Flintloque Wraith Infantry

I wanted to try out having some more unusual troops in my "Undead" army. Wraiths seemed like fun -- they get to have ranged weapons, command points and so on but they also get to turn into spirits and run through the scenery... and be invulnerable while they do it...

But Alternative don't make Wraith infantry as far as I could tell -- I certainly can't see them in the catalogue

Finding suitable figures turned out to be a little difficult. Many "Wraith" figures are very obviously tooled up for fantasy medieval combat -- lots of glaives, giant swords and so on. Those that are unarmed didn't look easy to convert.

I looked at the two Warmachine Pistol Wraiths, and decided they would make possible leaders if I could fill out the rest of the unit, but I couldn't locate suitable figures so I parked the idea for a bit.

While at a show I was browsing a pile of Reaper figures on Caliver's stand and they not only had a Banshee which I thought would work really well as the musician but several other wraiths -- which led to me wandering about Reaper's website where I discovered Reaper actually do a lot of wraith figures and the rest of the unit came from them; the banner is one of their traditional cowled "invisible" figure (There's nothing inside the cowl or the sleeves). The unit was completed by finding a two-pack of skull-headed, misty wraiths with open hands...

Some mail orders later, and I had two of those packs, a banner and two pistol wraiths. And an armoury pack from AA which provided muskets for those open hands. The duplication was minimised by reposing the figures (ever so delicately, the screaming of the pewter bending setting my teeth on edge..)

When it came to painting them, I knew I wanted them to look connected -- the differingstyles of figures meant I needed to tie the unit together with colours. Plain bone would have left me needing to do something with the almost-naked banshee which wouldn't match, so I eventually went with all-black clothing and both flesh and bone in shades of light blue. Weapons were muted down (tin instead of gunmetal and mahogany instead of my normal mid-brown) to add to the dark and gloomy air. The bases are the usual woodfiller, scenic materials and snow made from glass microspheres (sold as boat-repairing resin expander) mixed with wood glue.

So I have a banner bearer (with the improvised melee attack of hitting with his banner), a banshee who is the unit musician and has the scary music attack from Grapeshotte along with a sword, four musketeers and a sergeant and lieutenant both with a pair of pistols, making exactly 300 points.

WoooooOOOOOOooooo.....!