A new project: the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in 15mm (and a kitbashed troll)

Heartened by the completion of my Five Armies project, I'm now embarking on another Middle-earth scheme: the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in 15mm (using Hordes of the Things or perhaps DBF - or both for different games, perhaps). 

The Pelennor is an obvious choice for a big battle from Tolkien's works. It has a pleasing variety of troop types on both sides, with notably more varied forces of evil than some other battles, in that there are plenty of diverse human troop types alongside the orcs, trolls and Ringwraiths, along with some that could be interpreted as either wholly or partially human (the "men like half-trolls", who are later referred to simply as "troll-men"). And there are lots of varied goodies too, with plenty of scope for characterful leaders, from Gandalf to Forlong the Fat. 

And the Pelennor also has nice historical echoes, including the Cautalanian Fields (aka the Battle of Chalons) and various sieges of Constantinople. 

Alas, while 15mm is great for affordable historical analogues for Middle-earth troop types, it largely precludes the kitbashing of orcs, which was one of the great joys of the Five Armies project. But it does open up the possibility of kitbashing some trolls. 

 Most obviously, the great battering ram Grond is wielded by trolls. And trolls are mentioned in the rout of the Witch-king's army too, if I remember correctly.

What do Tolkien's trolls look like? Well, the consistent theme - from JRRT's own illustrations for The Hobbit to the cave troll in Moria to the hill trolls at the Morannon (who must be Olog-hai) - is that they're scaly. To that end, I kitbashed one using a Frostgrave snakeman body and various dwarf and goblin parts. I'm quite pleased with how he looks - a fairly original take on a much-depicted monster - and he's bang on scale with 15mm figures (Tolkien indicates that trolls were around 12' tall):

The Battle of the Five Armies with Hordes of the Things

 

Over the past few months, I assembled and painted up a set of Hordes of the Things matched forces for the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit. This was for a friend's kids; the armies were handed over at the weekend, and the inaugural battle was fought - largely according to the book, although Beorn was a notable casualty and Thorin survived. In the end, it was the stout Lake Men who put paid to Bolg.

Here are the HOTT elements involved:

Beorn:

Dain and his dwarves:

Thorin Oakenshield and his companions:

Gandalf, Bilbo, the Elf-king and the elves:

The Lake Men:

The forces of good (minus Beorn and the Eagle):

The goblin hordes:

Bolg of the North and his bodyguard:

The wargs:

Warg riders:

"They ride upon wolves, and the wargs are in their train":

The forces of evil:

The eagles:

The whole lot, more or less, including the bat clouds at the back.

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. 

The Battle of the Five Armies for Hordes of the Things

 A little project I'm working on at the moment consists of opposing forces to fight the Battle of the Five Armies with the Hordes of the Things rules, for a friend.

These are the first few elements: a warband element for Bolg and his bodyguard, and a couple of goblin horde elements (many more to come ...). 

I'm using a mix of miniatures for the goblins: EM4, Wargames Factory, Oathmark, BattleMasters, Citadel, Warlord Games and Wargames Atlantic, at least. I'm kitbashing a lot of the EM4 figures to vary the three poses as much as I can. 

Other elements are close to completion too: Beorn (a god in HOTT terms), two bases of wolf riders and one of wargs, Dain's dwarves and Thorin and company. The other elements have been procured, so it's jut a question of working through them all now ...

Essex goblin

The Essex range of goblins are a little undersung, I reckon. Yes, they're fairly primitive. But they've got buckets of charm. Rather than echoing Tolkien directly, they're more akin to the goblins of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin - which in turn was the ur-source of Tolkien's orcs.

The direct inspiration for the range, though, appears to be Down in the Dungeon.

With his plate armour, this fellow doesn't really belong in Middle Earth. But in D&D, he and his ilk will make a nasty surprise for the party. A mere goblin becomes quite a different proposition once he's acquired a couple of hit dice and armour class 3.

A Minifigs goblin

Here's a blast from the distant past: a Minifigs goblin from the 1970s. I've obtained a few Minifigs miniatures recently, and I really like them. There's a certain amount of 'paint your own detail', but they're nice little models - made, I believe, through adding detail to the maquettes with solder rather than with putty.

The Minifigs range was closely tied to the original Monster Manual, with the kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and gnolls all following that book's illustrations very closely.

I've painted this one to join my Tolkien orc/D&D goblin project. He's a bit smaller than most of the others, but I think he fits in well enough.

