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!