15mm Messenger Pigeons and Game Warden with Deer

One of the hypothesizes I have with why prospective players struggle with historical games is the perception of “sameness” between the different units and troops you can select for your army or warband.

Now, this isn’t an issue to those looking to refight a specific battle from history, but for those looking into historical games from fantasy and sci-fi, I suspect it’s frustrating to look at various blobs of undifferentiated infantry, musket, and horse and be told, “That’s it; that’s all you can choose from.”

It’s admittedly something I struggle with after getting creative with Frostgrave warbands or listening to the siren song of 40k 9th edition.

That why, with my little homebrew historical project, I want to introduce a number of lesser seen, non-standard unit types you can select for your Renaissance era band of raiders, refugees, or rogues.

Here we have a two base element of messenger pigeons and a three base element of livestock, in this case TT scale model railroad deer. I would have preferred cattle or lambs, but as I didn’t want to let up on the momentum I’m making right now, I went with the deer available via Amazon Prime from Noch (a German model railroad accessories company).

The pigeons are 1:75 scale, so a fair bit oversized for 15mm, but it was necessary to make painting and basing them a practical matter – and to ensure they had visual impact at the table.

Pinning the birds onto paper clips as flight stands (but probably not deeply enough!) and hedging my bets with green stuff.
The birds painted up, with their handler. Thinking this idea may work at this stage.

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