A big thank you to Victrix for supplying a bag of their new Pagan Rus minis alongside a transfer sheet of Little Big Men Studio shield transfers for review. It’s not summer anymore technically but it’s always SAGA Summer in our hearts!
Way back when I was getting into historicals for the first time (May of this year) with SAGA I’d seen and heard of the Pagan Rus faction/board summoning ice storms and thought “damn, that’s cool” and it is. However at the time the answer to the question “how do I play Pagan Rus?” was either “just use Vikings” or the much-less-appealing “buy metal minis”. To be clear that was less appealing cause the cost was going to be higher, not because they’re metal.
WELL NO MORE!
I might be a recent convert to “bag minis” but oh boy bag-mini-day is like Christmas around here now. When Lenoon asked if I’d be able/willing to review the new Victrix Rus minis I leaped at the notion. Had I only just finished my 12th point of SAGA Vikings with another review? Sure. Does that matter? No.
Bag Minis
If you’re not aware already, Victrix models typically come on sprues in bags. Although there have reportedly been seen Victrix minis in boxes seen in the wild. I don’t know anything about that, really, I’m just here to tell you how good the Rus bag is.
When you get a bag of Rus you get:
- 4 sprues of un-armoured warriors
- 4 sprues of armoured warriors
Very simple. That armoured sprue kind of works like a command sprue but there’s “command” type bits split across both anyways including various banner poles (the un-armoured sprue has one of an absurdly cool length held in two hands), horns, and even a torch. Very cool. The armoured sprue also works great if you’re building some Varangian Guard.
On the other side the un-armoured sprue has done great for levies, and mixing the two sprues together I’ve made warriors; both of these are for a SAGA warband. You get 12 square shields and a plethora (really, more than enough) round shields of a few different sizes; I used the square ones all for my levies since they won’t have transfers slapped on them and so will end up looking a bit more plain. That’s just my gamer-head-canon on what makes sense here, nothing historical about it.
The quality of the plastic itself is impressively high; mold lines are present but not very thick and easy to remove, the parts fit together perfectly, the weapons and parts all feel appropriately scaled. I would say that these are noticeably nicer in quality in detail compared to the Viking bag. To be clear: I think the Viking bag is also excellent, you can just tell this is a bit newer, it has a certain crispness to it. They also come with full, pictured, instructions!
Building and Painting
I can’t say enough good things about how good this kit is. With more than enough head, weapon, and other-arm options, I managed to build 48 of them with none being even close to a duplicate model. All of these 48 models were built using just one bag of minis and there’s plenty of further optimisation I could have gone with!
One thing that I have done however is a bit of snipping and extra-modelling (even some greenstuff) to help create models that fit my vision. All very simple little conversions so that I could have the most heavily armoured helmets on my Hearthguard models with the full chainmail helmets; also to give them all either two-handed weapons or wielding two weapons while avoiding any duplicate poses.
Simple cuts made at wrists to remove hands from some arms and move them to different ones is all this took; most notably putting the torch on an armoured body when it’s meant to go on an un-armoured body. Important to note here: some of the heads with dangling chainmail naturally are created to fit a specific body and don’t really work on the others. A few helmets from the un-armoured sprue (like with the tassel) work very well though.
The most I did was giving my Warlord a bear pelt. You get 1 bear pelt head per armoured sprue (so, four of them total in a bag) and it’s designed to fit very specifically on a body that’s leaning back. I didn’t want that pose for my warlord but did want a bear pelt (because of course, who doesn’t?) and this meant having to add some greenstuff to cover the shoulders and otherwise awkward gap. Simple texture work is the easiest thing you can do with greenstuff, great news for me who hasn’t touched it in about five years and can’t sculpt to save my life!
When it came to painting I wanted to match somewhat to the pictures Victrix had using more muted tones than I’d done on my Viking models. The blues especially are important and if you’re thinking “well they didn’t have blue dyes, idiot!” you’re wrong: woad was commonly used to make deep blue dyes, it just fades. Information I have picked up with simple Googling and that Lenoon has told me so leave a comment if you think we’re wrong.
Achieving this look was simple and used underpainting as a base then Stormfiend (Contrast) for the blue. Highlighted lightly with Calgar Blue, Creed Camo for the green, and Murder Scene (Speedpaint 2.0) for the maroon. Your choice of silver, gold, and black shade then over hit with some matte varnish at the end. Super simple.
Using Rus for SAGA
If you’ve read this far you’ve already gathered that I built these specifically to be used in SAGA. The Rus fit very nicely (as you’d expect) for the Pagan Rus in the Age of Vikings supplement which we’ve covered who and what they are previously. When building the warband you don’t have any equipment options rules-wise so how you model them basically doesn’t matter! Although the Levies have javelins so keeping that clear on the model is still nice to do.
From this bag I managed to easily build:
- Warlord with banner (two models on one base)
- Wandering Bard
- Extra warrior/hearthguard model with banner (for when I want to use one)
- 12 Hearthguard
- 20 Warriors (to do some fun half-point things)
- 12 Levies
For the grand total of 48 minis that come in the bag. Beautiful. You could easily skip the levies and build more Warriors if you’d prefer and if you’d rather build more levies with javelins that shouldn’t be an issue, either, however for SAGA specifically you’ll have a harder time creating the rest of a 6 point warband. One other very-easy option you could build would be:
- Warlord
- Personal Champion/Wandering Bard
- 8 Hearthguard
- 38 Warriors
Or
- Warlord
- Personal Champion/Wandering Bard
- 16 Hearthguard (using two of the more-armoured looking bodies from the un-armoured sprue)
- 30 Warriors
And you can figure out more options out of that as well, it’s not rocket science and SAGA is a pretty relaxed game. I like to model my Hearthguard and Warriors to be fairly clear from each other on the tabletop to avoid any confusion and it’s pretty easy to do so here!
Final Thoughts
If it hasn’t been clear this bag gets a big thumbs up from me. Remember that if you’re new to historicals and bag minis they do not come with bases. I use a cheap 25mm flat plastic base for SAGA, and 40mm for my Warlord. All of these models went together super quick, including shaving away some mold lines, taking up one whole evening after work.
My verdict? Great kit. Especially considering the cost at £42.
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