Kickstarted Fireforge Cataphracts

Back in the Before Times, I noticed, and then decided to back, a Kickstarter from Fireforge expanding their Byzantine range. Historically, I have not been keen for any Kickstarters, backing only 3 prior to this one, but I loves me some Byzantines, and figured this would be a nice little surprise for me down the road. It was! This all shipped in May, and arrived at my door in late June.

Fireforge seems to work in three mediums, "normal resin", which as I have mentioned before is very brittle and I do particularly like, "fine resin" which I have no experience with (yet), and "plastic", which is great. Their minis all tend to be the same scale and general configurations (same attachment style for the head, flat arms and such), so swapping between (plastic) kits is very easy, especially for heads and weapons. Thankfully, through stretch goals and such, most of their new kits made it into plastic. 

With the Kickstarter stuff all mailed out now, their online shop started selling the kits in July, and their stock has finally caught up the last few weeks. They also have a small promotion going on to celebrate a European sportsball thing, so check them out! 

Their website looks to have a bunch of finished pictures, but nothing (at the time of writing this) for sprues to show what you in the box, so uh.. here we go! From the Kickstarter I received boxes of their Cataphracts, Horse Archers, the classic Varangian Guard, in addition to some characters for backing at certain levels. We'll go kit-by-kit I suppose.

Cataphracts

The Cataphract Horse Sprue

As mentioned before in the blog, I have been after a good cataphract model for a while, and these are "it" I think! The armor looks nice and heavy and meshes well with the historical stuff. They look like a group of solid, heavy cavalry.

Fireforge has used "stands" for their miniatures for as long as I have been aware of them. The stand, as I call it, is basically a smaller piece of flat plastic (or resin... whatever the mini is made from)  attached to the miniature which then serves as the connector to a base instead of the feet of the model. 

The stand can help with stability and such, but can be a bit of an eyesore for multibasing, as everything is standing on little bumps which you need to either carefully remove (sawing around all those tiny feet), just work around or somehow disguise it with additional pebbles or higher flock. I was surprised to see that that is not the case for any of these minis! The Cataphracts here look to have their hooves either flat with the ground, or a tiny addition to a hoof to help attach them flush to a flat base. I am pretty excited about this change! 

Cataphract knights? Riders?
Anyways, here is this sprue.

My preferred method for basing was relying heavily on textured paste, and pasting around all those tiny feet can be such a pain, and it forces you into a weird workflow. No stands lets you hobby up the minis and the bases separately, and then just glue the minis right onto that finished base as a last step. 

The Kickstarter path for these was weird. These were originally 6 to a box in a resin, but transitioned to plastic midway through production anyways. My package had a baggy of 9... I do not recall if that was a bonus for backers (bumping the box up from 6 to 9) or if my baggy was missing a pair of sprues to get the full 12, but I only want a regiment max right now, so I am fine with this. The real box comes with 12.

The riders fit together like GW Chaos Knights circa 2010, with each leg being its own bit. The kit comes with either maces or lances, which is a bit lackluster, but fine by me, as these are always going to get lances I think, so anything else is just a bonus.

The helmets are all closed chain veils, with plumed and non-plumed options, which is a nice touch. All-in-all, this kit comes across as very simple but very serviceable. I like it!

Horse Archers

Horse sprue for the Horse Archers.

The Horse Archers are largely designed the same, though the sprues are organized differently. The box comes with 12 horse archers. Each horse sprue has 3 horses, and each rider sprue has 6 archers, so you get 4 horse sprues and 2 archer sprues. That seems like a fine split, and you should be able to get a great unit with varied poses.

Again, no more long, bulky stands for the horses! To quickly highlight their design approach, look at the top-most horse body on the right-hand side in the pic here. It has the little nub on the back hoof, which is how they are connecting non-flush hooves to the base. Much better than that traditional big plastic "wisps" of dirt or whatever being tossed up. We'll see how well these stick to bases, but aesthetically, this is an improvement.

The archer sprue has a ton of "extra" bits like shields, sheathed weapons and stored bows and arrows. The stored bow bit is a little sad, being straight, smooth blank plastic on both sides. But I think the intent was to attach other bits on top of it? I don't know. Being archers, everyone gets a bow, with the other arm being a knocked arrow or just released arrow. 

Rider sprue for the Horse Archers

Getting bows-only for the weapons is a bit of a bummer, but the kit is for horse archers, so I totally get it. The Kickstarter did have a third horse-related kit, the Koursores, meant to be a kind of middle-of-the-road raiding unit, and that kit comes with melee weapons, with lances, and swords and stuff. Pick up one of those and you should come out with enough right arms to customize as you wish. (Left arms could potentially be a problem; the Cataphract sprue only comes with 3 left arms, so if you are using tiny shields, you may need to get creative with any conversion work.)

All in all, all of these horse kits are solid. I am temped to pick up more, as I can see soooo many possibilities... but I am going to hold off. I am still not hobbying all that much, and all of my purchases here are still on the sprue!

If you are looking to get into Kingdoms of Men, these cavalry kits are solid and should be a great jumping off point for an army. You can cover basically all your mounted needs (Knights, Mounted Sergeants, and Mounted Scouts) with these kits. Not bad at all!

Varangian Guard

"Fine Resin" Varangians...
with some of the extra bits. 

Historically-speaking, the Varangian Guard are wild and they have fascinated me for a while. Long ago, I wanted a "special" unit of Foot Guard with two handers to run in my KoM army to stand in as a homage to this historic group. Originally that was going to be older Chaos Warriors to tie things out to my Varangur, but I think I will do these up now instead. The scale will be much better I think.

The box comes in groups of 12. I got two boxes to try and run one regiment, with some models left over. There are only 6 bodies, but a ton of weapon options, so I am hoping some basic orientation pivots and different weapons will help break up any potential "monopose" worries.

I am actually excited to get to these as they are made with Fireforge's "Fine Resin", and would be my first foray into that material.

All of the sprues (? I honestly don't know if that's the correct term for these if they are resin.. It must be, right?) need a lot of cleaning up, but the kit is sprawling with weapons and shields and such. I think there is at least one other sprue that didn't make it into the picture here? It's a big baggy, but you get the idea. 

First impressions on the resin are all good. The "fine resin" has far more bend and give than their old resin. I will definitely need a fresh blade on my hobby knife before working on these and these will need a nice soapy bath and a lot of clean up work before I can hobby on them, but I am excited to give these a go. As with all of the other new kits, these models lack stands now as well, so we'll see how that goes. More to come on these for sure! I'm not getting in a ton of hobbying still, but I think these will jump the queue a few spots as I want to try out this new material.

Bonus!

Leaders

For pledging at a certain tier, I got some "bonus" leader minis, their Harald Hardrada and their Byzantine Emperor twofer pack.

Both are in resin (not actually sure if it is their normal resin or their fine resin. The box is unfortunately packed away for now so I cannot check). both are also stand-less. 

I would not have bought these on my own accord. I may do up Harald as a test mini and eventual leader mini for that unit of special Foot Guard, or the emperors as one-off characters in between projects or just to practice a bit, but I have no big desire to hobby on these. Still, free is free, and I'm sure I'll find a use for these eventually.

Summary

All in all, this was probably overkill. I don't need more minis right now, but I am happy I backed this. If you need any cavalry kits, any of these seem like solid choices. I am not displeased with any of the models, and I'll find uses for them eventually. I am quite keen to try out the fine resin Varangians, and will share more on them once they have some paint on them!