The first recruits for my Dracula’s America Dark Confederacy posse are four gentlemen for whom recruitment standards have become considerably more relaxed. Being alive, for example, is apparently no longer considered essential.

The Dark Confederacy is one of those factions where the background and the miniatures fit together wonderfully. These are Confederate diehards who have taken refusing to accept defeat to a rather unreasonable extreme. Having stolen and corrupted the secrets of Vodou, their necromancers discovered that the dead could be returned to service as Revenants. The result is an army in which death is less a permanent career setback and more an inconvenient interruption. In the official background, the Dark Confederacy literally intends that the South shall rise again, which gives the old expression a particularly unpleasant new meaning.

My posse only needs four of these walking corpses, which is also the maximum number allowed in the official North Star Dark Confederacy posse. I actually have rather more zombie miniatures lurking around the painting table. I will paint these just because I have them but not until the force needed is finished. There is something particularly appropriate about having a small group of battered Confederate dead shambling along behind the Necromancer and the Ragged Veterans. They look less like a carefully organised military force and more like a unit that somehow missed the order to stop fighting several years ago.

Painting them was fun because I did not want these fellows looking like brightly coloured modern horror zombies. They need to belong to the Weird West. Faded Confederate clothing, filthy shirts, worn leather, dirty grey and brown cloth, rusted equipment and suitably unhealthy flesh should make them look as though somebody has quite literally dug up the last reserves of the Confederacy. I am thinking less Night of the Living Dead and more The Army of Northern Virginia has had a very bad decade.

On the tabletop they should also give the posse exactly the appearance I want. The living members may still possess some vague notions about tactics, marksmanship and self preservation, while the Revenants have a much simpler military doctrine: keep coming. Put them in front, point them towards the enemy and trust that being dead already removes at least one of the traditional objections to enemy gunfire. I am wanting a mixture of that poorly clad Confederate look, combined with the “fictional red shirts” of Quantrill’s guerillas.

So that is the first four figures completed from the Dark Confederacy painting list.

Next the Necromancer, Bloody Bill, and Quantrill are well on the way.

More Confederates tomorrow. Deo Vindice!