Dragon!

This one took a while, but I think the journey has been worthwhile. Below are a few pictures of an old magazine cover plastic dragon figure that I thought would come in useful one day as a gaming miniature. The magazine was a Hachette partworks called Beasts and Beings, if I recall correctly, dated from around 2008. I think I bought the first two issues, but all the subsequent figures were no good for my gaming purposes. The magazines have since been consigned to the recycling bin as they were not that great to be honest; kids would have loved them though.

The model was initially (rather inexpertly) painted red, with translucent red wings. The egg was white. Unfortunately I could not find a picture on the web of the dragon in its original colour scheme, although if I really tried I probably could, but I cannot be bothered to spend too much time in tracking one down. Anyway, I didn't want to stick to the standard red dragon scheme, so decided to go down the green dragon route purely based on the Lord of the Rings ditty about The Green Dragon Inn (sung by Merry and Pippin in the aftermath of one of the battles in Rohan if I remember rightly) which happened to be going round my head at the time. Anyway, first up is the undercoated version...

And, the dragon in a carousel-style series of pictures to show her off from all angles...

Although the painting has been completed, I still need to varnish her to protect her from rough handling and the elements. When I eventually get around to buying some gloss paint on varnish, and some matt spray varnish for the skeletons, I will also use them for her.

She is mounted on an old CD to give you a sense of her size. The basing is a mixture of almost everything I have; GW texture basing, sand, small pieces of gravel, flock, grass tufts, flower tufts (white and purple) and some tree scatter flock. I was hoping to get a small treasure hoard on there, but I think her egg is enough treasure for anyone to plunder. If I feel the inclination, I may add some treaure at a later date. At least as she is, she will be ideally suited to wilderness encounter scenarios.

So, what will I be able to use her for? I was hoping that I could use a small dragon in games of Frostgrave or any other fantasy style solo/co-op game, as well as in Dragon Rampant as a war beast of some kind, and Lord of the Rings as a cave drake or something similar. Hopefully I can find all sorts of uses for her going forward. At the moment she is sitting on my bookshelves looking lovely, and I am day dreaming over scenarios to include her in.

Next week will hopefully see me carry on with prepping more Otherworld skeletons, putting some more paint onto the undead riders and starting on my son's Gondor warband. Lots to do to keep me busy.

Repainted Elves

Following on from yesterday's post about the completed elf archers, today I managed to finish off the last of the elf swordsmen. Here's the warband in its entirety...

The ones I completed today were the broken ones that had to be patched up with whatever spares I could find. Two turned out OK, I think, but I am not keen on the other two. Anyway, here they are; I like the ones to the left and right of the picture, but not so keen on the middle two...

This completes the painting that I have been asked to do by my son on these elves. Here is a picture of all of the elf archers that I have completed...

And, here are the sword/glaive wielding dudes...

 And, finally, those that my son will be painting himself...

The sword wielding elf will need to be fixed up with another blade and then littlun can get on with painting them all. I will hopefully be popping to my local GW store in the next week or two to pick up some extra paints, brushes and so on so he can get to work on these. Again, these will be used for Battle Companies and the possibility of games of Dragon Rampant if they ally with another faction. So far, for the evil side, my son has the 30 orcs that I have already painted for him, one of my old troll miniatures, quite a few Easterlings and a handful each of goblins and uruk-hai. And for the good side, he has 17 painted elves, around 30 Gondorians, and maybe 25 or so Rohan warriors on foot. Hopefully we can put together two opposing forces from these to duke it out on the tabletop.

Next up for me to work on for him are his Gondor warriors of Minas Tirith. There are thirty figures from the ebay purchases, of which two are Numenorians (that will be used as sergeants/captains for Battle Companies) and five that are broken in some way (including one of those Numenorians). I will try to get some before pictures set up and then get to work on these next week if I can.

