ShiverShield – 2026 Warband – Part 2 – The Woods in the Woods
Last time, I went over the reason and then recruitment for my 2026 The Woods in the Woods Warband. Now lets move onto part 2 of this.
Fateweaving
In “The Woods”, Fateweaving is the form of magic used. while there are some things like Attack spells they are more wide of range of abilities. one of the new changes for Shivershield is special fateweaving abilities based on the caster. Merfolk like the Bucca have their own ‘spell list’ which is kinda unique to them, giving more flavour to them.
As my warband has a high focus on fateweavers, well, I have both a Deep Priest and a normal Priest, which are the only two options for Merfolk, I should have a good idea of what they can do and some good ways to use them.
Merfolk also have a special bonus. Captives. now.. this is both good and bad. In order to weave fate, you need to have a charge built up and then use 2 stamina to let if go. In 2ed, you had to spend some actions to generate the charge but these can easily be lost. well, they don’t have the easy lost bit now, which is great, but charging is different. each fateweaver type has a different way to charge. For Merfolk, this is the captives. In order for the priests to built up any charge, they need to sacrifice someone. well, that’s a bit of a pain. By default, each priest has 1 captive. So that’s one charge. However, the ritual the priest does for the sacrifice reduces the amount of stamina it takes in order to weave fate. That’s good. Sacrificing victims takes 6 stamina. yikes. Compare this to the standard Tutha (I’ll take the wildfolk as a good base line), that only use 3 stamina. BUT they can lose charges built up fairly easily. So… swings and roundabouts I guess ^_^ wait.. is that really the saying? mm…
Anyway, these priests aren’t too bad looking in battle so they shouldn’t be too afraid of that, but I still don’t want them on the front line. But with only 1 charge each, short of getting new captives, that’s gonna limit their fate use. This is why the netfish. They can hopefully go out and get move captives, which will also help decrease the enemy numbers. How better to deal with an enemy then to capture them and turn them into fuel for your god to fight their friends?
But what spell choices do I have?. well, a good thing is they all only take 1 charge, which is great with their likely limited charges. Anyway, lets look.
- Drowning Pool. I can create a temporary pool of water which does damage to any prone model under it. a nice 4 inches round, and can cause it within 10 inches my weaver.. wait.. any part within 10 inches? or the centre? anyway.. it automatically does 2 damage (ignore armour) that’s very nice apart from the prone issue. I would have to make sure the targets ARE prone.. so it’s good support after they have already been damaged.
- Summon Shellycoat. I can summon a single shellycoat from any water feature within 10 inches of the weaver. That’s very nice way to get recruitments for my forces. but limited to having to be near a water feature.. but there are ways around that.
- Drowned Man’s Face. Another 10 inch range, it damages multiple targets and causes them to drown on land and take bleeding runes equal to the wisdom of the fateweaver. A nice attack spell with a deep priest having 4 wisdom, and a normal priest having 3. It’ll take them victims a bit to stop the bleeding.
- Lake of Tears. You know I said about having a way around the lake of a water feature? this one lets you summon a pool of water that stays for the rest of the game. Doesn’t do any harm to anyone caught within it but it does push them to the edges. This could be good for creating a nice place to summon shellycoats from, as well as push back enemies.. and another thing, which I’ll get to later.
- Awaken the Crabs. This is a simple boost to shellycoats in grapples (Melee combat) and give then the rend ability.
- Breath of the Lurker. Ohh nice. This’ll shoot a huge blast of water for 10 inches in front of the weaver. All models in the range are knocked prone. This can be good when mixed with Drowning Pool as this will knock them down, for the drowning pool to drown them.
Abilities
Now, there are also some extra good bits with, which include what I commented about above with the Lake of tears. The merfolk are, of course, water people (being fish and all). apart from the Shellycoats (and technically the Captives), they can move through water as if it was open terrain, where normally water would be harder to pass, and in some cases, impossible to pass. On top of these, any Bucca that enters water, immediately regains it’s full stamina. So this can be fun.. attack, go into water, come out, attack, go back into water, rinse and repeat.
Of course, the enemy isn’t just gonna stand around the water to let me do this, and I’m not gonna be able to move away from each grapple so easily but it’s a possible thing to keep in mind.
They also have scales, which works as a strong absorb armour. They also have a habit of using barbed weapons. These can do extra damage.
So… I’ve already picked up my warband, and we have looked at what they can do now I think we have probebly already noticed weaknesses
Weakness
What are the weaknesses with this band? Oh… quite a lot.
While many other Fateweavers can use 3 Stamina to generate 1 charge, Bucca Priests need to kill a captive. This greatly limits the amount of charge they can have in a battle. Sure, unlike most others, they only need one charge for all their fateweaving actions, and instead of needing 2 stamina to cast, they only need 1, but yeah, it’s a bit of a big limit on the number of times they can do any casting. Captives also need to be dragged around the board if you want to keep them with your fateweaver and this dragging doubles the stamina needed to move.
But like I said before, the Netfish can catch more captives!.. erm… but each fish has 1 net. which is one-shot, then the netfish are down to very basic improvised tools for combat and my warband only has 2 netfish. If I say that both successfully catch someone which I then use, that pushes up to 4 times I can charge.
So… while I have forced on fateweaving, it’s not the BEST for the poor Bucca. I COULD have decided to not take the Shellycoats but take 3 more captives instead, that would boost my options, but doing that would really weaken any possible attack force. However, does that matter?
