If you’ve Lenoon’s review of the Outremer-focused models put out by Footsore as part of their The Baron’s War range, but the original setting of the game, a revolt of a number of Barons against King John of England that culminated in a civil war, a French invasion, and the beginnings of Robin Hood calls to you, you’re in luck – Footsore’s range is extensive.
As my local club is gearing up for a Death and Taxes campaign (in my opinion one of the best supplement names out there), it seemed like a good time to review the range.
Footsore models in this article were provided to Goonhammer for the purposes of review.
Table of Contents
Chosen Models
While you can just go ham and build your own force from the ground up, Footsore has four different 500 point collections to get you started, which are intended to be used as the foundation of a larger force, but also work perfectly well on their own. The Beginner’s Retinue, which comes with a mounted lord and retinue, six sergeants, eight bowmen and eight spearmen – alongside the PDF of the Baron’s War rules all the sets come with – seems like a good start.
But, having an unconscionable pile of Victrix knights sitting in my closet of opportunity, my eye was instead drawn to the “Chosen Men” retinue. Consisting of a five-man foot knight unit with a musician and standard bearer, five spearmen with shields, five sergeants, and ten bowmen, it’s a strong, infantry-heavy force that I envisioned as the start of a garrison force. You need three armies for a D&T campaign, so while my Baron is going to go riding off on a fancy horse with some very expensive knights, he’s also left a strong contingent behind to make sure his home stays secure, led by a trusted retainer. That’s these guys.
There are, additionally, two other sets, one of sundry Outlaws, a list introduced in D&T, and one with a small group of knights with a priest, some spearmen and archer, and twelve angry monks that are eager to test the limits of that whole “Thou Shalt Not Kill” business. Both are excellent themes, but also something I’d regard as somewhat more specialist retinues.
Casting Quality
Cleaning and prep of these models was delightfully easy, and probably some of the easiest metal models I’ve had the pleasure of working with. The details are crisp, preparing them involved usually just clipping off a few faint wisps of flash, filing down the bottom of the puddle bases to make sure they had a flat and rough coating to adhere well to the bases themselves, and that was that. The models come with MDF bases, but I ended up mounting them on my preferred Citadel-style beveled edge plastic bases. The puddle base was then worked into the rest of the base with some green stuff to make the transition between them a little less pronounced. Clever people who use slightly recessed bases can probably skip this step, but I’ll have none of that. Besides, once buried in a small hill of green stuff, these models are never coming off their bases barring some seriously catastrophic dropping or the like.
There was only one model with a small casting defect that meant having to damage some detail in the removal process, but even this was fixed by using some green stuff to resculpt like, a 1mm circle of chainmail. Once primed, I genuinely can’t tell which mini it is I fixed, which is less a testament to my deftness with green stuff and much more evidence of just how minor the flaw was.
The one problem I did have was with the spearmen. Or, more particularly, the spears. Like most spears cast in softer metal, these came out in a form best called “wiggly”, and after spending a little bit of time trying to patiently tap them straight, I gave up and replaced them with wire spears from North Star Military Figures. The holes for them would have needed to be drilled for their wiggly cousins anyway, so this didn’t particularly add more work. I don’t think this is really a knock against Footsore – I’ve replaced the spears from pretty much every metal figure I’ve ever built with a wire spear for similar reasons. The unfortunate reality of our hobby is that the sharpened stick, one of, if not the, most commonly used weapons in history, is remarkably hard to cast in metal at 28mm scale.
Size Comparison: Wargames Atlantic Foot Knights
Miniature scale is infuriatingly ambiguous, and “28mm” can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different sculptors. The nearest point of comparison for Footsore’s range is the rapidly expanding Wargames Atlantic range of plastics in the “Age of Chivalry” line, also intended for The Baron’s War. Comparing one of the foot knights in that range, the Footsore knights are slightly slighter – both shorter and a little bit more lean. While it’s visually distinct, I don’t think it’s enough to make much of a difference on the tabletop, and the benefits of mixing and matching poses for variety probably outweigh the fairly minor differences in scale, which are easily smaller than the natural variability in people’s stature.