D&D goblins - or Middle Earth orcs!

Childhood survivals and impulsive eBay purchases have left me with a large supply of 28mm goblins. Not, in the main, the zany, impish, smirking goblins that became popular from the later 1980s, but nasty, fearsome orcs. They're goblins in D&D terms of course: the goblins of the Monster Manual are essentially Tolkien's orcs while the pig-headed beastmen of that volume take their name and tribal affiliations from Tolkien but very little else.

Goblins from Acropolis, Citadel, Ral Partha, Rieder* and Citadel
*This one's a Rieder orc

In Middle Earth, of course, orcs and goblins are the same thing. The Uruk-hai are just as much goblins as the smallest snaga. Indeed, in the text of The Lord of the Rings, Uruks are described as "goblins" more often than are the smaller types.

Citadel Grom's Goblin Guard trooper

Early manufacturers of fantasy miniatures recognised this, probably because they were drawing on The Lord of the Rings directly rather than on derivative materials. So Ral Partha's Wizards, Warriors and Warlocks range featured "Giant Goblins" who were clearly the Uruk-hai of Isengard - complete with the White Hand on their shields and the S-rune on their helmets. They are a little bigger than the other goblins in the ranges, but are still squat, short creatures. And that's as it should be: it's clear from the text of The Lord of the Rings that Uruks are significantly shorter than Men - which is what makes the half-orcs (described as Men rather than Orcs) so remarkable.

Citadel Fiend Factory Red Goblin

Anyway, given all the goblins that I have kicking around, I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone: create a wargaming army of Middle Earth orcs and amass a huge supply of goblins for D&D. So I'm painting all these goblins from diverse manufacturers in the same simple style. I'm basing them all on 25mm squares so that they can be used in common-frontage wargames (MicroHotT, Book of War, perhaps Oathmark). Although that's 5mm wider than the traditional 20mm, a lot of these figures occupy the space quite nicely, as they're "squat and broad" (matching Tolkien's description of the Uruks at Helm's Deep). 

There are a few goblins I'm throwing into this project that aren't really Tolkienesque - like this Metal Magic 'red goblin' with his hammer and sickle! But he'll work OK as a goblin smith or something in D&D.

Metal Magic Red Goblin

For the colour scheme, I wanted something that would broadly fit both Tolkien's descriptions and those of D&D. Tolkien's orcs are 'swart' and 'sallow', but they should also look appropriately subterranean. D&D goblins have livid skin in grey or earthy tones. I started with a grey base, washed it in sepia and then highlighted it in grey, buff and Vallejo's Pale Flesh. I think the end result reasonably covers all bases: they're sallow, thanks to the buff, and could reasonably be described as 'swart' too. 

For the eyes, I went with a glowing red/yellow. This fits with D&D's 'glowing red eyes', but is perhaps stretching Tolkien's only description of orcish eyes as 'like coals'. When I was a child, I read this as indicating that the orc's eyes were glowing like red-hot coals, but that's clearly not the only reading. The eyes could be coal-black or simply burning with rage or malice. Still, eyes like glowing coals is still a valid interpretation, and it fits with the orcish ability to see in the dark. So I'm content to go that way. What I'm still not sure on is whether to give them pupils. I'll make a decision once I've got more done.

As far as liveries and heraldry go, I'm going with the Red Eye where no other emblem is present. Where there's a White Hand, or where one looks appropriate, I'll use that instead - and cheerfully mix them together until I have enough Isengarders to work separately. The Citadel Fiend Factory goblins have a wolf emblem, so I'm painting that in red and black to fit the description of goblin banners being red and black at the Battle of the Five Armies.

Snaga

Although I've never done any Middle Earth wargaming, I'm often tempted by it and always on the lookout for suitable miniatures. Those can be surprisingly hard to find - especially, perhaps, when it come to Orcs.

The fairly recent release of the Oathmark goblins changed that a bit; they're very nice Tolkien-esque figures, and wolf-riders are apparently to follow. But the only problem is that they fill only one of the two main Orcish slots in Tolkien's writings: that of the Uruks.

In The Lord of the Rings, goblins are broadly divided into two classes: the big fighting goblins (the Uruks) and the lesser kinds (whom the Uruks call "Snaga", meaning "slave"). The Oathmark goblins, being somewhat shorter than Men but still fairly large, fill the Uruk role perfectly (you might want to change the swords and bows for Isengarders).

