LotR Moria Army

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

This is the first in a series of follow up posts to the one I made way back in January 2015. The previous post "My Lord of the Rings Armies (The Boxes)" contains details of what I had back then when hardly any had been prepped in readiness for painting. This series of posts will feature each of those armies of the Lord of the Rings minis in turn that I have recently prepped and/or undercoated. There are a few minis that are still at the prep stage (need some putty work to fill a few gaps), but the vast majority of figures are ready to take a lick of colour.

I will follow a similar format with each of these posts, in that I will feature each army arrayed on the tabletop battle map and give a brief overview of what is in that faction.

First up is the army of Moria that I have collected over the almost twenty years since they were initially released. Here is the original pre-prep photo from a couple of years ago...

And here is a photo of the army post prep...

As can be seen there are two main components to this army; the goblins themselves and their troll support. The trolls still require some prep work with green stuff and then a subsequent undercoat with the spray can. A brief listing of the army is as follows...

Plastic:
36 Goblin warriors

Metal:
Durburz (Goblin King)
2 Goblin captains
1 Goblin Drum
4 Goblin warriors
4 Goblin warriors with bows
4 Goblin prowlers
1 Buhrdur (Hill Troll leader)
3 Cave Trolls

This gives a total of 53 Goblins (plus one drum) and 4 Trolls.

This is one of my smaller armies but it is certainly big enough to give the Fellowship some grief, or a dwarf expeditionary force a run for their money. Once all of the armies have been featured I will begin to stat them up for a variety of games systems and then get onto painting them all, which may be several years in the undertaking!

They have a Cave Troll (or 4)!

Although the Moria goblin hordes have been completed (see post from a couple of weeks back), their hard-hitting cave troll brethren needed to be constructed. These are large multi-piece figures that require some modelling skill to put together. Like Shelob, these took a little while to get right but, again, I got away without having to pin them - they will need a fair amount of putty work to smoothe out some joins though.

First up is the leader of this little battle of miscreants; Buhrdhur, Hill troll Chieftain. I absolutely adore this mini. It just oozes power and menace. He will make a good leader for any force of bad guys, be they goblins, orcs, evil men or even other trolls.

I have been thinking on how to use the four troll miniatures I have in my collection; obviously they can be used for a standard Moria army but as Burdhur is a hill troll I can also use them as a small band of his brethren. Not sure on a paint job yet, but I'd like to paint them so that they can have multiple uses. Here are the three variants of Cave Troll I have (not sure if there are any others)...

It seems, when looking closely at the sculpts, that there are two body variants of troll based on pretty much the same set of legs (Buhrdhur's legs are amended slightly due to what he is wearing and the base tab has moved to the other foot). Unfortunately, the three Cave troll bodies cannot be inter-mixed with the way the legs are done for Buhrdhur to give more variants, but I think four is enough for any army.

I am wondering what type of putty to buy to sort these gaps out and to give the joins extra strength. I normally use greenstuff but I am not really that great at pushing it around. I have heard there is a grey putty called Procreate (?) Perhaps that would be good to use - especially if it is more pliable than greenstuff.


Whilst gluing up all of these miniatures, my other piles of fantasy figures have been looking at me imploringly. I will get around to those too after I have made inroads with painting the LotR lads and lasses. However, this did not stop me from procrastinating whilst I should have been prepping - a New Life Resolution (as opposed to a New Year's resolution), starting this January after three years of life crappiness, was to procrastinate less - I am getting there, albeit slowly. At least I am now catching myself doing it and positively changing my attitude when I find myself doing it.

Anyway, from the figures I recall peeking at me from the lead pile I thought about creating fantasy armies that use the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings miniatures as a base, but with the added bonus of also using other manufacturers' figures in a parallel universe to Middle Earth. Using only the slotta based figures from my pile, this is kind of what I came up with (more will be explained in later posts if unclear what these miniatures are)...

Kingdoms of Men (lawful/good)...

• A technologically advanced race of men - Gondor with war machines and modern (i.e. for this world) tactics of warfare
• Horse Lords - Rohan with Confrontation Wolfen as their allies

Kingdoms of Men (baddies)...

• Easterlings play the heavy infantry/cavalry role
• Haradrim play the light infantry/cavalry role
• I will look at buying some toy elephants to convert for use as heavy support
• GW Ushabti can be summoned by their war priests as a kind of conjured battlefield support

Other armies...

• Trolls, Orcs and Goblins as allies to the bad guys
• Other manufacturers' Giants and other big critters as allies to either side
• Dwarfs and Hobbits as people allied to the good guys
• I also have some Fomorian type figures from Brigade Games (I think) to use, but not sure in what capacity yet

Once I have got under way with painting my LotR miniatures, I will look at prepping the above figures to fill gaps in my schedule and for when I get bored doing the same thing all the time (I can sometimes get caught in a rut when painting, especially when trying to complete armies that are very samey like Gondor or Rohan).

Moria Goblins

Lots of goblins, both plastic and metal, in this faction but also some hard-hitting cave trolls. However, due to the nature of the trolls (large multi-part metal kits) I will probably get onto them last as they will require some extra work, such as pinning, to complete them. This is a view of what the original army looked like a couple of years ago all neatly laid out on my gaming mat...

Luckily, all of the plastic goblins had already been processed, so I only needed to prep the metal kits. First up are the elites - goblin prowlers...

Seems like there are only three variants of these miniatures but there are four figures in each blister sold. These will just be thrown in the mix with the other metal goblin warriors and probably used as some form of captains or whatever in Battle Companies as I don't have enough for a full unit of them and probably won't bother making one up unless I get lucky on eBay or GW decided to re-release them in metal at a reasonable price.

Next we have a couple of captains and Gollum - wasn't sure where else to put Gollum, so thought as he spent many years skulking within the Misty Mountains this would be the best place to present him...

To wind their fellow warriors up into a Fury, I also have a goblin drum and drummer set. I like the idea of this miniature to represent those "Drums. Drums in the deep"...

The drummers need some extra warriors, in addition to all of the plastic ones I have, in order to overwhelm any intruders into Moria, so here are a couple of blisters worth of goblin warriors armed either with bows or spears or wicked knives with shields...

And finally, what was, I think, envisioned as the original Goblin King before The Hobbit movies presented their own version. Durburz is GW's own version of the ruler of Goblin Town...

I actually prefer this version to the official one from The Hobbit collection - seems more plausible to me, but that's not to say I dislike the movie version. I have a stack of Goblin Town miniatures from the original The Hobbit starter set stored away somewhere safely. I will most likely get them out once my Lord of the Rings collection has been completed and add them into the mix as extra cannon fodder. Obviously, the more goblins in ones army the better?


As I have quite a few Moria denizens to put on the tabletop, many of them can double-up for use in Dragon Rampant and Saga armies. Again, I will probably have to trawl the internet for specific army lists but I am sure some bright spark out there has already produced some amazing work on them already.