It’s time once again to swing back into the world of Elder Scrolls. I spent much of last year playing my vampires, then my Imperials, and now I’m trying out yet another faction: the Dark Brotherhood. My vampires provided a mix of magic and monsters, allowing me to zip around the board and smash things with my gargoyles while my impressive heroes handled more precise actions. My Imperials represented an organized army with solid brute force spread across a middleweight set of models that could bring a good amount of fighting power across the board.

The Dark Brotherhood is a group of assassins, dedicated to stealth and rapid death dealing. They want to strike on their own terms, from my archer that can likely kill a foe per turn from a distance, to my Alak’ir assassin who should be able go toe to toe with anyone in a duel, to my assassin followers that can lockpick a chest before stabbing someone in the back.

I love the poses here. They’re dramatic and well done. The Alak’ir assassin is exactly what I want him to be, and even the followers received dynamic and interesting poses.

I look forward to trying these out for the next few months. It’s a very different playstyle from what I’m used to. I’ll be sneaking and trying to make openings more so than just punching my enemy in the face. I’ll want to judge objectives carefully and select an approach. From looking over the cards, they should be able to engage in combat just fine but there’s a clear ‘glass cannon’ quality to them, with most skills being focused on some form of offense or sneaking and further rewarding light armor over heavy armor.

I’m not much of an ‘edgelord’ so to speak, but I will say I think these look cool. Painting in red and black was fun and I’ll probably revisit this when I eventually paint up a demon army for 4th Edition 40k or possibly One Page Rules with my son later this year. In contrast with the cowboys and terrain I’ve been painting lately, this made for an excellent palette cleanser.

I still find the miniatures for this game frustrating to build–they’re small resin bits you glue together. The scale of the miniatures is truescale around 28-30mm, which further means details can be very small. Once you have them built, though, they paint up real nice and have great details to work off. You can see in some of these photos the hand symbol of the Dark Brotherhood, or in the photo above you can see the symbol for destruction magic on the mage’s base. I admire the detailing and when I get to the final detailing stage of painting these, I really enjoy it.

You can tell from the title image that I’ve already played a game with these. It didn’t go well–I need to adapt my strategy to what they’re good at. More to follow as I learn my way around them. I’m sure they have many games in their future.