North Star – Oathmark: Plastic Undead Skeletons

There’s a new Oathmark supplement on the way, Oathmark: Oathbreakers, which introduces the forces of the dead. To accompany it North Star Military Figures has created a frame of plastic skeletons, packed with everything you might need in your games.

These are 28mm scale, multipart plastic fantasy miniatures; each boxed set will contain six frames – 30 skeletons in total.

The frame we have is an early test version; there may be changes in (and improvements to) the quality of the final production version. We didn’t notice any glaring problems with this one though.

Breaking down the frame
There are five skeletal bodies on the frame and these incorporate the torso, legs and a base as one part. Beneath the bodies are enough arms and heads to build a wide range of different looking and armed skeletons. These options will cover all that you could need in your games of Oathmark, as well as being suitable for many other fantasy games.

There are bows and quivers to make archers, shields to fix to hands (or somewhere else on your skeleton warrior) as well as spear and hand weapons to construct melee troops. In the corner of the frame are additional command elements – these can be used to build a standard bearer and/or a unit champion. If you want some full-on Undead Characters check out our look at the metal models in our other article.

If we are being greedy, it’s a bit of a shame that there aren’t empty hand options and/or sheathed weapons. These would make more diversity possible and also allow the construction of unarmed skeletons which could then be used in basing and scenery projects. Like we say, greedy, but tasty new models always give us an appetite for more.

Skely style
There’s a long history of plastic skeleton frames, going back to the early days of Games Workshop’s plastics and their ’80s Skeleton Army. There have generally been three recurring problems with these kits:

• Skeletons had unrealistically thick bones, or overly bulky armour and clothing.
• Or the flipside – skeletons were overly fragile and spindly things, prone to breaking during transport or gaming.
• Finally – frames had an unreasonably huge number of parts required to build each skeleton, with minute join points, making construction an absolute nightmare!

These undead find themselves at a rather happy medium here:

• They certainly look skeletal – walking and fighting stacks of reanimated slender bones, with a rather gothic and dark style.
• They proved resilient to various drop and bend tests we subjected them to despite those slender bits.
• They go together pretty quickly – their shoulder sockets create the only slightly fiddly part of the build, with some arms fitting slightly awkwardly.

Final thoughts
If you are on the lookout for some great looking skeletons, with plenty of options, and a good amount of resilience, then these could certainly be the rickety undead horde you’re looking for!

If you want to know more check out …

Building the skeletons
… How we got on building our own little group of undead!

We used the holy trinity of hobby tools – clippers, knife and plastic glue.

Shield arms come separate, ready to grip the back of the shield.

They can be fixed quite easily but there are no guide lugs to ensure you get it in the centre.

Because they are separate the shields can be used elsewhere.

We added this one to the back of our standard bearer.

The only bit of the build we found less than ideal was fitting the arms into the shoulder sockets, which weren’t always the best match.

It’s not difficult, but can be annoying. Sometimes it’s like trying to fit a not quite as round as it should be peg into an alternately shaped hole.

The archers have arms pulling back the bow string and loosing shots. Here a loose arm is being placed to reach to the quiver instead.

The heads fix to a somewhat thin spine stem. Because the jaw supports against the thin spinal neck fits are secure.

As you can see, rather characterful poses can be created with just the core kit parts.

You’ll end up with various spares – these can be used to decorate bases. We’ve chopped a spear …

… then frayed and splintered the shaft end with our blade before fixing it to the base here.

Shields and even spare skulls can be used to put more detail onto the bases of your models.

Because the quivers are separate you can add them wherever you’d like on the models. Slung at the waist is possible …

… however, with the obvious strap over the shoulder we were drawn to the over the shoulder option.