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.

It is a gift

When we were engaged, I felt it only fair to ease my wife-to-be into the enthusiasm of the one to whom she would be committing the rest of her life. She’s an enthusiastic board game player but finds it hard to get into the ‘war’ side of wargaming, so I needed to emphasise the extra-curricular aspects of this great hobby. A non-violent diorama would be my Christmas gift to her. I had a few weeks’ grace.

The Lord of the Rings being my first love in the tabletop world, I had a few collector’s pieces lying around, such as the resting trio of Frodo, Sam and Gollum, all set to be placed in a diorama.

I quickly and roughly mapped out the scene on an old and cheap coaster (too quickly – since when to rivers have perpendicular corners?) and then went to town with some very old green stuff – not good enough anymore use for particularly fine detail but perfectly sufficient for rough terrain features, and very durable to boot.

Then I started painting. As is so often the case, I berated myself for not thinking ahead better; these models, particularly Sam and Gollum, are a right pain to paint if you haven’t got full freedom of movement around the miniatures for the paintbrush. Having glued them firmly in place to the coaster, I couldn’t reach any areas which had an overhang such as the alcove between Sam’s leg and his pot.. Fine detail such as the eyes were also next to impossible, so it ended up being a case of painting the large block colours and applying minimal highlights.

This was definitely a ‘thought that counts’ present; it cost me little except time. Still, it went down well enough, and while I’ve still yet to coax Mrs Doodler into tabletop gaming, she’s appreciative enough of the creative side to let me shut myself away at my desk in the evenings.