Thorin, Dain and their dwarves

 These are some Blade elements for Hordes of the Things, to represent Thorin and company and Dan and the dwarves of the Iron Hills in the Battle of the Five Armies.

In the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Dain is described as wielding a red axe (though whether that's the haft, the blade or just its bloody state is unclear). Here (much later on at the Battle of the Five Armies), he's upgraded to a red spear. 

These ex-Grenadier EM4 dwarves are the best fit for Dain's dwarves, I think. They don't quite have mattocks, but their axes are sufficiently mattocky to count. And they're suitably grim and tough-looking.

That's the dwarves done. Next up are the Men of Laketown (Spear elements) and Thranduil's Elves (Shooters).

Beorn for the Battle of the Five Armies

 

This is Beorn for the Battle of the Five Armies forces I'm painting up for a friend. He's a Reaper Bones bear painted with the appropriate black pelt and based for Hordes of the Things.

In Hordes of the Things terms, Beorn should be a God element, I think: arriving late on the battlefield and able to move very quickly and destructively. 

A quick beholder

 Here's a quick beholder I painted. It's destined to be a baddie opposing or leading the warbands I painted for a friend's kids a while back.

These rough-and-ready Reaper Bones figures are very quick to paint: essentially just dry brushing with a few proper highlights. Mid-sized monsters like this one are where the range really shines.

Ghosts and goblins

 Here's the latest member of my growing troupe of night goblins. With these creatures, I'm aiming for a folkloric approach: eerie creatures of the Otherworld rather than mundane subterranean soldiers. 

In light with that approach, I kitbashed a leader for the goblins from a Games Workshop ghost and some night-goblin parts. In folklore, the distinction between ghosts and goblins isn't necessarily clear, so I thought a sinister fairy might benefit from appearing rather ethereal. 

I've got a few other conversions and kitbashes awaiting paint; some of these have tails or animal heads. I'm also planning a few larger bases of two or three figures for use in "large skirmish" games. 

A Chronicle hobgoblin

 Here's a blast from the past: one of Nick Lund's Chronicle hobgoblins, which were produced by Citadel in the early 80s. 

When I was a child, these were some of the most sought-after miniatures for their sheer heft and menace. They were also a staple of the Joe Dever/Gary Chalk armies that featured in White Dwarf and the like at that time.

 The later, slottabased Chronicle range were finer sculpts with plenty of attractions of their own, but they lack the bulk and brutality of the earlier range:

First game of Elf, Knyghte, Pyke, Sworde

 Last night, my son and I played an introductory game of Nordic Weasel Games' Elf, Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde (EKPS). I've been impressed by various other Nordic Weasel systems (Shoot People in Space, Squad Hammer, etc.) and liked the sound of a game that catered to a slightly smaller warband size than Dragon Rampant. I always struggle with getting enough cavalry painted, so the idea of having units of as few as three horsemen was appealing. 

We played a fairly simple straight-fight scenario, with four dwarfs, three musket-toting ladies, three zebra riders and a couple of individuals facing off against six orc archers, six orc light infantry, three hobgoblin wolf riders and another brace of characters. 

The game played out pretty fast. We got a few things wrong - chiefly with the morale rules, where we initially failed to realise that a passed bravery test exempts you from further tests that turn. But we know now. 

One thing I'd wondered was whether the move rates (5" for most infantry, 4" for orcs and dwarfs) would be a bit sluggish in 28mm. But the game proceeded at a fair crack, and running helped (extending those moves to 7.5" and 6", respectively, at the price of fatigue for most troop types). We played on 3' x 3', but I think those move rates would work find on a 6' x 4' table: there'd probably be a lot of running and exhaustion initially, before troops rest and slow down before engagement. 

I really liked the way in which the game uses groups: they aren't bound to keep together but are at greater morale risk if they don't. The targeting rules for shooting worked very nicely too - individual figures matter more than in Saga or the Rampant series, so that units aren't just 'blobs'. 

The Power Source system was a lot of fun (we just had Might, Luck and Leadership and only used the first of these), with lots of potential for heroic feats without unbalancing things: the ticking clock as Might points were exhausted by heroes surrounded by foes was exciting. 

The different troop types were nicely differentiated too. In EKPS, you have set profiles (like HOTT or Frostgrave: Polearm, Missile, Great Weapon, Skirmisher, Shield, Fantastic, etc), but these combine with profiles for various creatures, which are in turn divided into sub-types (Ranker, Veteran, Armoured and so on). So you can build lots of different profiles through the combinations. 

As an example, there are no profiles for lizardmen. But you could easily start with an armoured orc, hobgoblin or beastman and work from there to get a suitably tough and scaly set of stats. 

We'll certainly play again soon. The PDF is packed with all kinds of delights (scenario generators, RPG elements, a "combat RPG" approach with a games master and plenty more), so we've only skimmed the surface so far.

For me, the game's a great incentive to paint up all kinds of interesting old miniatures of which I have too many for a SOBH warband but not enough for a Dragon Rampant retinue (without fiddly dependence on reduced-model counts) or Saga army. I'm thinking of Citadel preslotta dark elves, dwarfs, lizardmen and troglodytes, hobgoblins and Slann - and as mounted troops can have their mounts shot from under them, there's plenty of potential to use all those Citadel foot-and-mounted personalities from the golden age ...

The People of the Toadstools - the and some very old dwarfs

 

I'm planning a goblin warband in a wild variety of colours: like Arthur Rackham's goblins, in all their variety, but with much brighter hues. I always liked this line from CS Lewis's White Witch: 

"Call the Cruels, the Hags, the Spectres, and the People of the Toadstools."

These nasty little sprites could be Cruels or the People of the Toadstools/

I also recently finished some very old Citadel dwarfs: Fantasy Tribes figures from the early 80s: