Swashbuckling Sessions: Introduction

This blog serves as a journal my toy soldier style swashbuckling projects through the ages. Unlike my other blogs, the figures shown here are of a larger scale (60-65mm), of the prepainted toy soldier variety.

Currently, it has two themes, though this may change over time.

The first theme concerns the characters written by Alexandre Dumas and is, at present, based around the fabulous King & Country "Pike and Musket" range of figures, though occasional additions from other sources are likely to appear. One of the main appeals of the K&C range is that the sculpting, while good, does not so much strive for intricate realistic detail as generally seen on high end 54mm models, but instead for infusing character to faces and details, much in the way that a well sculpted 28mm figure tends to have more character and soul than a realistically proportioned model of the same size.

Three Musketeers and a country boy (pic from the K&C site)

It is also my intention to explore the possibility of using these figures for fun- and action packed skirmish gaming using the "...And all for one" rules you can download for free from the Eureka Miniatures site, which were introduced to me by Vikotnik and are an easy, quick to learn ruleset that allows for fastpaced minigames.

So far, I'm looking at 4 different factions from the K&C range: The King's Musketeers, The Cardinal and his Red Guard, The Witchfinder General and his lackeys, and The Duke of Buckingham and his bodyguards. The latter two should allow me to get double use out of some of the English figures. And of course some Noble and civilian characters. The Kronprinz TYW Spanish range looks appealing for a 5th faction but I'm worried the size will not be a good match.

The other theme will focus on the tales of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn style. Again, this will be based mostly around the King & Country Robin Hood range, with some additions from elsewhere (the K&C Crusaders range is a good starting place for that). Here too, I was drawn in by the obvious character added to the K&C sculpts. It doesn't hurt that several of the characters were clearly inspired by the classic Errol Flynn movie. Ruleswise, odd are I'll go for an adaptation of the aforementioned "And all for one" rules as they are fun and uncomplicated.

The duel to end all duels, Robin vs Guy of Gisbourne (pic from the K&C site)