Game of Thrones - Wildling Reinforcements

As mentioned in the post from a few days ago, I've decided to add to my wildlings (and Nightswatcg/Men of the North) to bring them up to the warband size required for games of Lion Rampant or SAGA. I am also using these as the source of my warband members for Frostgrave, using them alongside a Warg-themed Witch (I have the official Witch and apprentice who fit the fur-clad wildling theme perfectly and they may see double-duty in this Lion Rampant force).

Above you can see the start of the additions to the warband - these are generally based on a big bag of plastic mordor orcs I bought from a friend, plus some metals I bought from another internet friend. The bag of orcs was lacking in bowmen, so I ended up hacking up some Lord of the Rings plastic elf bowmen I had sat around doing nothing for their bow arms. I did shorten these to fit with the wildlings a bit more. I also included a bunch of weapon swaps from spare parts from the Gripping Beast plastic kits.

In addition to the bits from Gripping Beast, I also used some heads available from CP Models, as shown on my favourite conversion from the bunch above, this dude and his horn. The metal figures shown above include some of the brilliant Mordor Uruk Hai, who will be used as sub-commanders in the force (and as Templars in the Witch warband for Frostgrave) with Dane axes replacing their missing weapons and another two metal orc characters with slight conversions to turn them into Wargs for the force.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

Game of Thrones - Wildling Chieftain

This is the current chief of my Wildling warband - the figure is from the Lucid Eye range that can be seen on Facebook: Lucid Eye. A great selection of figures - I hope I find an excuse to buy more!

The figure immediately struck me as perfect for a Wildling leader - the face reminded me of the Thenns from the Game of Thrones TV series. He was previously wielding a stone-tipped spear, which I decided to upgrade for a savage-looking axe. The head of the axe is from the Viking sprue from Gripping Beast and was taken from a Dane axe.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome - thanks for reading and have a lovely day!

Game of Thrones - Men of the North

Finally for the Men of the North, a group shot! The veteran Nightswatch Rangers, the Lord oh House Umber, the head of his house guard and the houndmaster I showed a couple of weeks back as I painted him around the same time - I had it in mind that he would be the master of hounds for a Northern Lord, helping his Lord hunt down the last of the Wildlings left after their raid. I'm very happy with how these have turned out! 

I have lots to add to these: the Warriors of House Umber (plastic Rohan from Lord of the Rings, on foot and mounted), more brothers of the Nightswatch (plastic Rangers of Gondor - these will represent the standard brothers of the watch, whereas the metals are veterans) and then some warriors of another Northern house (plastic Warriors of Minas Tirith - their armour looks sufficiently different to that of the Rohan forces - maybes the forces of White Harbor? I have been playing the Game of Thrones game by Telltale Games recently, so perhaps House Forester?). 

As usual, comments and suggestions are most welcome - many thanks for reading and have a brilliant day!

Game of Thrones - Nights Watch

Once again continuing the Game of Thrones project, here are my veteran Rangers of the Nightswatch. They're built from the metal Lord of the Rings Rangers of Gondor, which generally go for quite high prices second hand now, but I found these as an auction on eBay - I got the 6 miniatures for around £1 a figure and they went straight in the paint stripper.

I started these off in my normal method which goes like this; spray undercoat grey primer, then mix up a mid brown and basecoat everything including bases. Follow this up with scorched brown on the base, then when all of that is completely dry, drybrush tan all over, then drybrush stone grey all over. From here you've got a starting point where everything is picked out and ready to go - use thinned paints and washes to block the various parts in. Although the Nightswatch are known for wearing black, I didn't use a true black on anything but the bass edging - I used a lot of shades of brown-black and grey-black to paint their uniforms.

This guy is the one in charge - I was thinking of a grizzled veteran like Quorin Halfhand. The base figure was actually Faramir from Lord of the Rings. I remove his head and sword with a jewellers saw and replaced them with parts from the plastic kits from Gripping Beast - an axe from their Vikings and a head from the Dark Age Warriors kit. A little bit of modelling putty added fur to his collar to hide the join.

Finally, I got these figures of Boromir spare from various Lord of the Rings job lots I'd received - I thought I'd turn him into a member of the Nightswatch, as well as turning him into a severely injured objective marker. The arrows were missing from the figure and his sword was twisted at the end, so I decided to add replacement arrows from a paper clip and some foil, plus remove part of the sword to make it look like a broken blade.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

 

Game of Thrones - Northern Lord and Household Guard

These gentlemen are part of my Game of Thrones project - I've already shown the start of my wildlings on the blog, whilst these belong to my "Men of the North" faction - these will accompany some house warriors and men of the Nightswatch against the growing wildling threat.

I love this sculpt of Denethor from the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings line - there's a palpable sense of power and character emanating from his stance and scowl! I thought he'd fit the project perfectly as a Lord of one of the Northern houses that are close to the wall - I decided on the colours of House Umber, which also seemed to fit his stature.

