Accidental Rohan Army

 Honestly, I'm not quite sure how it happened. I used to have some Lord of the Rings minis. I know how that happened - about, oh, 21 years or so ago, when my eldest was very small, we went to the cinema to watch the first Harry Potter film. While there, we were treated to an advert for the first of Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Apparently, according to Mrs Orc, both me and Orc Junior sat through it all with stunned and entranced expressions.

Cut to a few weeks later: I saw that Games Workshop and De Agostini had brought out one of those 'collect a magazine every two weeks and in only 700 weeks you'll have a complete scale model of Tina Turner'-style things, but this time it was LotR. The first issue was something like £2 (a very reasonable price), and came with a sprue of Moria Goblins and some paints. Awesome, I thought, I have to get that, Orc Junior will love it.

I was right; at which point (maybe I should have kept my damn fool mouth shut) I said "if you like those, just wait until you see what's in Grandma and Grandad's loft." I knew my old Warhammer figures were up there see. So next time we were up at my parents' place, I got the box down and we had a look through. Lots of Goblins, some Dwarves and humans... not as many Elves as I remembered... but then I remembered swapping some Elves with a friend for some Goblins when I was about 14, which probably explains it. Anyway, we brought it back to the Orc cave and started playing something like Warhammer and also started getting more paints to paint them up.

And of course we started going to Games Workshop. Very quickly, Orc Junior's interest went from Elves and Goblins to Space Marines and Tyrannids. So that's how we ended up playing 40K.

It's also why I ended up buying loads of stuff over the years on ebay. I now have literally dozens of half-started armies for a whole load of games, including LotR (or Battle Games in Middle Earth or Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game or whatever it's called). But I didn't have many Rohan minis - Theoden, Gamling and Eowyn from the 'Heroes of Helm's Deep' set, and that was all, until I got a somewhat random collection of minis in a job-lot. There were half a dozen riders, including an Eomer, and three plastic footsoldiers. Not enough to do anything with, and they stayed in a box for a long time. With a lot of other LotR minis - men of Gondor, lots of Moria Goblins (including the very first ones), various Orcs, some Numenoreans and Eves of the Last Alliance. Some of them, I had an idea that I could do some kind of Game of Thrones tie-in. I have two Boromirs, and as I've mentioned before, I think there's some mileage in a Boromir/Nedd Stark crossover. I know that some people used LotR minis for GoT projects. Some of one the job-lots had had their helmets shaved down and the White Tree armorials scraped of their shields before I got them, I presume for similar purposes. But all told, I didn't have reasonable forces for anything LotR related, and I didn't have any small skirmish fantasy rulesets that I was interested in playing (I was playing Kings of War a while ago, but had built a big Goblin army for that) so they just went back in the box.

And there they stayed until very recently. But, maybe in October or thereabouts I was chatting to someone at work who is also a gamer. For him it's mostly Napoleonics, but he's not averse to pushing the odd Orc around on a table. We were talking about different games, and I was saying I liked games with a campaign-type structure, and also quite liked 'random' things happening (like, monsters that weren't part of either army turning up on the battlefield) and he said that he'd found the Oathmark system interesting for the way it provided some kind of storytelling in the background rather than just every battle existing in a kind of limbo (I paraphrase, but that was the essence of it I thought). Long and short, I decided to get hold of the Oathmark rules.

So now I have Oathmark, and was looking for factions I could apply the rules to. I can no doubt get a few units together pretty easily. I have 20-or-so Numenoreans and about the same Gondorians (with heavier-looking armour) that I could field as a couple of Human units. But I was irritated by the Rohirrim. If only I could make those into viable units - not too difficult, I had both foot and cavalry models, surely it would be easy to find some manufacturer (maybe someone making Ostrogoths or something) to add to the minis I had.

But the scale of the Rohan miniatures (especially the plastics) is on the small side, it seems. A bit of asking around over at the Lead Adventures Forum rapidly rapidly lead me to the conclusion that if I wanted to build a ... let's call it 'ersatz Volkswandrung' army on the cheap, that matched the small force I already had, probably the easiest way to do it was to get more job-lots off ebay.

So, here I am. I know have about a dozen cavalry (in various states of repair) and about 70 foot (again, some broken); this will let me field 20 with shield and hand weapon, 20 with shield and spear, and 20 with bows. These can be added to my Numenoreans and Gondorians, to produce a decent infantry force. The cavalry I'll have to fudge for a little while (maybe I'll get some more, who knows?) but should be able to field something approximating 10 horsemen pretty soon. That seems like a good beginning for a Human army in Oathmark.

But it does mean I have now, accidentally (as I've never really played BGiME) a Rohan army, of a kind. Or I will have, if I get on with the painting. So that's the point of this - another of those 'I'm building an army and going to chronicle it here' posts, and I hope, not the last ... we shall see, but soon, perhaps, there will even be photos.

Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, part II - Painting some minis

Complements of the Season, one and all.

I have something of an announcement. Not about Rift City, that'll come along at some point, I'm sure.

No, more momentous than that. Some paint has been introduced to some minis. I play D&D about once a month. It's ages between my bouts of painting, it's a much rarer event.

Please bear in mind these are 'rescue' paintjobs. They were partly painted, but there was no proper undercoating done, mostly just painting onto the bare grey plastic. I've tried to use as much as feasible of the original paintjobs while still sticking to my idea of trying to paint them up 'Bakshi-style'. Also, the photos aren't great, so apologies for that.

So, here are Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, in costumes at best 'reminiscent' of their 1978 garb.

Something like Bakshi's version of the Fab Four

However, I do have a confession to make. Having mistaken Merry and Pippin throughout the film (for most of it, I thought Merry had dark hair and wore brown, and Pippin had blondish hair and wore green), I finally sorted out which was which and assigned the right colour-scheme to each character.

Then, unfortunately, I then mistook the minis. I thought Merry had a raised hand (holding a stone) and Pippin had his hand (also holding a rock) out in front of him. But coming to check the costumes for the Jackson version, I see Pippin has a scarf, as does the mini that has the raised stone, that I have now painted as Merry.

Oh well. Not much to be done about it now, I feel. There's a little more to do on these fellows but they're getting there.

The next four are also rescue-jobs. They're painted up as the Jackson movie versions, more or less. Again the paintwork I'm painting onto is not great. Getting really up close there's still a few places with no paint, especially under people's chins. But in the end these are never going to be great works of art. What they might be is fun to play with on a table. That's the main thing

The Jackson... Four?

At least Sam still has his pan in this iteration!

Oh, and I definitely have two Boromirs. One of them will be a Leader of Men in a vaguely Game of Thrones-inspired project. More on that in due course...