroy three objectives belonging to the other side. While I looked over the Goth board which the Lombards use a few times, I had not taken the extra step of testing it out by rolling dice and placing them to get an idea of what could be done during a turn.
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| Lombard medium and heavy cavalry out on the flank. |
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| Lombard medium and heavy cavalry out on the flank, confronted by Byzantine heavies. |
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| Byzantine archers in a ruin. |
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| I had these Lombard mounted warriors try their luck charging some Byzantine javelin troops in a muddy field. Not a good result. |
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| Byzantine javelins skirmishing with Lombard mounted troops. |
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| Lombard heavies try to destroy an objective. |
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| Andrew's Byzantines and general. |
The entirely predictable result was that I lost a lot of figures as I kind just experimented and tried the various abilities. I also have very little experience with mounted warbands so I'll need to think about how to use that correctly. This game also featured me having more archers than I have ever fielded before so will take some getting used to as well (generally I have used either javelin warrior warbands like Irish or Welsh or foot warrior warbands like Danes or Vikings).
So a learning experience, and the super good feeling of gaming in-person with someone.
*Aneurin. Y Gododin. LVII.
