Kings Of War: Old Man Morin's Orc Amy: Part 3 (Goblins And Using Allies In KoW)

By Old Man Morin

Welcome back gang,

In the last couple of articles in this series I have detailed how I am transferring one of my favorite and craziest hobby projects over from Warhammer Fantasy Battle to Mantic's newest edition of Kings Of War.  Now this project started out as an Orc and Goblin army but in KoW these races have been split up into two distinctly different army lists, thank fully KoW has rules for allies.



Now version 2 of KoW is not commercially available (at the time of this writing) (ed note: you can find the core rules for V2 here and many starter army lists here) but copies are starting to trickle out to Kickstarter supporters and it appears that allies will be in the book. As orcs and goblins are both evil races and are both green skinned races, I don't think it will be a massive leap fluff wise to include units from one army into the other.

The goblin horde, early in the process

My goblins were made using a pile of old Warhammer 40K ork shootas with the ammo clips and handles cut off. This created a nice thick cylinder to stick muzzle down onto to the centre of a 20mm base.  From there I glued a goblin head to the narrower end of the gun that created a very basic neck joint to work from. I then, with the help of my old buddy Drew, sculpted furry cloaks to cover the models from the neck down and to give the model some girth (not much mind you...  they are supposed to be starving and weedy).  I did not use stacked dice like their larger orc allies because it just made them look short and fat.

Though I love the look of these guys individually, they do kinda look a tad boring at the moment. I think I will have to build these models into some interesting group bases and possibly add a few units fillers to mix things up. That, or I think I might sculpt a few front rank models throwing back their cloaks to mix things up a bit. I acquired a large pile of goblin heads a few years back (thanks again Drew!) that I have yet to put to good use. 

Here they are as of today, not finished but a lot closer to being done.

Now, in Kings Of War army building is point based, like many other games. To prevent the min/maxing of units within armies you must take regiments or hordes to "unlock" other choices within your army. For every regiment you take in your army, you can take a hero, a monster or a war engine. For every horde, on the other hand,  you take in your army, you can can take a hero, a monster AND a war engine. Allies work the same way. Thus by taking a horde of 40 goblins, I unlock other options within the goblin army list. Namely a giant rusty war engine.

Not my version of this model...

I plan on using this cannon as an old, beaten up, war engine stolen from the goblin's Abyssal Dwarf oppressors that is now getting dragged along my ragtag army. Game wise I plan on using this as a goblin "Big Rock Thrower." To reflect this I am going to model the barrel of the gun to its maximum elevation and add a pile of rock "cannon balls" to the ground next to the gun.

I have been playing with rust effects on some of my Eastern Front Bolt Action tanks and on the weapons of my Nurgle Daemon army for WFB. I plan to go a little crazy with the rust and dirt on this cannon when I get to it.

Outside of the "rock thrower" I don't think I will add too many other goblin elements to my "orc" army, as I am just trying to complete the existing army for KoW play. The more I play that might change, after all I do already have a half built, heavily converted unit of goblins riding giant wolves in a box somewhere.

Til next time...