Reworking the Lord of the Rings

I remember wading through my 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles rulebook - the first I tried - and boy, that was a slog! Compared to the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game set of rules, it stumbled around under the weight of special rules and exceptions and dependency upon knowing all the rules to understand all the rest.

LotR SBG, on the other hand, was a breezy read through, and you could pretty much get going after twenty minutes' concentration. I spent many happy hours skirmishing with my cousins.

Alas, life tends to require people to move to new pastures, and I haven't found any LotR players in the area. I do still have pretty much all of my miniatures, the huge majority unpainted, and those which have gone beyond the basecoat could definitely do with stripping and redoing.

I never enjoyed (and still don't enjoy) painting white, so I would experiment with different paint schemes on Saruman under the guise of creating new characters, and often felt that it looked better (certainly than the whites I could manage). I carry that habit to the present and, needing a generic wizard to potentially lead a band of fantasy warriors, I've gone for more browns and greens on my favourite Saruman model:

I really enjoyed the cloak, and painting cloaks in general seems to be just so easy compared to a lot of the fiddly detail one can find on minis. The windier the day the better, it seems.

It's a great miniature, and testament to the ideal that 'less is more'. Simple and relatively unadorned with detail.

Just ignore the clouding at the bottom of his cloak, unless you want to count it as dust, rather than an over-enthusiastic application of superglue before basing...

There are signs of too much glue on the next miniature too:

I will learn. One day.

Another fun one to paint for its simplicity - I really like the Dwarf Ranger set. It may not be the finest example of what can be achieved at 28mm, but they're dwarves as I first imagine them when reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. And they have more cloaks.