I have also been working on those undead riders again; just a little bit more paint work and trying to figure out a colour scheme for them. I am not sure whether to theme them around a certain colour and whether that colour should look faded as if it had just come out of a crypt or grave. I also sorted out that dragon from a few months ago and began to finish her off too. Hopefully there will be some pictures of the dragon very soon.

Elf Repaints IV

Today saw me bring the total number of elf archers up to nine completed miniatures. I managed to complete five more elf archers for my son, so his Lord of the Rings elf warband is almost there now. Hopefully I will complete my part of the re-paints tomorrow. He still has his metal command that I undercoated for him a week or so back, and a couple of plastics that need a bit of TLC that he said he would like to paint himself.

Here are the lastest elves in all their painted glory...

Again, these were just a tidy up and make do kind of job - nothing special; no highlights, shading, washes or anything like that. They are more than good enough for the tabletop, even if I didn't quite get the colours on as well as I would have liked this time (age is beginning to ge the better of me now as my hands are not as steady as they used to be, and my eyesight is rapidly deteriorating). There are a few places where my ordinarily neat lines are a little wobbly, but this cannot be seen from the distance of my eyes to the tabletop.

I have four more elf swordsmen to go, which I am hoping to complete tomorrow, before moving onto his Gondor troops. He doesn't want the standard film colours on them either, so I need to pick up one or two new pots of paint to achieve this for him. He is braver than me going non-canon, but I really like his ideas. When I get around to painting my Lord of the Rings figures, I think I will look at doing a little of the same.

Over the last couple of days, I have also been putting a little bit of paint onto the skeleton undead cavalry, as well as starting to build the Otherworld skeletons I bought recently - these will be assembled differently to the six I already have, to bring the total number of variants to twelve. When I put in my next order (end of the month), I will be getting their armoured equivalents. I will then need to look into getting some zombies - I am not keen on the plastic ones on offer at the moment, so will need to find suitable miniatures in metal. Does anyone out there have any recommendations for decent zombie miniatures that are compatible with the Otherworld stuff? Heresy have some good undead, so they may get an order from me when I get around to the other types of undead. This project will be expensive, but I can build the faction slowly, and paint those that I have bought before I purchase the next batch. I am looking at around 20-30 figures again to round out the low level undead, before moving onto the upper echelons like ghouls, ghasts, wights, wraiths, banshees, vampires, liches etc. At this rate, I may be able to begin running some low level dungeon crawls; something I have never been able to do in the past with the figures that I own. I mainly concentrated on the adventurers and used counters etc. for the baddies. Hopefully I can run some games where all the beings encountered can be represented with a miniature.

Defend the Ruins

After we had finished our rule-driven battle companies battle, littlun carried on playing with his newly painted figures. In his mind's eye he had seen an heroic last stand by his elves against a small warband of orcs. Like the previous Gondor vs. orcs encounter, there were no rules involved, just a child's imagination and ability to tell a great, heroic tale.

The elves, cut off from support, take refuge in a ruined farmhouse...

The attacking orc force has them trapped and try to force their way in through the door supported by a couple of archers...

Whilst the other half of the band, with their leader, go around to the rear where access appears to be easier...

Unfortunately for the orcs, the elves have both accesses covered and are willing to sell their lives dearly...

After he had finished playing, the elves had three survivors and the orcs were either wiped out or had run away.

Battle Companies : Elves vs. Orcs

The kids were over this weekend, so my youngest lad got to see his newly daubed elf figures. He liked them a lot and couldn't wait to get to use them in anger. He swiftly set up the table and two battle companies, one orc and one elf, so we could go head to head.

Looking at the two units on the table he was a little over-awed; the orcs numbered nine, whilst the elves numbered only five. He thought that he would be in for a thrashing considering the numbers. I placated him by telling him that his elves were far superior warriors, and that his propensity to throw a multitude of sixes per game would help his cause.

The elf force...

The orc force...

