Happy New Year readers! While most of my time has been hoovered up by various parties and the 150 pages of prereading that I need to do for my next module, all my spare time is now being dedicated to the ATR project and I can happily report that I have my first unit completed, with the other now completely built and awaiting paint.
Here are some pictures of the Highland Spring Water Clan, otherwise known as the Highland Spring Tranders.
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| Basic Musketeers |
The standard bearer - front and centre - still has to have his banner added. I've made the flag, I just need to get it to a printer. As it turns out, I am simply not good enough to paint intricate design.
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| Some more colourful figures |
The second photo contains some of the "characters" of the group. At the far left is the squads LMG gunner and to his right, with the ornament on his turban is the squads 0 Leadership leader. The figure behind and between the two is the NCO for the Clan detachment.
The Highland Spring Water Clan came together when I envisioned a more post-nuclear setting for our game. They were pulling double duty as a stand in for Clean Water Cartel/Generic civilised wastelanders for Dariwns World. As the setting for our game become more unspecified, generic human die-back their mode of dress became rather odd, but I do have an in-story handwave for that.
In all honesty, I probably should have given these guys a desert wasteland basing, rather than a generic wasteland basing.
Ahem
The Highland Spring Water Clan
Soon after The Fall, the families of the Highland Spring group took refuge at their bottling plant in the Brecon Beacons National Park. The isolated location afforded safety and an abundance of game. It soon came to their attention that there were plenty of concentrations of people without access to sufficient quantities of clean drinking water. Soon they were back in business producing and transporting bottled water. As people learned to deal with the new realities of the world, the bottom quickly fell out of the water market, but by then, the Highland Spring Traders had an established network of contacts and clients and began to trade in other commodities.
Their idiosyncratic mode of dress was established early in their history. During a period they refer to as "The Burning Years" they came to believe that increased solar activity was a major threat - due to whatever reason, global warming, use of nuclear weapons in other parts of the world - and began to dress accordingly. They claim that this threat has now passed, but by then the new style of dress had become cultural. In reality, this paranoia was provoked by a series of nasty sunburns suffered by their children during an unusually cloudless summer in the higher altitudes of the Welsh Mountains.
Membership of the Highland Spring Water Clan is restricted to family members, thus the Clan part of their name. Everyone currently in the Clan is related, at least by marriage to the original families who took shelter in the bottling plant. This proved problematic during their initial expansion as manpower was constantly stretched and resulted in a rash of adult adoptions, arranged marriages and rumoured bride and groom kidnappings. Now the Clan's presence has stabilised, reaching from Manchester to London.
Their northern interests have been severely damaged by the presence of the marauding Northern Nomads and it was the Highland Spring Water Clan that first truly realised the threat posed by these new, powerful raiders, and proposed the idea of a multi faction coalition to the Mayor of Manchester. While they incessantly promote the coalition as a cosmopolitan group, the majority of the forces involved belong to Manchester, with the Clan itself providing a distant second. Unfortunately, the Clans warriors are little more than caravan guards and have never fought anything like a pitched battle. They are desperately unready to face the seasoned raiders of the Karns forces.
