A llittle background. When I got back in the UK in 1993 after a couple of years travelling I lived in Birmingham for a while as friends from Shrewsbury now lived in Erdington and Sutton. As Billy was a wargamer I took the opportunity to return to the hobby. I had some 25mm stuff still at my parents but no 15mm. And at the time everyone seemed to be playing DBM…
So that Summer I went to the Worlds at Derby (the old pre-Uni venue) and on the Bring and Buy (when I finally battled through the crowd) was a small 15mm Republican Roman army using Museum Miniatures. Just lots of bases of hastati, velites, and some triarii and cavalry. A good start for a DBN army.
Over the next couple of months I picked up some extra bits to give me a usable army and even played in a few tournaments. But at the time I wasn’t a huge fan of the figures and decided to slowly start replacing them with Essex Miniatures. Once I had the core force done I passed most of the figures to Billy so he could use it as the base of his own Republican Roman army. I kept a few bases of the hastati and repainted shields and other bits to use them as Italian Allied Auxiliaries.
Since then my Punic War armies have grown quite a bit. But a few years ago Billy moved back up to Scotland and sold off pretty well all his wargames stuff. But he decided that the Romans really belonged to me and decided they needed to come home. However it took over 5 years for that to happen! But this weekend he finally came to visit and presented me with a little box jammed full of 15mm figures…
There were four bases of Tarantine cavalry which I’d painted up for Billy as a Christmas present in 1994 so it was nice to get those back.
There was also three stands of cataphracts which I’ve no idea where they came from…
Question now is what to do with them…
There just seem to be hastati so some repaint needed to ID half of them as principes. The cataphracts can be passed on. The cavalry are all useful. It would make sense to maybe paint a few extra command and base them all on 80x40s for use in Midgard/To The Strongest/Sword and Spear/Impetus. I have to resit repainting them too much as that would slow things down. Or I could just do them all as Italian Allied types… We shall see…
So there we have it. My first proper 15mm army has come home…