Sculpt and Character
As with the Outremer-focused figures Goonhammer has reviewed previously, the quality of the sculpts themselves, and the character of the models, are great. Facial features are well sculpted, and the expressions are mostly serious but not screaming. The poses are great too, and well suited to a skirmish game like The Baron’s War – they make sense as units, but they have enough difference in pose, attire, etc. that they look good as individual figures, rather than relying on the weight of a ranked up formation to provide visual impact. The Knights are stoic and intimidating without being overly static, while the foot sergeants look dangerous as hell.
In addition to the variety of poses, there was also a nice variety in equipment. The spearmen range from helmeted men equipped in mail shirts to a guy who looks pretty fortunate to have found something slightly more durable than a cooking pot to wear. The archers are similar, ranging from cloaked forester looking fellows to a helmeted, mail-wearing figure that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t look out of place in an English force intended for Crecy or Agincourt.
This variety made painting a pleasure, as even if I did favor a slightly ahistorical level of uniformity (most figures are wearing at least one element of one of their lord’s colors), there’s a ton of variety between figures wearing padded armor, mail, or simple tunics in the same force. That meant if one figure had a broad, bold green tunic, one of his compatriots might be in muddy brown, or a buff-colored padded jacket. There’s also usually a pretty strong transition point between different fabrics or textures, which avoids one common problem with metal models, which is deciding where exactly on material ended and the other began. Lots of layering of fabrics, etc. helped a lot here.
These models were a delight to paint, speaking as someone who paints frustratingly slowly. Lending themselves well to “small batch” painting (simply because The Baron’s War units aren’t that big) the details also take really well to contrast-style painting (a point discussed in our recent metal models roundtable). The setting the models are in lends well to that as well – a little unevenness and staining, which might not look great on smooth, polished battle armor, makes perfect sense for the roughly dyed tunic of a peasant who has been marching for the past five days without changing clothes. I’d been dragging my feet on painting these for too long, as they don’t lend themselves well to my typical tools – an airbrush and oil washes. As it turns out, these were the perfect figures to get me over that hump.
Expanding Outward
So thanks to the Chosen Men set, you have a functional 500 pt. starter force for Baron’s War. What now?
To my mind, there’s two ways to expand your force from this foundation, and the models in the Chosen Men set support both options. The first is to treat it as a standalone modular force, and use your next 500 points to diversify. While ten archers is a decent base of ranged fire, perhaps the addition of some sergeants with crossbows for a unit with both a little more punch and a little more staying power, albeit at the cost of mobility. Or a host of peasant levy for cheap bodies. Or, having established a strong infantry core, expanding out into more mobile elements, with mounted knights or sergeants to harry the flanks of your opponents, counter movements where your infantry might not be swift enough to respond, or contest distant objectives.
The other path is to double down, and build out a genuinely robust, infantry-focused force of foot knights, melee sergeants and spearmen backed by archers. Here’s where I think the variety of poses that potentially come in the Chosen Men set (which is really just a grab-bag of existing kits) really helps. For example, the banner bearer who came with my set is lightly armored enough to credible be a pennant bearer for a veteran sergeant leader, as is potentially one of the knights.
That creates a second strong command group, while adding more foot knights and a more heavily armored command group to flesh out a baron or lord on foot’s command group. Similarly, one or two more sets of spearmen would allow the creation of two units – perhaps a veteran group equipped with mail armor, and a more lightly armored green spearmen unit to soak up some of the required points spent on green units. The differing bowmen have the same potential to them. In writing this, I think I’ve developed my plan for a 1000 pt. “garrison force”.
Closing Thoughts
Footsore’s The Baron’s War range is, I think, a really strong range of metal models. Thanks to the small size of armies, some of the impediments of metals (like their sheer weight) are less of a thing, while the chance to bring out a lot of charm and character in the figures is especially valuable. I think the “Chosen Men” retinue in particular, which is currently available on the Footsore website for $48, and comes with a PDF of the rulebook which would be $13 by itself, is a particularly good starter kit. It’s a strong force that puts a lot of bodies on the table, discourages overspending on expensive and vulnerable mounted knights (we are a good hundred+ years before the French learn this the hard way), and provides multiple paths of expansion. There are a couple places that require some thought – for example, with the knights that came in my set, there is one who must be the commander, as he’s armed with a mace, and everyone else has a sword, and units must be equipped the same – except for a commander. But beyond a little bit of thinking – and a little bit of drilling to replace the spears that come in the set with wire spears – this set was pleasant to assemble, straightforward to paint, and a solid start to a The Baron’s War force.
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