LotR Easterling/Harad Army

Lord of the Rings Easterling/Harad Army (Prepped and/or Undercoated)

I managed to get a lot of this work done yesterday alongside the Isengard stuff, so an early post today.

I have decided to combine these two factions into one post as I think they ally very well. I will be painting them so that they can be used either separately as Haradrim and Easterlings, or together as some kind of combined force that is tied together with the paint scheme.

These two factions combined make for a great themed army, with the Eeasterlings offering up the heavy infantry and heavy cavalry, whilst the Haradrim offer lightly armed and armoured skirmishers and mounted raiders, as well as some interesting one-offs in the form of half-trolls and hasharin.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of the two factions pre-prep...

I did include some EBob Mongols and a couple of other Citadel miniatures I thought might fit in, but have decded now to do away with those in order to streamline the army to just GW LotR products...

This force is made up of the following miniatures...

Plastic:
6 Easterling kataphrakts
42 Easterling warriors
6 Haradrim raiders
36 Haradrim warriors

Metal:
2 Khamul the Ringwraith
12 Easterling kataphracts
8 Easterling heroes (capatins, banners, war priest etc.)
15 Easterling warriors
5 Haradrim heroes
3 Haradrim raiders
2 Half trolls

This gives a total of 137 evil mannish troops, consisting of 85 Easterlings and 52 Haradrim.

I have a short list of figures I would like to add to these factions just to round out a couple of units, but I am also wondering whether it would be possible to add some kind of artillery to the Easterling forces and perhaps scratch build some oliphaunts with riders?

I envisage the Easterlings as being quite advanced in field warfare, so I think artillery wouldn't look out of place - some kind of large siege/warbows, chariots of some kind (I am not keen on using the GW Khandish, but may appropriate the chariots for an Easterling crew) etc.

With regards the oliphaunts in the movies and what GW subsequently produced I am not able to get around their exaggerated size. Not sure if I am misremembering the first time Sam saw oliphaunts in the books, but I recall it as saying that the elephants were actually of a normal size, but due to Sam being practically half the size of a normal man they would appear twice as big. I will stick with my possibly misremembered theory and try to use some toy elephants that scale in and try to scratch build a howdah of some kind on them.

Haradrim Raiding party

On Friday I managed to grab three hours and put them to good use. I took all of my Haradrim miniatures and began working on them. Some have already been prepped and are ready for their undercoats - details can be seen in the picture below that I took a couple of years ago when I still had high hopes for my Middle Earth armies.

As you can see, I had a box of Haradrim Raiders and four blisters of figures to work on. The next three hours saw me get out the clippers, files and plastic/Super glues and get them made up. You may also notice a couple of random miniatures in the photo (on the right). These are a couple of minis I thought might come in handy for a Haradrim force. The one on the left is an ancient Citadel Chaos type warrior and the one on the right was a freebie from a magazine or something of Saladin.

I only took a few photos as I was working on them; pretty much only the plastic Haradrim raiders as I wanted a mini-tutorial for myself on how I put them together. First up is a sprue shot of the riders and their equipment...

Now for the actual horses...

I noticed that there are only two variants for each half of the horse. I put them together for test purposes and noticed the typical goofy kicking out leg pose. I decided I would play it safe and go for two of each of the main pose and then do a swap for the other two so I only ended up with the one goofy pose.

When putting the horses together I decided to do my usual and fill the body cavities with Plasticene. I always do this for cavalry miniatures now as it gives them an extra gramme or two of heft. Not a lot in the scheme of things but it can make a bit of difference on the gaming table as they tend to be just that little tiny bit more stable.

I decided not to do a full army photo as I will save that until I come to paint them, so I can get a before and after shot. Also, I was at a loss as to what to do with the extra bows, quivers and spear arm. For now I have plonked them in my bits box in a separate see through zip-lock bag I had lying around. They may come in handy later on for some conversions.

Now for the procrastination bit. I have decided to be good with this army and only contemplate buying one more box of Haradrim Raiders (when I have the spare money) so I have a round dozen plastic mounted troops. I have plenty of everything else, so unless I am lucky and spot some eBay or trade show bargains of Harad metal miniatures I will leave the force at that.


I have plenty of troops to make a great raiding force; 36 warriors, 8 mounted raiders, a few heroes and a couple of half-trolls. I will have to sit down and work out the points values as I complete the force. I may paint up 2/3 of the foot troops for normal SBG and the other 1/3 as a Battle Companies force, and utilise my two non-GW minis as captains of that force.

As I have quite a few minis in this faction it might also be numerous enough to be used for any future games of Dragon Rampant or Saga I may wish to partake in. When ready, I will trawl the internet to see if anyone has made up any faction specific Dragon Rampant or Saga forces and then calculate a force that can be made up from the miniatures I already have. If I need any further additional miniatures for this particular army at a later date, I can hopefully ask for a box or whatever for Christmas or hopefully have a job by then in order to buy them myself.

Monday will hopefully see me doing the same for another faction. Which faction will I choose? Decisions, decisions :-)