Steve's Verlorene Haufen (Forlorn Hope) - Wrap Up

So the relentless march of time has brought us round to the end of another OWAC and thankfully I can claim the victory of having completed the challenge despite its remorseless onslaught! As ever the challenge has been a great driving force in pushing me to get things painted and it is a truly rewarding feeling to see the end results. Things haven't been easy this year - a fair amount of upheaval and issues at work and some rather large home improvement projects have sapped my morale and time respectively. As a result I've not been as active in the community aspect of the challenge as I would have liked so apologies for that. Rest assured though that I extend hearty congratulations to my fellow competitors for their fantastic efforts and beautifully painted armies!

There's been some tense moments (Resorting to a month off felt like a bit of a defeat!) thanks to real life intrusions and my often over ambitious painting targets but I think I've stuck to my brief pretty well. Todeswunsch's Verlorene Haufen makes a suitably macabre companion piece to the Cult of the New Colossus I painted last year. I may have gone a little darker than Vic Reeve's version of those days past but I'll put that down to my own morbid inclinations!

Stone facing the retaining wall for my "Gin Terrace" has been one of the more pleasant impositions on my time! Just a shame 1:1 terrain building doesn't count towards the challenge!

There were some additions and omissions to the original army list and it was a shame not to get the baggage train, Witch Hunters and a few other bits and pieces done with this lot. The large tub of older Empire miniatures which was the original reason for this project has remained largely untouched, however, in my excitement at finding newer Oldhammer style miniatures that fit my Hammer/Folk Horror theme a little more closely! This does of course leave the way open to finish the project off next year of course...

The sea-reach of the Reik stretched out like the beginning of an interminable waterway before the huddled group of men sat on the dockside. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Broekwater, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over one of  the biggest, and the greatest, towns of the Old World.  At last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over the crowd of men. Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. One of the men spoke up as the light waned,

"This also has been one of the dark places of the earth - still is..."

The others, knowing all too well of Heinriksen's melancholy fits, listened on without acknowledging the outburst. Heinriksen went on regardless,

"I was thinking of very old times, when the men first carved this thin veneer of civilisation in to the world. Light came out of this river then but it was like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of some skiff, ordered suddenly to the north. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Reik water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes—he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion. Yet he must land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest and in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

I'm really glad how this lot turned out - big blocks of peasant levies and religious fanatics, with my own horror-influenced twist of course, and a small core of more regular troops who had survived the earlier depravations of the campaign. Working in inspiration from films like The Wicker Man and Plague of the Zombies has been a lot of fun!

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. Heinriksen fell silent, seemingly defeated by his companions disinterest. He had fallen far since his return from Sylvania - resigning his commission and finding what work where he could. Instinctively he clutched at the ragged bundle of papers he still kept. Despite his wanderings he still could not escape the pull exerted on his soul by his former commander, Todeswunsch. He had even heard of vague reports of a rogue Warlord, operating without restraint in that benighted county and had shuddered at the thought that he lived on. Whether or not they were true, the man still lived on in Heinriksen, his voice a persistent whisper, like dry leaves rattling in the wind.  Heinriksen, his eyes burning in the dusky light, read aloud from the tattered sheaf of letters as his companions receded in to the darkness, leaving him to his madness.

Unaware of his solitude, Heinriksen recited the last words of Todeswunsch as though it were some sermon to save the damned,

"Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards the lands of men to be born?"

"Mutability should be the Goddess you fear for She death for life exchanged foolishly: 

Since which, all living wights have learn’d to die,

And all this world is waxen daily worse.

O piteous work of Mutability!

By which, we are all subject to that curse,

And death in stead of life have sucked from our Nurse."

He paused briefly, glancing to his side, disturbed by the passage of a night watchman. The watchman continued on, leaving well alone.

Heinriksen's oratory became more exercised as Todeswunsch's writing descended in to chaotic ramblings,

"I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.

I think I have worked out what God is punishing us for. Everything.

Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash. I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me, and bury it in the stomach of this place!

You must have patience, even while people die. Only thus can the whole evil be destroyed. You must let it grow.

I am ready to return, but understand, I shall use undreamed-of measures to conquer the evil."

He looked up expectantly as though looking for the approval of his erstwhile master yet only the dark stared back.

As ever I should aknowledge and apologise for butchering the writings of masters like Joseph Conrad, Yeats, Spenser and Shakespeare, from whose writings much of Todeswunsch's ravings are taken from!

So after all that here's the final list in the ordere I painted them - I'm not sure they'll make a particularly dangerous opponent on the battelfield but that's always been a minor concern of mine when building armies!

14 Temple Ritterbruden 623 points

L10 Hero, heavy armour, shields, lances, hand weapons, standard, musician, barded warhorses

25 Knights of the Cleansing Flame 418 points

L10 Hero, L5 Hero, heavy armour, shields, spears, musician and standard

18 Habutscutzen - Der Schwarze Haufen 206

L10 Hero (light armour, arquebus, pistol, hand weapon), standard, arquebus, hand weapons

20 Ersatzsolder - Knights of the Moss - Wæpenbora un−læd ðone as Môs 278

L10 Hero (Heavy armour, pistol, hand weapon), standard, musician, heavy armour, pikes, arquebus, hand weapon

30 Landestrurm - Die Seuchenopfen                344 points

L10 Hero and 2x L5 Heroes - Plague Doctors - Light armour and hand weapons

Standard bearer, musician, hand weapons

3x Plague Censer Bearers - to simulate the virulent and deadly plague this levy carry I will be using the Skaven Plague Censer Bearer rules to represent this on the table top.

25 Zombies - Die Schale 512 PointsL10 Vampire Hero, light armour, spears, musician and standard

20 Penal Mutants (Peasant Levy) - Die Sünderinnen                 120 PointsL10 Hero (Light armour, hand weapons), hand weapons, musician, standardErzatzsolder but with D6-4 dominant attributes

Kurt Todeswunch                                               120 points

L20 Hero - Army General, Heavy armour, double handed weapon, barded warhorse

Captain Heinriksen                                            65 points

L10 Hero, light armour, pistol, hand weapon, warhorse

31 Peasant Levy - Die Wilde 151 points

L10 Hero, hand weapons, musician and standard

Giant Mercenary                                                   250 points

30 Flagellants - Die Geissler                            334 points

L10 Hero, hand weapons, musician and standard

Reiks Kanone Batterien                                       60 points

Total - 3481 points

Straining to see in the twilight, Heinriksen sought some last solace from Todeswunsch's papers, joined now by a gathering of hooded and vague forms only his eyes could see. He read on to his new audience,

"When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,

Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose."

Heinriksen ceased, and sat apart from the shadows crowding in on him, indistinct and silent. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast and darkening sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.