Armies on Parade: Los caballeros de la mesa cuadrada

Above you can see the Bretonnia Army Book released for Warhammer Fantasy 5th edition in 1996. This is the edition that had the core box with Bretonnia and Slann, both new armies at the time! (not really new in terms of lore but in terms of rules and miniatures).

Back in the day (late '90s), I started a small army of Bretonnia that ended up as a Mordheim band because I did not have the money, time and energy to collect and paint complicated banners for my Knights. Since then, I have always wanted to collect them and the small scale was the perfect opportunity.

To keep the same trend as with my undead army I gave them a funny name, "Los caballeros de la mesa cuadrada", which is the name in spanish of the Monty Python's Holy Grail movie. I chose Forest Dragon miniatures because from my point of view, they are the best available in that scale, see my comments about it here.

List building

For list building, there is no direct translation of Bretonnia into Kings of War. There are many different lists that can recreate an Army similar to the classic one, but none that are a 1:1 match, so you will always need to make some adjustments. You could use Basileans, Kingdoms of Men, The Order of the Brothermark or The Order of the Green Lady. After playing a bit with the different options, considering I had a few "must-have" in my list, I chose the Green Lady because they could cover almost all options I wanted, and for the few that I did not like or want, I could get a suitable alternative.

The basic list is shown below (including CoK 23 updates) and I am pretty happy with it, although might tweak it moving forward.

Painting

Before painting, I spent quite some time browsing over the old Army Book as well as more recent Bretonnian content to get inspiration. In particular, I spent quite some time going over all the posts from this painter that has managed to capture exactly the feeling I wanted to convey, if you don't follow him already, I encourage you to do so! There are a few rules that one must follow when painting heraldry that I of course did not know about, so I decided to follow exactly the same patterns I liked from some of the books and posts I selected.

After having spent quite some time doing that, I quickly realized that the super quick technique I followed with the undead would not suit this army. Undeads were painted just by applying base colours without much care and then a generous layer of agrax to cover them in grime. As this army must look bright, clean and shiny, I could not really use agrax at all! That meant that I would need to be much more careful and paint a lot of white over black basecoat :D

Lastly, because of the amount of knights in a single base, I also decided to paint them separately and only glue them to the base once they were done. This was also a pain as I needed to carefully add texture in each case making sure the underlying base was not visible. I did not manage to do it properly in all cases, but most of them.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with how the army looks, but I have to admit it took me much much longer than expected! My favourite miniature of the whole Army is of course the Green Knight which is incredibly well rendered in 10mm.

The Army is fully magnetized and fits in a single small metallic box for easy transport and storage.

Photos

Back in the day, I painted a full-scale Green Knight, and here is a comparison with the 10mm variant. I have to say that Forest Dragon has done an amazing job at capturing the original.

Don't talk to me or my son ever again