When you play a ‘clash’ (as a game is now referred to as. fair enough ^_^) you have a primary objective and a secondary objective. The secondary is depending on your warband of choice. The Primary you have a choice with. Warbands come with unique primary objectives, in the Merfolk’s case its Abduction. I start with 3 additional captives and I need to escape off the opponents table edge with atleast 3 captives. There are also 7 Generic objectives and new objectives can and will be introduced later so that’s all fine. No shortage of objectives. Well.. Objectives are rarely ‘wipe out the enemy’. Something like Revenge does give you the objective to harm an enemy model but while you CAN wipe out the enemy force, that isn’t gonna happen alot, so a huge attack force isn’t really needed. BUT some is needed for defence.
Any chess players here? your goal isn’t to wipe out the enemy, it is JUST to capture one set piece. Depending on the player and play style, you could just wipe out the enemy until they have no piece left, or you can very carefully just target the one. (quick aside, one of my MAJOR problems in my chess game is the ending. I sometimes get myself into a situations where I can’t lose but I end up chasing the king around the board for half an hour cause I can’t just nail down that fine bit).
of course, it’s important to be able to try to figure out what your rivals play style is. Sticking with Chess, if you are a defensive player, and you then go up with another defensive player, It can be a problem. you need to be able to adjust some of your plays on the fly and judge the situation. Not really something I’m best at. So knowing my weakness, and the weakness in this warband, I need to deal with it.
Figures
Let’s see..
Last time, my Tally chart of what I needed was this:
* Deep Priest
* Priest
* 2x Captives
* 2x Netfish
* 4x Shellycoats
And I had already sourced the Deep Priest and Priest, as well as started work on one of the Captives and a Shellycoat.
First Up, the Leader himself, the Deep Priest “Gilmar”. Fish men often get a green colouring which is fine and all, but a bit dull. So I started to look around cause you get some weird colourful fish, even some in the deep seas like some of the really weird Mariana Trench animals (have you seen the Barreleye fish? it has as see through head with internal eyes that look out through it…) Well…. I just couldn’t find one I was happy with.. then I had an idea and this is the result. Believe it or not but my fish colours are all based on Transformers! Gilmar is based on a transformer called Gilmer (yeah, I’m smart with names ¬_¬) Gilmer was an 1988 Pretender, which were Transformers which had a outer shell to ‘disguise’ them and pretend to be something else. In his cause, a large Fishman. He was the Japanese name (and character) of the Hasbro release ‘Submarauder’ and there was no real known differences between the two. I’m always a bit iffy when people say the Hasbro one was the ‘original’ or the Takara one was the original with some of toys of this period. They mostly had Takara staff design them (in his case, Masakatsu Saito) and it was more of they both took the toy in different ways at the same time. Anyway.. I did drop the green parts as I couldn’t quite fit them and increased the yellow (in the original toy, the yellow was just small mouth grill, I thought it worked better for the fins). The Colours are slightly closer to the Japanese animation and the boxart design.
Next up, the Captives are finished. As said about, the first one is a customised plastic oathmark Elf Infantry figure. While not the best figures around, they are pretty solid. Standard job of the torso with legs, which you add different heads and arms. For this one, I sliced the neck of the one head which worked really well and he has a nice ‘proud but downcast’ look. He isn’t happy that he is a captive, and I don’t blame him. There wasn’t two different arm options with nothing in the hands so I removed a bow from one arm. I had to remake the shoulders to allow the arms to be positioned behind. I then basically screwed up as I decided to use some real chain to tie him up and to a small stake (despite the fact he would be moving around the field) and because I put the hands behind the back first, I couldn’t get the chain all the way around them so.. oh well, does the job ^_^. The stake is just a piece of wood (I think a cocktail stick) I roughed up a bit before painting. the idea is this captive is a fae who was caught.
Now, Since last time, Midlam Miniatures has expanded there townsfolk line to include a bunch of captives. Nice. So I got a couple of them to add to the Captives. Ideally I would like a good mixture of species to show various different captives but there is a somewhat limited amount of captives you can find. Though I will be making up some hopefully.
For the Shellycoats, I had the Blacktree Doctor who ‘Ancient one’ which has been finished and doesn’t look too bad, and it’s clearly not a lasergun by his side but some weird.. truncheon. Fair enough.
I have also made up a customised Skeleton as another Shellycoat. Say Hello to Zadok. He is mostly a Wargames Atlantic Mythic whatever Skeleton, which is more Greek based (kinda good as soo many Skeletons were forced into Egypt for some reason and Games Workshop split the undead into Vampires and Skeletons basically.. ugh, hate it.. anyway, the only problem with this set is no scythes.. which is just weird for me but oh well. I cut off the left hand and replace that with a plastic 5/6th edition skaven plague monk scroll hand (with scroll.. the hand is kinda a bit big but nothing of note). I then looked around some bits I have and got some tree fungus which I attached to stand in for barnacles and such. Boy, when you look at Barnacles, they are just really weird range from like them tree fungus, to the ones which are like circles with a bit in the middle.. okay, that’s a weird way to try to refer to them but oh well. They are good enough and work fine.
I also puttied up a belt to give him something a bit more. Painting wise It’s a mixture of things to give a bit of ‘been underwater’ but I’m not 100% sure how well that turned out. I kinda wanted some more sea rubbish but don’t want it too busy and cluttered.
Now.. some might have picked up on the name but I’m kinda leaning into a bit of a theme with my Bucca warband. How well this works, I’m not sure, but the name does tie into the scroll with the ‘Take the Third Oath”. I won’t explain it (atleast now) but I’m sure alot of people will pick up on it.
Right now, I’ve almost got my Priest finished off. I also have my Netfish but I want to do some custom work on them which is running into a bit of trouble. I then need to sort out the final Shelly Coats but I do have one almost finished, which is an original sculpt by me ^_^ I’ve already had a cast I did of it and thought I would work okay for this too, so I cast up a second copy
