Midgard : LotR (Orcs with shields 1)

These next four orc warriors painted up quite quickly using my 20-30 minutes per day schedule. I must admit though, when the light is low I have had to skip a day's painting and make it up later.

These are all in the same colour scheme as the previous two sets as I want to keep the first fourteen looking like a cohesive whole. The next fourteen, the converted ones, will have a slightly different scheme for their cloth parts to differentiate them and individualise them further. I want every orc to at least appear different even if that is just a different paint job or easy weapon swap conversion.

Orcs with hand weapons and shields

The warband is coming along quite nicely now - I have completed 9 of the initial 14 figures. When they're all painted I will do a group shot or two before getting on with the second batch of fourteen.

Next up should be the final five orcs of this batch - the ones wielding polearms.

During the down days, due to the lack of light, I have been progressing with other hobby work on the army. The initial nine variants of Warlord Games' figures have been constructed (another post on those soon), some movement trays have been sorted and construction on them has started (also another post), plus I have managed to look in the rulebook at the Midgard army Zagrot the Cruel's Orc Warband. This is a very basic 300pt warband that literally has a few leaders, a unit of trolls, 8 units of orc (heavy infantry) warriors, a unit of wolf-riders, and two units of archers. The 400pt army just has a few extra units of each orc warrior type. Looking at the pictures in the rule book and on several blogs and forums, it seems people just lump all their different orcs onto the bases without a care for weapon-types etc. Sooo, I think I will stop worrying about diligently adding orcs into similarly armed units and just plonk them all together in massed infantry units. This "official" way of sorting orcs will hopefully stop my mild OCD from kicking in too much whilst I worry about the differentiations and permutations of what is a spear and what is a polearm etc. Orcs should be, well, orcs - non-drilled but competent warriors.

Midgard : LotR (Orcs with 2H Weapons 1)

Well, as per my last missive, I managed to get three orcs completed that are wielding two-handed weapons over the last few days. I am still attempting to get 20-30 minutes per day painting time, but I do not always manage this and end up doubling-up on occasion to get the time in that I set myself.

The two-handed weapon designation for these three orc miniatures is kind of a grey area as a lot of the orc figures I have are wielding something deadly in a two-handed fashion - spears, axes, picks, two-pronged trident-like things etc. I have decided, for now, to differentiate them by the actions used to wield them:- two-handed weapons are choppy/clubby type weapons, and polearms include actual spears, polearms, glaives or anything else pointy/stabby on a stick.

Anyway, after a few days of applying paint to some two-handed weapon wielding figures, here are three more orcs to add to the warband...

Orcs with two handed weapons

Again, the blue has come out a lot brighter than it actually is. I have tried a different lighting set up with this particular batch of fourteen figures, so maybe that is causing the issue? Or that plus my usual green background not allowing enough contrast with the figures for my phone camera to pick it up properly? I will continue with this set up for now, but when I move onto the second batch of fourteen I will maybe try a different set up if those ones also come out too bright.

I am trying to increase the amount of figures that I paint in each batch until I complete this particular set of fourteen warriors, so the next couple of sets will hopefully be four warriors with hand weapons and shields, and then five warriors with polearms.

In between times, I am also going to try to construct some of those new Warlord Games' orcs to add to the ones currently being painted so that I can make up full Midgard bases. Which means I will also need to glue-up and make ready enough movement trays for them. I will get the rules out soon and work out a generic orc army's stats based on the one in the book and create enough movement trays for it - 300 or 400 points? Hmm...

Midgard : LotR (Orc Archers 1)

I managed to get some paint onto a couple of my orc minis over the last couple of days. As per my Midgard : Britannia painting project over the summer, I am aiming to try to get in 20-30 minutes of painting per day. This means that I will sometimes have some quick successes, but then there may be longer delays if the batches I paint are larger. A unit per week was a good target for the summer when I had plenty of daylight, but as things are turning gloomier with the onset of autumn, my eyesight is rapidly deteriorating and I can no longer make out detail clearly - I think my output will reduce significantly.

Last Orctober I showed one of the sets of 14 minis in an undercoated state alongside the glued up Medbury Miniatures' orcs. After that post, I managed to get a small amount of work done on the orcs before bad light stopped play. The Medbury orcs had some base material added and were undercoated using my usual black spray. The GW orcs managed to get a bit of paint onto them during the month, but not as much as I would have liked.