But the smaller types must be closer to Hobbit-sized, because Frodo and Sam are mistaken for them when suitably disguised.

So I was pleased to discover that Oathmark heads and arms fit rather nicely onto Mantic goblin bodies. The Mantic goblins are much worse than their other lines - indeed, notoriously so. The beaky heads have a certain charm, but the arms are poorly cast and don't fit terribly well on the bodies. The Oathmark appendages solve that problem at a stroke.

What's nice about this is that the Oathmark goblins come with lots of extra heads and limbs, because each sprue allows for the assembly of its component Orcs as archers, spearmen or swordsmen. So by buying some Mantic sprues to go with the Oathmark ones, you can assemble five Uruks and five Snaga from each.

A spotter's guide to Beorn

One of the great pleasures of reading (and re-reading) Tolkien is spotting the influences. Many of these are well known: the dwarf-names from Voluspa (The Seeress's Prophecy) in the Poetic Edda, for example, or the Orcs and Ents from the orcneas and eotenas of Beowulf.

Then there's Tolkien's own acknowledgement of the Orcs' debt to George MacDonald's goblins. And there's their Misty Mountain lair's original in Skirnismal (identified by Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle Earth).

But one of the most satisfying spots comes in Hrolf Kraki's Saga. Many Tolkien enthusiasts know that Beorn owes a debt to Bodvar Bjarki ("Warlike Little-Bear"),  Hrolf's shapeshifting comrade-in-arms. But rereading part of the saga the other day, I was struck by just how strong the influence is.

Here's Beorn's decisive appearance at the Battle of the Five Armies:

In that last hour Beorn himself had appeared—no one knew how or from where. He came alone, and in bear’s shape; and he seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath. 

The roar of his voice was like drums and guns; and he tossed wolves and goblins from his path like straws and feathers. He fell upon their rear, and broke like a clap of thunder through the ring. The dwarves were making a stand still about their lords upon a low rounded hill. Then Beorn stooped and lifted Thorin, who had fallen pierced with spears, and bore him out of the fray.  

Swiftly he returned and his wrath was redoubled, so that nothing could withstand him, and no weapon seemed to bite upon him. He scattered the bodyguard, and pulled down Bolg himself and crushed him. Then dismay fell on the Goblins and they fled in all directions.But weariness left their enemies with the coming of new hope, and they pursued them closely, and prevented most of them from escaping where they could.

And here's Bodvar's spirit-bear in the saga's great battle:

Hjorvard and his men saw a great bear advancing in front of King Hrolf's troop. The bear was always beside the king, and it killed more men with its paws than any five of the king's champions did. Blows and missiles glanced off the animal, as it used its weight to crush King Hjorvard's men and their horses. Between its teeth, it tore everything within reach, causing a palpable fear to spread through the ranks of King Hjorvard's army.

All the elements are there: the surprise appearance, the massive carnage, the apparent invulnerability and the shattering of enemy morale. Tolkien's conclusion is rather more consolatory, though (I won't spoil the saga's here).

If you haven't read Hrolf Kraki's Saga, please do. It's short and great and brimming with ideas for games, including sundry trolls, literature's best half-elven sorceress and a terrific strategic use of undead soldiers. Poul Anderson did a pretty serviceable novelisation, but the Penguin Classics translation is marvellous, as well as being much shorter.

A brace of Grenadier orcs

When I was a kid, Grenadier was an intriguing alternative to Citadel. Grenadier miniatures were fairly cheap (£1.50 and later £1.95 a blister, if I remember correctly, for typically three infantry or one or two surprisingly large monsters) and they offered a huge amount of variety.

The downside was that there wasn't a great deal of each type. If you wanted orcs, for example, you were faced with small numbers of various visually distinct types - at least until Nick Lund joined from Citadel and created the Fantasy Warriors range. Meanwhile, Citadel produced scores of their main humanoid creatures. So the bigger Grenadier monsters tended to be the main attraction.

But many of the Grenadier humanoids were nice miniatures and often rather distinctive: an orc leader mounted on a hefty warhorse, for example, or kobolds riding large reptiles. They also did orc skeletons.

Here are a couple of their orcs, from two very different boxes in the Dragon Lords range: a lesser orc with war axe from the Monsters box; and the chieftain of the Orcs of the Severed Hand. I think the latter would make a decent RuneQuest dark troll. The former, on the other hand, is a much more Tolkienish orc: short stature, big head, big hands, long arms and short, thick legs.