Big project at a small scale

I’ve been tinkering with some fantasy large battle rules and it’s needs a new scale rather than my usual 28mm, and I eventually settled on 10mm as I’ve seen some lovely looking figures at Cromarty Forge and Forest Dragon.

This will have some challenges of course. Firstly 10mm is very small!  Can I even paint figures at that scale that don’t look pants? Then there’s my total lack of terrain. Oh and how should I base the figures? What size units do I want? What armies shall I do?

Anyhow, I thought it might be interesting to log this all here in one place.

First I had to do some work on the rules, while my 28mm scale skirmish campaign (Protect the Kingdom) has 12 battles against four enemies, and I think I’ve settled on a single enemy who has sent 3 armies to invade. My Kingdom will then deploy armies to counter this, and there is a map system where the armies will march about until they face each other.

I say “armies” on purpose, this is not a skirmish game, I want it to feel much bigger. Which means lots of troops, separate units, formations, support, supplies, etc. I want to make this as agnostic as possible so settling on how they are based rather than numbers of figures seems to be the way to go. So I am using and Effectiveness stat (EFF) instead of numbers of troops.

I did a 28mm Narnian army that was fun to do, so I’m looking at that as my Kingdom, while what first drew me to Cromarty were the stunning Undead Norse. So an Undead invasion of Narnia is my theme!

Basing 

10mm figures seem to often come as strips and Warlord Atlantic do some nifty 40x20mm bases that are inset and can have a couple of magnets, so that seems like the basing sorted. Formations implies being able to shuffle bases around, so a standard foot unit will be on 4 bases, this also allows for removal of bases every time the units’s EFF is reduced by a quarter.

So here we have a WA base, one with two 3mmx1mm magnets installed (I got mine off Amazon in a pack of 100), and finally with two strips of figures (10mm Cromarty Forge Zombies). Plus a 28mm figure for scale!

Now to try painting some!