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Back around 2015 I was at a convention and picked up a handful of vintage fantasy miniatures. I’ve collected, painted, and played with fantasy miniatures since 1974 (as best I can reconstruct), but was working on Bones and similar figures in Heroic 32mm (or whatever) size at the time. Anyway, that random handful of old minis sent me back along a retro path, and I ended up acquiring a great many vintage figures from auction and flea market, as well as fresh castings from vintage molds where such are sold legally. Somewhere in those early lots, I ended up with a few Broadsword Miniatures, a company active for a short period around 1980. I have no recollection of them at the time. I don’t have magazines from the period to check for ads, and I didn’t make it to many conventions while in college. I ended up with a group of 7 Rangers, which work out to be the contents of 2 original packages, P-11 Rangers (an archer, a ranger/bard, and a ranger swordsman/captain), and P-12 Rangers firing (four copies of the archer from P-11). You have to love a group that comes with their own bard. I painted them up back in 2018: As you see, I painted them mostly in greens and browns, with a red hat motif to tie them together as a group. My current favorite set of fantasy rules suitable for throwing a random selection of vintage fantasy miniatures on the table is Dragon Rampant (Dan Mersey, Osprey Games), and it uses units of 12 for most foot figures. Scouts are in nominal units of 6, which is what these rangers have been deployed as to date. I have been keeping an eye out for more of the archers, so as to be able to deploy them as a 12 figure unit, and managed to acquire a second pack of P-12 a while back. That put me up to 11, so I needed one more figure. My first thought was that I would add a dog or some such. According to the Lost Minis Wiki, the was a Broadsword catalog number P-34 Falconer, Houndsman and Hounds, and an M-22 Wolf Pack, but nothing like that has shown up for sale. I looked around and the only original Broadsword animal I could find was a pack of NG-05 Sabretoothted Tigers. Well, I thought, that would at least be a serious combatant as a companion animal. Then I started looking through other possibilities for a 12th figure, and found that there as an enchantress (P-06) in sensible clothes for a tromp through the woodlands. Moreover, she was wearing a beret with a feather, so could be red-hatted to fit with the unit theme. Better yet, I already had one bagged and tagged in my vintage minis boxes. So, hedging my bets, I got them all cleaned up and primed this winter, but have been dsitracted and didn’t start on them. This weekend I was constrained by work to be in a hotel halfway across the country, so it seemed like a good time to bring them along (with the travel paint kit) and get them done. Basing will have to wait until I get home. The castings are a bit rough, so I decided there was a limit to what I would try to do with them, but here’s a closer view of the enchantress and one of the tigers anyway: I still need to put a thin coat of brush varnish on the tigers before heading home, and it’ll be later this week before I can base them to match the first group of rangers. After that, I’ll be eager to get them on the table in a Dragon Rampant game.

After almost a year of work, I've finally completed this piece. 2 hours each on the adventurers, about an hour each on the terrain pieces, and close to 6 hours on the dragon itself. A lot of different colors used, so I'm not even going to try to mention them all. The terrain is mostly dry brushed, and washes. The dragon has no dry brushing at all though. Everything else is either layered or blended painting. Thanks for looking! Enjoy! (And yes, that is my YouTube channel in the background. LOL)