The Nightmare Legion is one of three regiments of Renown I bought sometime in the late 80s. I had saved up my pocket money, birthday money and whatever odd job money I could earn and took it to GW with the intention of spending the lot. Instead of making a set of carefully chosen purchases based on a well worked out army list, I went with colourful box art showing nicely painted miniatures. I came home with Bugman’s Dwarf Rangers, Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs and The Nightmare Legion. Over the passing decades almost all of the first two sets have either been swapped, sold or lost. However, I did manage to retain almost the whole Nightmare Legion with the exception of the champion, Renzo Avanti, and a few troopers. Also, both the leader, Ennio Mordini, and the standard bearer were broken. Mordini’s sword hand had been snapped off, which I was able to repair. However, the standard bearer was broken at the base tab which proved a bit beyond me. A little time and money on eBay supplied me with a new Avanti, standard bearer, and the requisite number of troopers to complete the unit. I did consider buying some additional troopers to make the unit up to 30 so it was a ‘full strength’ unit of skeleton warriors for third edition rules. However, after painting 20 near identical troopers I decided to keep it at its original strength.
I remember reading the story on the box and enjoying it at
the time. The stories on many of the boxed sets were one of the really nice additions GW made to some of its miniatures back then. I have recently found
that they were written by Graeme Davis, who was responsible for so much of the wonderful
WFRP texts. He wrote a little about it on his blog (nightmare legion |
Search Results | Graeme Davis) which is well worth a read.
In terms of painting them, I decided to stick fairly closely to the original description of the legion. This was partly for nostalgia reasons, but also because I saw them as rather like a lost Roman Legion and wanted the colours to evoke something of this. In this vein I didn’t use a multitude of different shields but used the same long shield design for all of them. This helped ‘justify’ the monopose of the troopers if they could be viewed as having been a highly disciplined unit in life and be continuing this in death. Generally I’m not a fan of units made up of identical or near identical minis, but this seemed to work. I started out trying to freehand paint the shields with the original design from the box, but it didn’t come out too well, so I swapped to a plain design, which I think looks ok. I painted the banner as a direct copy of the one on the box.
Overall, I’m rather happy with the result and particularly pleased that something I’ve had for around 30 years has finally been painted. Next time, more undead.
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