Goonhammer Historicals: Victrix Treasures and Chests

It's a good time to be Pillaging at the moment, isn't it? We've got Churches to despoil, markets to loot, warbands to assemble and the final missing piece is gold - lots and lots of gold. Whether Lindisfarne-bound for some nice easy targets or harrying the north for the Bastard of Normandy, your pillagers need something shiny to pick up on their trip. Coming hot on the heels of Monday's Market Stall review, let's have a look at Victrix' Treasures and Chests bag.

Thanks to Victrix for sending this out for review!

What You Get

This is the Treasures and Chests set, so unsurprisingly you get treasures, and chests. And you get a lot of them.

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

With three sprues in the bag, this is a packed set for £20, offering a plethora of chests and caskets and enough gold, silver and artwork to adorn a cathedral. There are 8 chests to a sprue, and 15 assorted “treasures” - goblets, candlesticks, bibles, processional crosses, and reliquaries. The sculpting is - as you’ll undoubtedly have predicted - top notch, with wonderful detail that is clearly and cleanly presented even on very small items. There’s excellent detailing on everything, with the Bible, Crosses and plaque being the stand out items.

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

This will do very well for anyone interested in glamming up their board with scatter and scenic terrain and most of a sprue has gone into my Sarissa Norman Church to give it a lot of period-accurate life! Above and beyond the scenery, it’s a set that will immediately appeal to Pillage players, with the vast majority of items being large enough to use as loot markers without further basing. You can very quickly and easily represent portable loot with a casket or chest, potentially even assigning different gold values to different items. Pillage is all about the look and feel, so having your models raid a monastery and come away with golden crosses and jewelled bibles rather than cardboard tokens is absolutely well worth the time and money you’ll invest in this set.

They obviously scale well with the barrels, sacks and market stall set too! Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

It is a lot of gear, and I imagine this being an excellent split purchase with a friend or clubmate. You might want six processional crosses (good conversion fodder for pilgrims and knightly orders!) or 24 chests, but at a certain point you’re probably looking for reasons to use them - a sprue and a half is probably all you need, though massive props to Victrix for stuffing the bag full of them!

Painting is relatively straightforward - though I made a meal out of it - and I'd recommend a lot of metallic drybrushing with a very very light touch to bring out the best of the intricate detail.

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

To display the set for photos, I combined it with a few tables from the Marketplace set, with a home made altar cloth (painted silk) to give a suitably grandiose setting for the religious pieces!

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

History and Sculpting

Okay so we know the drill with Victrix reviews, this is where I obsessively focus on one particular element of the kit and do a ton of research for it that your eyes glaze over. It could be how nice the wickerwork is, or the texture of cloth, or the dynamism of pelisses - this time it's how closely Victrix have modelled these pieces on real life examples.

The first bullet point on the Victrix site really pushes the attention to detail - "inspired by archaeological finds" - and I went down the rabbithole to see how true this was.

Chests

The chests and caskets in the set are inspired by those found at Hedeby, Oseberg and Mastermyr - all key Viking sites. I know Hedeby best, so let's talk about that one!

Hedeby is a Viking site in modern day Denmark, one of the key Viking trading centres. Close to the Frankish Empire and under the protection of the powerful Danish Vikings, it underwent a massive expansion over the 8th-11th centuries. It was the mid point of trade between the North Sea and the Baltic, and played a key role in far flung trade with the Arabic world as well.

The Treasures and Chests set features a couple of pieces from Hedeby - most notably the large, low chest and smaller "Sea Chest". Both are absolutely dead-on for the items recovered in excavation, with a little interpretation around locks. The position - and size of metal clasps is excellent. Hedeby graves often contained smaller caskets, which are also represented in the set:

A Chest from the Hedeby excavation - "Hedeby Chest-2". Via The Viking Age Compendium - http://www.vikingage.org/wiki/wiki/File:Hedeby_Chest-2.JPG#/media/File:Hedeby_Chest-2.JPG

This is the contents of ONE sprue of three - there's a lot here! Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

The Mastermyr chest, a general use tool chest found containing woodworking and metalworking tools - along with the mechanisms for several locks - is very clearly represented in the set, with a beautiful recreation clearly rooted in the archaeology:

Mastermyr Chest - By Jens Mohr, SHM, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=140773501

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

This is a really nice bit of attention to detail. These aren't just caskets and chests that look vaguely medieval, but clearly Viking-age and possibly Viking-crafted. As reuse, trade, movement and conquest took these chests all over the world (well, this side of the Atlantic anyway), these can be used just about everywhere. Wherever Vikings were, they took their kit with them.

