Ave Caesar, Morituri et cetera!
I’m a big fan of Studio Tomahawk’s Saga ruleset, so I when I heard about them releasing a gladiatorial combat game, Jugula, I was stoked. It’s taken me a while to get everything together for it, but at Crisis ’14 I finally picked up the rules, card decks and some models. Here are the first four painted gladiators!
All models by Crusader Miniatures.
The official models for Jugula are of a bigger scale and they’re also rather expensive, so I opted for good old 28mm miniatures – these are from Crusader Miniatures. The downside of their range – for budding Jugula players – is that the models are packaged in blisters of four of largely the same kind, and in a Jugula warband you can’t have more than two gladiators of the same kind For instance, I picked up a blister each of 3 secutores + 1 scissor and 3 retiarii + 1 laquearius, which means I have two secutores and two retiarii to spare. Not that big a problem for those like me who want to build more than one ludus, though.
The names of the armaturae have been written on the back, as a reminder to players.
Paintingwise I worked over a mournfang brown undercoat again, followed by a necron compound drybrush. Flesh areas were blocked in, washed and highlighted, then the metal, etc. I did experiment a little with the secutor’s bronze scaled armguard; it’s a hashut copper basecoat with coelia greenshade and carroburg crimson washes applied successively instead of plain old agrax earthshade. It’s probably not that noticeable in the pictures, though.
The names were added as with my Viking warband for Saga. I chose for a cosmopolitan ludus, with Aulus the Italian, Mago the Carthaginian, Cynos the Greek (literally The Hound) and Aram the Syrian. Not that historically accurate, but who cares about that.
I’ve got another four gladiators coming up soonish, but first more commission painting. Keep your eyes on the blog tomorrow, as I’ve received notice of a special something happening in tomorrow’s Warlord Games newsletter…
Very nice paintjob. Each of them stands out and your highlights and colour choices guide the eye to the details.