Foul Smelly Things...

My mate Thomas at the Learning By Doing blog got a bunch of Games Workshop Mordor Orcs in a figure swap which he then kindly donated to me for some strange reason. Not the person to turn down free figures I gladly accepted but without any real notion of what to do with them.

Taking the hobbits to Isengard? Well, not really since they serve the red eye.

(Please excuse the photos, they were taken outside with my mobile camera in glaring sunlight, and the green background played hell with the colours. In reality the colours are much duller.)

These are the metal figures from the old Lord of the Rings line, sculpted by the Perry Twins. Well, not the ancient line from the eighties, but from the early 00-ies when the movies came out, before GW started to do them in plastic. (Games Workshop made figures for Middle Earth RolePlay back in the day in case you wonder what I'm diddling about...)

'Ullo sunshine. Fancy a pint and a quick snog?

I do like the Lord of the Rings game from GW, but I have long since given up trying to collect all the figures for the game. I would if I could though, but even I have limits. But since these are nice figures I started to prep them, remove mold lines and glue them to their bases and tallying up their numbers.

Today they would all make a living as professional football hooligans.

It turned out I had one character -- Grishnakh -- that stood about a head taller than the rest, eight figures with sword and shield, six archers, two with polearms and two with spears. As I just had bought Saga and was planning and prepping a lot of Viking figures these numbers seemed strangely familiar.

If you stick your weapon on a stick, you can stick it to the enemy from some distance.

In Saga a unit of Warriors are eight men (or orcs) strong. A unit of Levies, often armed with bows, are twelve figures strong, while a unit of Hearthguard are four figures strong. So if we lump the spears and polearms together and call them Heartguard we get 2½ points in Saga terms. Grishnakh will naturally be the warlord. And so, with a plan to field them as whatever opposition I needed for my Saga vikings I set out to paint them, as fast and painless as possible. And the beautiful part is that if I stop playing Saga I have a bunch of Orcs to use as baddies in any fantasy skirmish game I play.

Of course, hitting the enemy from a greater distance is better.

How I painted them:

• Basecoat: Army Painter Leather Brown spray.
• Flesh: GW Foundation Tallarn Flesh or Wargames Foundry Flesh (base).
• Animal skins and tanned leather: GW Foundation Iyanden Darksun.
• Leather armour: Wargames Foundry Slate Grey (base).
• Metal armour: A light drybrush or stippling of Vallejo Gun Metal.
• Rat tails on Grishnakh: GW Foundation Dheneb Stone.
• Red details: Vallejo Crimson Gore.
• Finally everyone was dunked in Army Painter Strong Tone dip.

The hardest thing about painting these figures are their cobbled together look. You can't look on a figure and tell which part goes together with which part, are the sleaves for the tunic or the armour, is the armour boiled leather or metal or both, and what animal are the furs from? So I decided to keep a minimum of colours, each figure only have four or five colours before dipping, but vary the paints around, so one one figure I would paint the armour as metal and the tunic tanned leather, the next would have brown leather armour (just leaving the basecoat) and dark grey tunic. That's why I used two different kind of skin colour too. One of the models got a red tunic and Dheneb Stone trouser just for fun. The bases were finished with some sand and static grass and then the figures recieved to coats of Tamiya Flat Varnish to take the shine off. I need to drybrush the bases some though.

So there you have it. I will have a rummage around in the garage for my old Lord of the Rings figures, with a little bit of luck I have some more orcs stashed away. Ideally I would like to have six more archers for a full unit of levies, and eight more orcs with shields for another unit of Warriors. That would get me a four point warband for Saga. And maybe I will buy some of the nice plastic Warg Riders since some of the factions in Saga get to take cavalry.

And who knows, maybe I will start to play Lord of the Rings again?