Treasures

The treasures in the kit are widely inspired and that's all to the good. The 7th-11th centuries were a period of highly skilled crafts, devotional metalwork and incredibly decorated bibles, all of which were part of a rotating cast of stuff people stole from, traded with, or gifted to each other. Items from Ireland are found in Norway, Carolingian artworks end up in Scotland, Saxon gold working makes it to Byzantium and - not included in this set presumably because they would be sub 1mm in size - Arabic dirhams get everywhere. The treasures included then are nicely eclectic, and all very closely inspired by archaeological examples.

One of the altar crosses is very clearly the Cross of Cong - probably the best bit of Irish gold and silverworking from the 12th century. The plastic version is lovely, a beautiful representation of the real one.

Cross of Cong via Wikimedia By Sailko - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114740520

For some reason I took a photo of the back. Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

The Anglo-Saxon caskets are well-realised pieces that captures the feeling of later Anglo Saxon and Anglo Dane mobiliary art. The sculptor has done an excellent job in producing a piece that looks inlaid with either whale bone or goldwork (painter's choice there!). There's a clear Later Anglo Saxon to 12th century one - the one with the cross, that I'm 99% is a specific casket I can't find - and the Franks Casket for an older, Pagan England feel. If you're feeling brave, slice the top off that one to make it THE Franks Casket. It could also work well as a Scottish/Irish House Shaped reliquary if your saints feel a bit more Hebridean.

Franks Casket By Michel wal (travail personnel (own work)), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4577249

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

The Shipley Reliquary isn't directly in this set, but it's very dear to me so here's a picture regardless.

Shipley Reliquary, credit: Horsham Museum https://horshammuseum.org/collections/blog/posts/the-shipley-reliquary

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

The Carolingian Bible is absolutely the Lindau Gospels, the least tasteful way of collecting the life and works of everyone's second-favourite Communist, Jesus Christ. The Lindau Gospels, now held in New York for some reason, are a wonderful piece of metalworking with a fairly nice illuminated manuscript inside it. The draw here is the front cover - a spectacular 9th century masterwork, faithfully recreated in the Victrix kit, less than the size of your fingernail. An amazing accomplishment from the Victrix team! The one major difference between kit and reality is that the Lindau Gospels have a different back cover - earlier, Insular (Irish) art and probably the last surviving example of it's kind. Both covers would have made a very tasty target for looting and while it makes a lot of sense to do just one cover (sculpt it once, after all!) I'm a little sad the back doesn't make an appearance! The picture below is the largest possible one I could find - server forgive me - because this is a spectacular piece:

The Lindau Gospels Front Cover. By Daderot - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87055347

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

The chalices and candlesticks have slightly less direct inspiration, based on byzantine designs that might have made their way into Northern European contexts. I'm not sure we have good Saxon/Anglo Danish candlestick examples - possibly because they all got nicked and melted down - in the archaeological record, but these are very nice examples nonetheless! The chalice with drinking handles is a classic Byzantine style and there are quite a lot of these kicking about, while the wide base is a very common catholic and orthodox chalice that you could find in many modern day churches.

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

Overall

At £20 this is a cheaper proposition than the Market Stall set, and will be a tempting addition to any other purchases. It's as nice as you'd expect it to be and TTRPG players - among others - will see this as a nice, quick purchase for cluttering up your dungeons and churches with chests, icons and gold. Pillage and other early Medieval historicals are a given, but this set will fit out churches all the way up to the modern day. Burrows and Badgers and Carnivale players will probably want to get the chests (live your Ezio/Redwall fantasies) and I doubt there's anyone playing anything that wouldn't benefit a sprue from this set. It's a fantastic set to split and I think the best route for this one is to buy a bag between friends - parcelling out what you need for loot tokens, set dressing and scenics. If, however, you want to load up your tables with treasures and archaeologically accurate chests with the contents of an entire bag, shine on you oðr gimsteinn.

Victrix Treasures and Chests, credit: Lenoon

If you're dollshousing and want to outfit churches, ill-begotten loot, museums (multiple redundancy there), this is absolutely a set to get. If you're more gaming in mind this will have fantastic use as a set of detailed, period-accurate loot counters for 7th-12th century battles and far beyond. Matched up with the Marketplace set it will provide almost instant high-quality set dressing, and I'm sure we'll see the contents on tables and stashed in Viking ships for a good long time.

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Tags: historicals | victrix