Owner of a mansion

 The recent itch for LoTR minis has sparked some interest in the kids. Though they mostly just go pew pew, we’ve managed to play a few small games. However, as they have… ahem… politely yet insistently reminded me, I’ve got plenty of sci-fi scenery, but hardly anything suitable for LoTR or even generic fantasy settings. So, on a quick trip to our local shop, I was (easily) convinced to pick up something we could use for our games. I let them choose, and this is the story of how we ended up as the proud owners of a Gondor mansion.

28mm plastic houses are the only kind of real estate I can afford these days, but that’s another story.

There's more to it than it looks

Building the house is trickier than it looks, as it’s modular to an almost ridiculous degree. Each wall section consists of two interlocking parts, with the join neatly hidden by the stonework reinforcement, both inside and out. The same goes for the arches. I really expected this kit to be easier!

As the arcade will make part of the wall inaccessible later on, I decided to paint the lower floor before building any further.

Grey primer and watered down browns on some bricks. A little bit of Nuln all over later

Very light grey drybrush to unify, then more Nuln on the lower part and watered down dark green later on

It all leads to this

At this point I started thinking. Of course, you all know that’s a bad sign. When you start thinking, you get ideas. When you get ideas, you feel tempted to make them happen. And when it comes to miniatures, you can safely assume all those ideas are inherently bad.

I was looking at the space under the arcade, which is about to be covered by a terrace. Would the ground underneath just be… whatever board I happen to use? Wild grass didn’t seem like a particularly fitting option for a space like that. It really needed some sort of tiled floor.

My first thought was to use an MDF board and build a large base for the whole mansion. But then I had second thoughts. Sensible as it might be, the only board I had was too big, and it would create the classic problem of whether to add grass or more tiles, depending on whether I wanted a rural or an urban setting (Overthinking? Me? Naaah…). So in the end, I went for a different approach…

A (very) simple tiled floor for just that space

Once covered by the terrace you won't even notice it

The terrace came next...

Looks sturdier than I thought

Sticky fingers and all kind of assembling incidents, but I got it

Assembling the upper floor brought a different set of issues, mostly down to the kit’s excessive modularity. I mean, I’m sure it offers endless possibilities for building your own designs, but it also makes it quite tricky to get everything to fit together properly. It feels like a Revell wannabe, but in true GW fashion.

Didn't really got to fit in all the pieces as exactly as they were supposed to

You can see the source of my pain everywhere

Right, next issue: the interior. The lower floor is inaccessible, and the narrow windows don’t really let you see inside. But the upper floor is a completely different story. Even in some parallel dimension where I glued the floor to the walls and made the room unplayable (good grief, what a thought), the interior would still be clearly visible through the windows. So of course, I can’t just leave it as it is, an empty, soulless room.

So how to decorate it? I had to think about the purpose of the building, and its current state and surroundings. It’s obviously a house, a place meant to be lived in. That gives me a general direction for the furniture. But is it a town house? A villa out in the countryside? Why do these questions even matter?

Because in a few years’ time you’ll remember this post. Or laugh at me. There will be no middle ground.

I’ve started to feel the itch for a (small!) fantasy board with a handful of buildings. Not quite a full Mordheim setup, perhaps, but at least a few structures. Maybe not ruins, but simply abandoned houses. The concept still needs a bit of refining, but now I’ve got a purpose. I want a house that was once lived in, hastily abandoned, its inhabitants fleeing from some now-unknown danger.

With that idea in mind, the first question I asked myself was… what does a house like this need first?

Well, some carpets, of course!

 Think about it. It’s a stone house, yet it has no fireplace. That, along with the windows, makes me think of a warm climate, which fits nicely with Gondor. Still, I quite like the idea of having carpets for a bit of comfort in the colder months. I simply browsed for some medieval-style carpets and printed a couple out.

As for the furniture, I don’t really have anything suitable (yet). I could probably borrow a few bits from my HeroQuest, but I don’t think it’s necessary for now. If I end up committing to this idea and building a few more houses, I’ll likely order some proper pieces down the line. For the time being, I’ll leave that aside. Today, the carpets will have to do.

Let's move on to the railing and the roof. 

I could declare this thing done!

But of course there's still work to do.

It will look better in a minute

Grass, flock, tufts, ivy, leaves... When you get all those together, you get...

...this

A house that has clearly seen better times

The vines and flock are just there to hide my mess-ups!

 Just a view of the space under the terrace:

Dammit, the cardboard. Should have used MDF

 A final aerial view:

Still to be completed!

 Well, I don't know when will I build more stuff like this, but for now we have a piece of scenery to play with, and that's something! 

Last bases redone

Last bases are done! Now the whole project is done and my mind is in peace at last.

Rather than forces, what I bring today are essentially characters and monsters. Of course I have to start with the Fellowship of the Ring 

Dum... Dum-dum-dum... Dum-dum-dum...