Orcs with a bit of paint from last year

I am most likely going to change them up a little bit, but not completely repaint what I have done. I decided to add a little colour to them but I am saving the "traditional" reds for maybe my second or third batch of these or maybe the Morannon orcs? In addition to the above, some base material was also added as can be seen from the first post in this current Orctober/Midgard thread.

I have gone with a greenish tinge for the orc flesh; I had ummed and aahed and changed my mind several times but couldn't get away from orcs being green to differentiate them from humans. I initially painted them in a human flesh colour, but then wanted them to be distinct from humans, so I went with grey. Unfortunately that didn't work for me either, so in the end I stuck with green but not the standard trope GW goblin green.

Anyway, here are the results of the first few days' painting - a couple of orc archers. Not the greatest of sculpts, but they will do. Unfortunately they are not that easy to convert as they are almost a solid block of plastic with very shallow detail. However, as can be seen in the previous post, I was able to convert a couple to have a historical bow instead of their original ones. These will feature in a later post alongside the other converted orcs once the original fourteen are completed.

A couple of orc archers

I decided to go with a blue theme for this batch of orcs - lots of browns was too drab - but the colour saturation in the photos makes them out a lot brighter than they actually are. I chose blue for no reason other than I liked the colour and, although orcs are supposed to be rough and ready, Tolkien also describes them as industrious, so they are not just scavengers and may actually make clothing as well as weapons and armour. I am aiming for a little bit of uniformity for my soldier orcs, especially when I eventually get around to the uruk hai.

Next up will hopefully be three orcs with two-handed weapons (two with axes and one with a war-pick).

Vecna: Eve of Ruin (#9) - The Mausoleum IV

I missed last week's D&D session due to a family wedding but was able to get online this week for a catch up. Unfortunately we were unable to play again but the DM relayed a brief summary for me to be able to write-up the session I missed...

Day 31 - late evening in the Helix Mausoleum

We headed northwards and then to the east. Inside the large room were a number of cultists and two very large angry looking simians. After a long hard fight, the last of the cultists escaped from the room via a secret door in the north of the west wall. The two giant simians proved to be especially hard to defeat and the fact that one of them was an illusory monster annoyed our fighter Drakkon no end - he felt it was a waste of his efforts in killing it.

A third giant ape approached along the corridor, but after another stiff fight it too was defeated.

After the fight we rested and healed up a little before heading back along the corridor to see where the simian had come from.

Mountfitchet Castle 2

Yesterday I managed to get in a return trip to our local Norman fortification - Mountfitchet Castle in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex. I went there previously on 25th October 2020 with my daughters and son, but this time it was just me and my son. The weather was absolutely glorious for this time of year.

This time we only visited the castle grounds and not the associated museums. It still took us two and a half hours to get around to seeing every building, turret and rabbit hole.

I took many more videos and photos than listed below, but this is a taster of what we saw...

Plan of the medieval castle

The outer bailey and gate to the inner bailey

The cemetery

Mountfitchet Manor House

A medieval banquet

More of the medieval banquet

A working water wheel...

Apologies for the quality of some of the photos and videos - it was a very bright, sunny day and my old phone camera is very basic so finds it difficult to adjust to certain lighting conditions. Anyway, you should get the gist of what we saw.

I really like this fortification. Most of the Norman castles that I usually visit are made of stone (hence their survival), but this reconstruction of a wooden fortification is based on the archaeology. Apparently this castle lasted maybe one hundred years as a wooden fortress before parts were rebuilt in stone, of which there are still a few outcrops scattered around the site.

I am always surprised by the numbers of people assumed to have lived at archaeological sites. Mostly, castles have inflated numbers living in them according to "Hollywood", with dozens of soldiers and servants etc. being present. At this site, according to historical documents and archaeology, the number of commoners numbered maybe a couple of hundred (in addition to all the artisans' buildings, apparently, there were 11 peasant huts with an average of 20 persons per hut!). Add these to the Baron's household and soldiers, we are probably looking at the best part of three hundred souls in its heyday.

This is just my little summary of the visit that I will use as an aide de memoire. If you would like more information on the inhabitants and history of the castle, as always, it is better to take a look at the official historical and archaeological writings on the site that can be found in a number of books and on the web.