Farmer Maggot & His Hounds

I love the Lord of the Rings universe and I have a special place in my heart for The Shire! I’ve been slowly collection some figures together to potentially play out some Scouring of the Shire-themed games using my brigands and a little (pun intended) force of hobbits! I love the scene with Merry and Pippin picking mushrooms (and half of the other vegetables on Maggot’s farm!) and Farmer Maggot standing up to a bloody Ringwraith! The miniature version of the good farmer and his dogs, Grip, Fang and Wolf, are lovely sculpts and practically painted themselves - I’m a sucker for figures of A) civilians and B) animals, so these were an obvious addition to my collection. 

I actually finished these in January - I have a backlog of finished stuff to post that I’m pretty chuffed with!

Easterlings vs Mini-Cthulhu

I painted up the brilliant Elder God from the Reaper Bones line a couple of months back - better pictures soon, but here's an atmospheric shot from a game I played a while back. The game was between the warbands of two wizards, both trying to retrieve the same artefact. The artefact happened to be in the final resting place of a minor Elder Thing, whose shade did not take kindly to such an intrusion...

I really enjoyed using the Easterling plastics along with a Reaper wizard - have I ever mentioned how much I love Song of Blades and Heroes? Such a fast-paced ruleset, easy to pick up and easy to modify. Brilliant! This series of battles were probably my favourite gaming to date!

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...