The Battle for Skull Pass boxset contains approx 500pts of Dwarves. I wanted to double that as cheaply and efficiently as possible. In doing so, I also wanted to satisfy my appetite for proxies.
Enter Oathmark: one of several “rank and flank” wargames to fill the vacuum left by Warhammer Fantasy. The Oathmark range offers several chunky boxes of popular fantasy races: elves, humans, undead, lizardmen etc. Their dwarves come in two styles: heavy and light infantry. Hoping for Hammerers and Ironbreakers, I went for the big hitters.
Sprues, glorious sprues
So here’s what you get out of the box: lots! There are swords, there are axes and there are hammers. There’s also standard bearer and musician pieces, shields, one handed weapons and great weapons. And then there’s heads: 14 per sprue both helmeted and uncovered.
Just as I’d hoped, all of these are interchangeable and modular. Out of this mass of plastic you could build 3 x units of Hammerers, Ironbreakers and dwarf warriors, each with full command pieces, with heaps of bits to spare for kitbashing.
To start with, I went for 15 two-handed hammerers. I wanted these chaps to be imposing, so I went for the brooding closed helmet look. Here they are assembled, based and ready for priming. Oathmark uses 25mm bases (included in the box) so I had to get some 20mms for Warhammer Fantasy. The dwarves rank up just fine, and now I have 30 spare 25mms. Another happy accident.
Below: the hammerers are primed and spray painted silver. I hadn’t tried a metallic spray before, and this sure saved time in the long run. The spray was a little lighter than my customary Lead Belcher paint, which gave some variety to work with for their armour.
Et voila! 15 haughty hammerers ready for war. I’ve enough for 15 more, with lots of leftover bits for conversions. As I look to my greenskin army, I expect many of those heads will end up on spikes
So yeah, great kit, fantastic value and worth the £25 £20 to bolster a Warhammer Fantasy Player’s army. It’ll be fun to check out Oathmark itself sometime too; by all accounts the game is a good’un. In the meantime, I’ve more dwarves to paint…