Now a couple of iterations of some characters, you know, there were a few different poses depicting them at different moments of the movies

Along the years that bow string has gone untight

Aragorn's cloak is so goos that you can't even spot him in the picture

 The invisible Frodo was quite a thing back in the day, I hadn't ever seen a clear resin mini ever before, and I found it like the coolest thing at the time.

There's a mini there, I promise

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards...

...for they come in pairs, and bring horses

Ivory and ebony

 Now as a different category, the Witch King, both on foot and on the fell beast:

It almost didn't fit in the background

I'm finishing this batch with the monster of monsters and a whole project by itself:

Grey as a mouse, big as a house

I got it as a birthday present (gollum, gollum) and I didn't purchase a proper army, shame on me.

I only got the guys and glued them, so more a moving diorama that anything else

But I think you came to see the base, which is the only thing I put some work on now

 With these I put an end to the project. During these latest posts (I mean this one, this one, this one and of course the current one you are reading) I've shown almost everything in my collection (coming from GW, at least). Now that I'm doing this recap, I'll take the liberty of adding the links for the Balrog of Moria, the now no longer existing Sammath Naur and my naive yet beloved Bag End vignette.

Just in case, I also have my puny attempt to reelaborate Thorin and company (through these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4) in a more book-oriented fashion. I have to look for proper minis to do it right.

I have more LoTR stuff not from GW, feel free to delve through the LoTR label!

More refurbished bases

 Here I am again! While working on other stuff, I’ve been squeezing in bits of time to keep unifying the LoTR bases. There’s really no mystery to it, it’s quite a mechanical, methodical bit of work. Almost therapeutic, I’d say. The mandala of miniatures.

Merry people coming from Isengard

I could put some additional work on the minis, I'm aware. However, my aim now is just getting them ready to run some merely presentable games. If the kids really get into playing regularly and feel like taking the next step and getting a bit more serious about it, then we’ll talk. But for now, I’m perfectly happy just having a handful of reasonably painted minis that let us play some simple skirmishes.

This is one of the few exceptions in which I've actually done something on the mini itself. The banner pole broke and I took the opportunity to make it all look a little bit better.

 

Well, it was quite easy to break, to be honest

It originally was a puny attempt to convert a swordsman into a banner bearer. But I made the pole with separate small rods, so it was doomed from its very conception. Ah, the naivety of youth! 25 years ago this looked acceptable to me.

But now I've used a single rod, much better option. About the banner itself, I didn't want to redo it completely, but it obviously needed some work.

Slight touches

It's fun to see how the banner seems to have changed so much having done almost nothing. I had to very delicately unglue it from the pole, outline the shapes with the brush (burnt brown, didn't want to use plain black) and glue it to the new pole. I had a heavy temptation of repainting the cloaks and all the Elves, but in the end I resisted, so this is how they look like:

The arrows are mere pins. Yes, these are delicate to touch

At some moment (can't honestly recall when exactly) I apparently got Haldir and a banner bearer. Most likely got them second handed, as I'm quite a heavy detractor of the whole scene of the Elves from Lórien in Helm's Deep, and I don't see me buying them fresh new. Never got to collect a full Lórien army beyond these two.

Anyway, here they are

I got the Mordor Orcs next. Quite a bunch of different fellas. As they are too many to put them all in just one single pic, I'm showing them in three batches:

Sword and shield

Two handed weapons (plus homemade banner)

Archers

They look acceptable after all these years, even if they could obviously get some updated paintjob. However, looking dirty and gritty seems to be atemporal enough.

I'm finishing with the Men of Gondor, in the main two stages we get to see in the movies. 

The Last Alliance guys

 And the modern ones, also presented in batches for your convenience:

Fortunately no arrows were needed here

Shades? Highlights? What's shades and highlights, precious?

You may notice brave Faramir and even braver Pippin

With this, I’ve pretty much covered all the forces I own for the game. I just have a few character bases left to sort out. Hopefully I’ll have them done before too long.

More coming soon! 

A matter of bases

 In my last post regarding the Nazgûl and Arwen minis by GW, I mentioned that I’d realised I’d never actually shown my LoTR figures here before. I’ve had them all painted since they first came out, we’re talking late 2001 to 2003. I didn’t buy much beyond that (well, probably a few bits here and there, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when). I picked up the starter boxes and added a few extras, but I never aimed to build full legions for massive battles.

Back in the day I played quite a bit, but the minis have been sitting in storage for years. That’s why I’ve shown so little of them here: a diorama, a repainted Balrog… but never the core collection, as they were painted long before I even started this blog.

Anyway, what matters now is that the kids have taken an interest in the books, the films… and the minis! So we’ve been playing a few simple games to get them used to the system. I thought about taking some photos and showing you what I’ve got, but there was a small underlying issue: the bases are all “themed”, meaning they’re modelled to match the exact moment that character appears in the film. I’ve got dark Mordor earth, very dark Moria depths, very pale Osgiliath ruins… You get the idea. At the time it seemed like a brilliant way to recreate scenes from the trilogy, but in reality, you always end up playing on a fairly generic grass-and-earth board… where none of those bases quite fit!

