Bretonnian ponderings

There was going to be an End Times post today but then I ran out of steam. We'll get back to it, I'm sure, but for now I'm pondering my much delayed Bretonnia army. Now, my focus up to the end of the year will be the Tomb Kings but since I'm going to need to do a lot of conversion on the Bretons to make a full army it'll have to be a slow build even before we take into account painting all that heraldry.

So, yeah, the things the Bretonnia range is currently missing: generic knightly characters, Questing Knights, Mounted Yeomen, the Grail Reliquae, Mounted Yeomen, Grail Knights and the Field Trebuchet. We're good for core plastics and Pegasus Knights but that's are a lot of things I'll either have to convert or do without.

I've been at this long enough that I remember when this sort of thing was business as usual. I remember the days when character classes and even whole units had no models for them. I had a Lost And The Damned army! I converted ninety mutants! This is nothing!

So, a few initial ideas:

Questing Knights

The name Graeme Friend Of Dwarves has always been an inspiring one to me. I was just going to paint an old Questing Lord in his colours but now I have all these spare champion weapons from my Dwarf Longbeards that don't seem too badly scaled to the knights. If I can chop the ball join flat I think I can wed the Dwarf great weapons to the knights with little difficulty.

More challenging are the piles of junk Questing Knights generally carry around, having no home to go back to and all. I'll have to raid my bits box and anyone else's I can get my hands on for random objects.

Mounted Yeomen

I once saw (and stupidly failed to save) a tutorial on merging Bretonnian Men-At-Arms and Empire Pistoliers to make Yeomen. Shouldn't be too hard to do if I can find the right spot to chop the Men-At-Arms in half at.

Grail Reliquae and Battle Pilgrims

Battle Pilgrims, easy: Empire Flagellants with the twin-tailed comets filed off and as much Bretonnian props glued to them as I can find. Grail Reliquae, far harder. I did own a Grail Reliquae so hopefully I can dig that up, strip the awful teenage paint job and just set it up in the middle of the Flagellants.

Trebuchet

There's only one other Trebuchet in GW's range and its terrible. Again, hopefully my old one has survived somewhere.

Grail Knights

Unbelievably this is the trickiest proposition. It seems easy: they're armed and armoured exactly the same as Knights Of The Realm and therein lies the problem: making the buggers look distinct. My first idea is to strap lots of those little heraldic shields to their shoulders and I think there are some big fleur de lys I could use somewhere on the model (chest, maybe) but aside from that I'm kind of out of ideas.

Still, if I make the Questing Knights first it'll be a while before I have to worry about the Grails.