The Guiding Hand - Pan Tang Officers

After a little break from my Frostgrave Pan Tang warband, I've painted up another couple of figures, this time representing the better fighters or officers. I imagine Pan Tangians to be ruled by a brutal and strongly hierarchical society. The military would be no exception - officers are the word of the gods, as far as their subordinates are concerned, no matter if this results in a soldier being needlessly incinerated by some kind of foul magic spell!

 

Pan Tangians battle Melniboneans - Stormbringer RPG by Chaosium Inc.

 

The two latest additions to the warband are just such men - masters of their own little empires; ambitious, amoral, petty and selfish. Thorkor (on the left), is a junior officer from the Pan Tangian marines. He wears the lighter armour and shorter tunic of the naval forces. Carkan Amit is the senior officer of the Soorkan ul'Kaarna's warband - the most experienced fighter, with a strong grip on the fate of his men.

 

Tygers of Pan Tang - The Beast and His Handler

The tigers of Pan Tang are so iconic, that they even named a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band after them. The Stormbringer RPG by Chaosium Inc. states that:

"The tiger is a rare animal in the Young Kingdoms. Tigers roam freely only on the Isle of Pan Tang where it is the sacred totem animal of Chardhros the Reaper, Lord of Chaos...In rare cases they act as a Pan Tang warrior's combat companion."

It would therefore seem pre-destined that my Pan Tang Frostgrave warband would include a tiger (either as a Hunting Dog or Snow Leopard animal companion). Happily, Citadel anticipated my need, and produced a pair of tigers and their handlers as part of their Pan Tang range.

Image taken from Stuff of Legends.

The Rise of Pan Tang

Back in early 2014, I spent a lot of time and energy tracking down the delightful licensed Eternal Champion range produced by Citadel between 1986-1987. After successfully accumulating the entire range, I duly packaged them in a figure case and did nothing with them. Two years on, and their time has come.

In April I will be travelling to Ireland to meet up with some good friends and gaming buddies for a weekend. Among other things, we will be playing a series of games of Frostgrave - you may have already seen cheetor's fledging Oriental warband, The Shonen Knives. Bar the odd figure here and there, I've not painted a fantasy force for anything since about 1991 or 1992. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity to put some life into some of my Eternal Champion figures.

After some consideration, I decided to use Pan Tangians for my Frostgrave warband, for no other reason than they are much less common than the Melniboneans which were later rolled into Citadel's High Elf range, while painted Pan Tangians are rare as hens teeth!

A Sorcerer of Pan Tang blasts his Melnibonean foes (artwork from the Stormbringer RPG by Chaosium).

Friskers Painted

If you've been keeping tabs on this blog, I probably don't need to tell you that over the last 9 months or so I've been steadily collecting Citadel's mid-1980s Eternal Champion range, based on Michael Moorcock's brilliant novels. It is my intention (eventually) to paint up the full range and do a bit of fantasy skirmish gaming.

As part of assembling the collection, I commissioned my friend and ace sculptor John Pickford to sculpt me a little winged cat (let's call him Friskers), who could represent a certain animal familiar to accompany Elric's companion Jhary a-Conel. Citadel's Jhary sculpt already had a very similar winged cat on his shoulder, representing Whiskers from the Elric books. But I foresaw the need for an independent winged cat, hence the Frisker sculpt.

I painted up my Friskers last night - here's the results:

Friskers hunting through the grass!

 

Chasing Unknown Unknowns

When it comes to collecting models, there are "known knowns" - the models that were catalogued, widely produced and put on general release. Limited editions and even unreleased figures could also be "known knowns", with resources such as Stuff of Legends and Collecting Citadel Miniatures Wiki increasing the number of known knowns on a regular basis.

 

 

Stormbringer RPG 1987 - An Inexpert Review

I'll start this post off with a caveat. I'm not an experienced RPG player - in fact it's been 10 years since my last Dungeon crawl, and I think I've undertaken fewer than 10 quests ever.

So why, you may ask, am I writing a post about the Stormbringer RPG, based on Michael Moorcock's 'Elric' novels, jointly published in 1987 by Games Workshop and Chaosium Inc.?

Stormbringer. Cover art by Peter Jones