This is what I mean!

 Of course there is only a reasonable solution... which is to build proper themed boards for each game and only play with the appropiate minis for each scenario! LOL

But I'm afraid I have to be practical. It was quite easier for me to do exactly what I’d done with the Nazgûl and rework all the bases a bit to unify them, so they’d work better on my gaming boards. We can happily accept the idea of a Moria goblin hunting party venturing up to the surface, or some men of Gondor fighting out in the open. It’ll have to do.

With no particular order in mind, I started with whatever I had closest to hand, in this case, Rohan. And if you look at teh pic below, it’s almost painful: not even within the same army do the minis have any consistency in their bases!

Aye, Theoden always carries a bit of Helm's Deep with him wherever he goes

 

My plan with all this is simply to unify the bases, without touching the paintwork on the figures themselves. Yes, they’re over twenty years old, and they would undoubtedly benefit from a repaint. But I’m prepared to endure the public scrutiny of showing my old minis and submit myself to your judgement.

I’ve only made one exception, and that’s with Rohan. If you look at the picabove, I think we can all agree those cloaks were crying out for a wash of Agrax Earthshade. That’s genuinely the only thing I’ve added or retouched: just giving the Rohirrim cloaks a bit more depth. It felt like a manageable amount of work for very little effort.

So this is what I got with the characters:

I counted little fella Merry into the Rohan host

Can you spot them among all the infantry minis?

Agrax on the cloaks

Now the riding characters:

Riding through the Pelennor Fields

And all of my mounted host:

Deeeeeaaaaath!

You can see roughly what the work involved. I’ve unified the colours, peeled off the radioactive green flock they originally had (cut from those railway grass mats that used to be sold in sheets!) and replaced it with more natural grass and tufts.

As for the latter, I had to remove those old plastic grass tufts that were meant to represent tall vegetation (Remember those? The ones where you had to drill a hole in the base and stick them in). Back then, 25 years ago, they were cutting-edge stuff, the peak of realism! Now I’ve swapped them out for this newer option, and I think the minis are better off for it.

 

Besides the Rohirrim, I also managed to work on the bases of the Moria goblins. No repainting at all here, I’m showing them exactly as I painted them back in… December 2001, was it? The only additional work I’ve done is on the troll. More specifically, on his weapon.

On that model, the weapon arm comes in two parts, with the front part of the spear attaching at the hand. Over the years that piece must have fallen off a hundred times. For the first time, I finally felt confident enough to drill into both the spear and the hand and insert a bit of wire to pin it properly in place. And now, at long last, it’s not going anywhere.

These are goblins. Not that thing we saw at the Hobbit movie

 This is it for now. I have the Uruk-hai on my bench as I post this, so I think you can expect more updates anytime soon! 

The diorama that never was

 I'm going with a kind of an atypical post today, it's a little trip down through memory lane. I've noticed I haven't ever shown most of my Lord of the Rings minis, just a couple of vignettes (and I couldn't blame any of you if no one remember them. Looking through the archive I can see the first one was in 2012! And in fact it was painted even before).

I got the GW minis as they were released back in the day with the movies. I'd love to say something like "it was long time ago, kind of 10 years ago..." but it's been 25 years since the first movie (glups!)

Now that the kids are really into the movies (and even better, quite into the books!! I'm so happy), I've taken the minis out of the cupboard again and have been running a few games. They enjoy the game and I enjoy them getting step by step into the hobby.

The thing is that one of the Nazgûl chipped a little during the games, and I decided to put a little bit of work into them all. Not exactly repainting, but just reworking the highlights on the dull cloaks and adding some tufts to the bases.

Nothing too spectacular, the essential work remains the same

You see the bases resemble a stream or something like that. I'll explain: back in the day I really thought of making a vignette with the Nazgûl, just the scene in the movie when Arwen crosses the ford of Bruinen with Frodo. So I represented the Nine in different stages of crossing the ford.

In my mind, I would build a big stand where I could insert the minis and which would represent the Bruinen:

General composition, more or less

The thing is that such a diorama would have been insanely out of scale, and in the end I never got to do it, but still kept the bases with that scene in mind. What I've done now is just repainting the edge of the bases and adding some more natural tufts, besides a little rework on highlights (only the Nazgûl, no work was added on the horses or on the Arwen mini).

Nin o Chithaeglir lasto beth daer; Rimno nin Bruinen dan in Ulaer!

You can see, there was no way of making such a diorama into the real thing, I would have needed way more space than I had then (and now too!). Anyway, it's been fun to remember my original idea, and I also enjoyed putting some work into these minis.

Well, given that I was doing that on the riding minis, I thought I could do just the same on the standing ones. Slight rework on the highlights of the cloaks and some more work on the bases, that's all: 

Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die

 As told before, now that the kids are deep into LOTR, I'm making the most of the situation, I hope I'll be bringing more stuff of the like anytime soon!