I picked up this Gamling figure at a very low price on eBay amongst some other figures from a seller - I thought that his equipment and wargear would mark him out as a wealthier Lord or potentially the head of a household guard. I painted his cloak in quite a neutral colour, so I could potentially use him in a number of different uses.

These are the first figures that I'm showing on the blog from my expanded Game of Thrones project - as my projects usually do, this one has grown from being a skirmish warband of wildlings vs a skirmish warband of Nightswatch into two Lion Rampant-sized forces. I've got a number of connected posts that will be appearing soon, so come back in the near future for more!

 

Comments and suggestions are most welcome - thanks for reading!

Wildling Raiders

Another of my projects started a while back, using figures I already have - Game of Thrones battles between Wildling Raiders and Rangers of the Nights Watch. Here are the completed raiders, using some of Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings Morannon Orcs and a few bowmen from the Mordor Orcs, converted here and there where weapons or heads were a bit too Orcish with extras from the Gripping Beast Vikings and Dark Age Warriors

The Wildlings were painted as though they were wearing leather armour or various skins, with very limited metal (it being precious north of the wall). A few have captured axes or spears, the rest have Free Folk-wrought weaponry.

Opposing these raiders will be a band of Rangers from the Nights Watch, which are slightly converted Rangers of Gondor, picked up very cheap from eBay a while back.

Comments most welcome as usual!

Bluebells the Fool

Bluebells the Fool was named for the copper bells festooning his suit of motley, turned blue-green with verdigris over time. He rides a wooden zorse from town to town, where he's often warmly welcomed, with meat and mead his payment for such wonderful performances...
He never stays long though, and it's often found to be the case that one of the townfolk's children has wandered off - some say to follow Bluebells into a life of foolery, whilst others speak of darker acts...

I've always been a fan of this figure from the Warhammer Bretonnian range - I picked it up on eBay nice and cheap a year or so back. There's always been something a bit sinister about jesters for me, and the idea of a travelling fool that never overstays his welcome long enough for his crimes to be discovered... I've been listening to the A Song of Ice and Fire audiobooks whilst painting/modelling lately, and Shagwell the Fool stood out, with the following piece of fan-art sealing my next figure to be painted (and inspiring the paintscheme!). I also painted his hobby horse in the style of a zorse for another link to the Bloody Mummers.

Image Dump - Fantasy Skirmish stuff over the past few months...

So, over the last 6 months, I've been full steam ahead on a fantasy skirmish project. As usual with my projects, it grew from a few characters and some enemies for a dungeoncrawl RPG, into an attempt to utilise the large collection of fantasy figures I had amassed. This blogpost is an image dump from my Instagram of the various figures I've been working on in the past months - above you can see a wide range of stuff, including toy crabs and loads of Reaper Miniatures Bones beasties!

Here you can see a mix of a Minotaur, Mordheim Freelance Knight, misc. PCs and NPCs, a troll, a Deadzone Plague creature for my zomb-apoc, some refurbished pine cone and cocktail stick poisonous space cacti and last but not least, this beast...

The Reaper Miniatures Bones Jabberwocky! Hopefully one of the heroes has a Vorpal Sword to go snicker-snack!

This fantastic figure from the Hordes Circle Orboros faction. He'll be a necromantic Priest of Carcosa (yeah, I'd been watching a lot of True Detective...) in muted browns, with pale skin and yellow spirals...

Some human warriors from the first GW Lord of the Rings boxed set. Just because. These will be Kingsguard-inspired.

A Ringwraith discovered in my collection. He'll be "The Pale Rider", an emissary of a great evil in my fantasy skirmish games.

The Crimson Knight - I had the figure and had been listening to the A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones audiobooks, listening to descriptions of Ser Amory Lorch and thought that this figure might make an interesting villain...

Another figure I love, this time from Warmachine, a Thrall Warrior. I love the pose, armour and the expression on the skull works alongside the normal skeletons I have to join him.

A couple of nasty surprises for my players - I need to make some closed boxes too!

Last but not least, my human mercs Mordheim warband. I was generally happy with these, but decided that I'd prefer to have them on round bases, specifically lipped bases, as they're my favourite for 28mm fantasy...

 

Check back soon to see these painted!

 

Night gathers, and now my watch begins.

Decided to buy some dodgily-painted Rangers of Gondor off eBay, to create a sort of Nights Watch warband for Song of Blades and Heroes - I chopped Faramir's head off and replaced it with this one from the Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors and replaced his sword with an axe to complete the "grizzled veteran ranger" look...

Of course, this meant that I had to create some Wildlings to face off against (picture was shown in a test post a few days back) - Morranon Orcs with some headswaps (Gripping Beast again) and a few Mordor Orcs with bows for ranged support. With 15 in total, I probably need a bit more support for the rangers...