The sun had just risen above the small hills surrounding the abandoned farm of Sunnydale. The shadows were long but cast deeper by the presence of an encroaching orc warband. Graznuk sniffed the air. "Elves." he spat. "Forward. Let's show those pretty boys a thing or two about knife work."

The orc commander split his forces with the archers peeling off to the right flank with a supporting shield armed warrior and the rest of the heavy hitters heading off to the left. The elves did the same, envisioning that the lone elf archer would be able to keep the heads down of the three approaching orcs. As soon as the orcs came into view, the elf let loose a shaft and an orc armed with a sword and shield dropped to the dirt with an arrow embedded in his throat (1 orc, 0 elves).

Graznuk noticed the loss of one of his warriors out of the corner of his eye and urged his troops to surge forward to engage the hated enemy. No sooner had combat been joined than another orc fell to the swiftly moving glaives of the elves. Undeterred by his losses so far, Graznuk pushed on and personally felled one of the elves in front of him. This seemed to be going easy for him, so he dispatched two of his axe warriors to help bring down the pesky elf archer, with orders to return to this fray once that easy task was accomplished (2 orcs, 1 elf).

The leader of the elves saw the danger that orc warband chief would cause if left to run riot, so felled him with one swift blow of his glaive (Graznuk failed his Fate roll). Unfortunately, this left him exposed to the remaining orcs and he almost suffered the same demise (made his Fate roll) (3 orcs, 1 elf).

The orcs remaining in the melee rallied around their second and all attacked a solitary elf who had been forced away from the fight. In what seemed a foregone conclusion, the elf ducked and dived his way out of being hacked to pieces by the heavy axes and spears of the orcs (they needed 3+ to hit but all rolled a 2!). Unfortunately, just after the elf warrior has retreated, the elf leader could not avoid being surrounded and was hacked down where he stood (3 orcs, 2 elves).

Meanwhile, on the other flank, the solitary elf archer managed to keep two axe wielding orcs and two archers at bay, but failed to cause any wounds. The attacking orcs, like their brethren on the other flank, could only keep pushing the elf back, despite winning combat after combat (kept rolling snake eyes or just ones and twos). Just as the orcs closed in on the elf archer, in what they thought would be a successful pincer movement, he managed to find a little space for himself and felled an orc archer that was pursuing him with a true shot shaft (4 orcs, 2 elves).

An orc war horn sounded off in the distance and the fight was warily abandoned. The orcs ran directly to answer their master's call, but the elves, saddened by their losses, gathered the bodies of their brethren for burial whilst they burnt the corpses of the orc dead.

This battle was a tightly run show. Although littlun didn't roll his normal unusually high number of sixes, I was unable to roll much more than a two on several critical occasions (two sets of snake-eyes, a 1 & a 2, a double-two, and three dice less than 3) to compensate for that. Any of these rolls being successful would have turned the tide of the battle firmly in favour of the orcs, and they would have forced a morale check on the elves. As a result, this battle was declared a draw.

We were going to try to begin playing a proper Battle Companies campaign this week, but we got involved in the game too quickly to think about it until afterwards. I am thinking of running the lad's elves as a battle company as they journey from Forlindon to Rivendell to deliver an important message to Elrond from Cirdan. He said he saw his elves as Lindon elves, hence the non-canon paint jobs on these figures. Hopefully we can start this campaign in a couple of weeks' time when he is next over, and we have a little more time to prepare and play due to the half-term school holidays.

We are hoping to get to our local GW in the half-term to pick him up his own paint brush so he can paint the elf command he bought, and thus help to reduce his own backlog. However, he said that he wants me to paint his Gondor troops after I complete his elves, so my painting list grows ever longer.

As an aside, I received those Otherworld skeletons through the post yesterday, but only saw the soggy package on the door step this morning (it has been raining heavily here for a day or two now). I will get them prepped tomorrow if I can, and then see about getting the paints out for them during the week.