Banelegions, beasties and unpronoucable names!!!

I originally drafted this article out at the end of summer last year (2011), but for some reason I never got round to finishing it off. It was around the time I did my articles on Studio McVey and Kingdom Death, it was meant to be 'third' in a series, so I guess you could say this article is actually really, really late! When I actually started writing it though I was fairly skint. In fact I probably made Greece and Iceland look positively flush with cash, and sadly this state of affairs is still the case, in fact I might be worse off! I hadn't at the time been able to look at picking any of these up, and so for this article I asked the the lovely chaps at the Maelstrom if they'd allow me to take shots of some of their Banelegion stuff, and have a general ferret around in their boxes (it's not as dirty or illicit as it sounds), so I'd be able to do some reviews maybe... this turned out to be a cunning sales ploy. Because I ended up getting the Terror of Fortriu and Guillaume le Perlerin as they're both lovely figures. Hell I've also picked up a few more since and will be reviewing them all separately over the next few months. This article is just a brief overview though of the range of models and a bit about the Banelegions range in general.

Photography courtesy of Mrs Frontline Gamer, aka Dr Brainiac.

The first thing to point out about the Banelegions range is that it is split currently into two categories, Banelords being your heroic miniatures and Banebeasts being the gribbly monsters. The second thing I have to say about the product line known as 'Banelegions' is that without a shadow of a doubt it contains some of the most incomprehensible and tongue twisting names in the entire hobby. That's saying something, because we love our weird sounding names us nerds. We all know that fantasy and sci-fi universes tend to suffer from what I like to call 'random name generation syndrome', a process whereby letters of the alphabet are picked at random to create names that not even a cunning linguist can pronounce. But, Banelegions takes the gold medal, and by a big margin! Names like N'nhaak'chshir and Oacyning make the likes of Euryalia, Magagg and Guillaume le Perlerin seem positively bland by comparison... however, I'm reliably informed by Rob Lane that the names are all indeed ye olde English, and not just a random conflation of letters drawn haphazardly from a hat. I have no reason to doubt him, but, I still have my suspicions! All I can say is thank the lord that we still don't speak ye olde English like Geoffrey Chaucer, it's hard enough being dyslexic with modern English.
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