27) In League with Daemons: Luring Others into the Hobby

For the first two months, we used the Ambush rules for smaller games. Now that we are going into May, however, we can use the standard rules and full 6'x4' table. We have ten participants in the league, and a great variety of armies. Everyone is having a lot of fun, and we are all getting multiple games in per month. A year ago, I never would have imagined this possible. Big thanks to all my friends in the Kings of War Wisconsin club for making it real.

The league features a campaign map which is a fantasy map of Wisconsin. Every month, the players get to move their base camps and plant banners to claim territory with their outriders. If two players enter the same map space, it forces a battle between those two players that month. Otherwise, anybody can play anybody at any time. Playing battles earns gold. Gold lets the players purchase new units, hire mercenaries, and is also required to keep their troops fed and in fighting condition. We even have a system that awards veteran status to a player's MVP unit after their first league game of the month. Veteran units get little perks to reflect the fact that this is an experienced group of fighters.

If you are trying to build a community for a miniatures game I highly suggest an escalation league. It makes jumping into the hobby much less intimidating for a new player. It allows them to slowly collect and paint their models on a regulated schedule, rather than making a huge investment into a daunting project all at once. It also helps that everyone in the league is building their army at the same pace, and learning the game together. That can be very important for someone who feels anxious or intimidated by playing against more experienced gamers.

Speaking of experienced gamers, a gaming club from Minnesota recently reached out to us. They wanted to organize a meet up of some sort. We decided to to a doubles tournament with them. Each team will be comprised of one WI player and one MN player! The tournament will be in June, and we already filled the roster. It's going to be a blast. We will be meeting up at Three Mountain Games in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, which is the halfway point between the two clubs. Mantic Games has generously promised us prize support, and two of the experienced tournament organizers from MN have volunteered to help guide me through running my first tournament.

This is great timing, because I was officially accepted into the Mantic Pathfinder program. As a Pathfinder I can earn credit for teaching demos, working conventions, and running events like tournaments. This credit can be used to purchase miniatures from the Mantic online store in the future. It's a great program, and I am excited to be part of it.

On the hobby side of things, I sold my lizards to another player, because he was much more interested in a Salamanders army than I was. I have plenty of other minis to paint, and I really wasn't all that motivated to build and paint that army. I had originally intended to build it for the escalation league, but decided to use my Abyssal Daemons instead. Between managing the league, running demos, organizing club meetups, and planning the upcoming tournament, I decided that the safer choice was to use a completed army for the escalation. That way I wouldn't be stressed to finish new units every month, as I wasn't sure how much hobby time I would have.

I've not had a lot of luck commanding this Abyssals army, but at least the miniatures look really great.

On the topic of miniatures; I've mentioned it before, but Kings of War is miniatures agnostic. You can play with any miniatures that you want.

HOWEVER, if you are working for Mantic, wearing their Pathfinder uniform shirt, and representing them at a convention, event, demo, or tournament, then they really want you to use their models. That's fair. Especially since they literally pay you with their miniatures.

This left me in a slight predicament. I had enough Mantic Rats to do a Ratkin demo army, but my Abyssals were a real mixed bag of miniatures from different companies. A lot of them were Mantic, but a lot of them were not. The Bretonmark and Undead armies had zero Mantic minis in them, because they were older than Mantic was!

I decided to build a new army, just for the sake of running demos.

So much for not stressing myself to complete a hobby project on a timetable!

I happened to have a couple of regiments of Mantic Northmen lying around, and so I picked the Varangur Barbarians list for my new demo army. The models are great, but their shields are very random and not at all uniform. They are made from antlers and bones and weird shapes. I don't like that. I like uniform shields. For one regiment of Barbarians, I used leftover round shields with skull motiffs, and the other regiment got tower shields. Once the regiments were glued together and primed, I had to pick a color scheme. When I think of Barbarians in a fantasy setting, I always think of the media that I grew up with as a child of the 80s, like "Masters of the Universe" and "Conan". For this army, I decided to go with that iconic Skeletor color scheme from He-Man. I painted the models with purples, blues, and yellows. To take it one step further, I bought Mantic Sisterhood Panther Riders from the Basilean range, and converted the riders with fur hats, horned helmets, and other accoutremonts to make them look less like nuns and more like barbarian cavalry. They turned out great, but they needed another fast unit to support them, so I picked up a pack of Mantic Tundra Wolves. The army was rounded out with a unit of Draugr from the Mantic Dungeon Dead set, and a Cavern Dweller.