I’m still building my 15mm 17th Century Ottoman army: the Sipahis and Janisseries are done, not it’s just a matter of adding some of the more irregular troops.

About as irregular as you can get, the Deli are technically a light cavalry unit consisting of fanatical warriors and known as The Mad. They would dress themselves and their mounts in animal skins, decorating everything with feathers, fur or hide.

Altough my Sipahis are painted using traditional acrylics, I went back to Contrast paints for these mainly because Contrast really suits the depiction of fur and feathers.

When you get these (mine are from By Fire & Sword, some of the last of the v1 models before the v2 ranges are released hopefully later this year) you get a packet of stiff wire lances which come with a lot of little metal balls.

I puzzled over what these were for before managing to find a picture of the models from the BF&S website that showed them in place: they fit on the lance and rest just on top of the hand holding it as, I suppose, a sort of hilt. Might have been nice to have that on the box somewhere as I almost discarded them in ignorance.

For some reason, I also found the flag and epnnants difficult to do this time. Usually I’m fine with them, but the flag is a second attempt after I ruined the first one, and you can see that some of the pennants suffer from the dreaded “edges don’t match white edges”! They still make the unit really pop though, so worth doing.

The Deli were certainly light cavalry, but you don’t give horsemen a lance and call them fanatic and mad unless you expect them to charge people. As most rules don’t allow lights to charge formed units, I’ve therefore classed the Deli as fanatical formed cavalry, but might have to review my decision in light of the various whinges I have heard about this. I think I might add the option of fielding them as light or standard: people can then make their own minds up!

So just a few light cavalry units to go now, although to tell the truth I have many units of lights in my other armies that would pass as Ottoman lights. They were, after all, largely the same peoples…but it’s just I like a full roster for each of my armies rather than operating some kind of central pool. Any excuse to buy more minis!