The Old World Army Challenge: Jaakko and Rugluk

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Jaakko and Rugluk - Rank & File month #2

Act 2

The camp was quiet. Most of the boyz were snoring after a meal of stale ale and rotten meat. Gronk Skullbasha, the biggest git of ‘em all, lay sprawled in his tent, one hand still clutching a half-chewed boar leg. His goblin guards, meant to be watching him, were slumped nearby. Rugluk’s “special brew” had seen to that.

Rugluk Backstabba pushed aside the tent flap, creeping closer. His blade rested easy in his hand, but this weren’t no battlefield scrap-this had to be done quiet. Up close. Personal.

Gronk snorted in his sleep, rolling onto his back. Rugluk grinned and thought to himself: “Shh now… dis won’t take long.”

He raised the blade high and pushed it straight into Gronk’s gut. The warboss’s eyes shot open full of fear and confusion. A gurgling growl and a splatter of blood escaped from Gronk's lips as he grabbed at Rugluk’s wrist, but the poison had done its job-he was weak, too slow.

Rugluk leaned in. “Don worry, boss-yer tribe’s in good ‘ands.” He wrenched the blade free. Gronk slumped back, dead as a squashed snotling.

Outside, the camp was still silent. Rugluk wiped his blade on the boss’s furs, then shoved it into one of the sleeping gobbos’ hands. He took a step back, admiring his work.

Gronk, dead. A gobbo, holding the murder weapon. And him? The next boss, just waitin’ to be cheered.

Rugluk grinned and strode out into the night.

I'm glad to be writing a post again as it marks the beginning of a new month. This February was a busy one and I don't mind it ending. As most of you probably noticed, the banner bearer from January was converted from a broken trooper from the Ruglud's Aroured Orcs Regiment. He was fast and fun to paint so I figured that I would continue with the same momentum and paint a whole unit of them. It felt like a good idea but there was a bit more work in them than I thought. Luckily I could tap into the unused time reserve that I usually spend sleeping and managed to finish them all. But that's enough talking, let's look at the miniatures!

These guys are missing three models from a nice round number of 30. The general, his bodyguard and the army standard bearer will join this unit after the Leader month. These Boyz clearly need a large banner and I intend to correct that in June.

Despite the time pressure I enjoyed painting these guys a lot. Especially the trooper sculpts are full of character and have just enough variation to keep you interested while still being quite fast to paint. I like the backstory in the Ruglud's RR box and painted some chaos inspired shields accordingly.

This month in points:

These guys are quite professional looking and I think these could also be used as Biguns. Anyway, I decided to call them regular Boyz for the time being. The leader and champion are as in the information given in the Regiments of Renown box. Interestingly, this means that Ruglud is not the leader of the unit. The armour that these Boyz have looks pretty heavy to me, but since it's not available to them I gave them light armour.

SIEGE

The original plan was to paint some war machines every month but I ran out of time. Still, I wanted to include something siege themed into this month and ended up doing some 5-minute crafts. These log rams were made from sticks, toothpics and some string that I had readily available. More crude logs made from thin round sticks (with bark) would have been more orky but I didn't have time to dry and prepare any materials gathered from nature. I made different rams to be carried by groups of 4, 6 and 8 models.

I'm learning the rules in the Siege book (the 1988 version) as we go and found the mechanics of using these interesting. You score an automatic hit on the castle gate if you manage to move into contact with it. The amount of models using the ram determine the strenth of the hit and the highest strength in the group carrying the ram determines the amount of potential wounds caused. Nice and simple.