The Crescent & The Cross - The Knights of Outremer

SAGA miniature game has been played in our Club for a while, but the period of the game is the dark ages, which is not up in the list of my interests. Though I have quite a lot of figures for the period both painted and to be painted. But the SAGA guys went to Crusades era and that's really something for me. I've always have had great interest for the period. So I got The Crescent & The Cross ruleset somewhere autumn, but I was very occupied with Bolt Action painting, so the book stayed in the shelf. And then came Christmas holidays and I picked the C&C rules and was immediately inspired! Not that much of the rules, but those fine knights and wily Saracens and all those colorful miniatures. I dug up age old set of Norman knights and soldier by Gripping Beast. I got those from my friend with an idea to paint them and play medieval fights. Well that never happened, but the figures were laying there until now.

I put immediately everything else aside and started planning theme for the armies. First was easy, one troop should be The Hospitaller Knights or The Knights of St.John. They have been always my favorite religious order, so it was no brainer. Second troop would be more generic Normans noble army since they went there among the first and were very influential power around Mediterranean during the times of the Crusades.

Painting the Hospitallers was easy, these guys wore mostly black, later they changed red, but not yet.
But the Norman knights livery was not that easy. It's at the same time nice but quite laboring to paint knights army, since you have to remember to change color theme constantly. No knight can be similar to man next to him.  Equally laboring was painting all shields and flags freehand. I didn't have any transfers and wouldn't like to wait to order, so I decided to paint them. It's funny how painting an army with no uniformity is actually harder than painting very uniformed army. Men at arms or soldiers are much easier, they can be wearing similar color theme depending their master.

But enough this story telling and on with main thing, the Outremer project so far.

First batch of crusading Norman knights who took the cross

Knights Hospitallers ride to protect crusaders

Warriors in the service of the Hospitallers

Hospitaller crossbow men

View from the back where cross livery is openly presented

Don't really how the actual game is, wether I like it or not, the battle board feels bit gimmicky.  But once again game gives good focus for this project. First I will do two four point Christian armies, one of Hospitallers and one of Normans which can be combined into eight point total. Later I'll paint Saracen army, because I already have some figures and even one figure depicting famous Saladin himself.

So there will be more coming...