Itsy bitsy teeny-tiny gondorians

Warmaster is one of my favourite GW games and I love it. One of it's inspiring spin-offs is the Battle of Five Armies boxed game that GW released a couple of years ago, based on "the Hobbit" by Tolkien. It's main drawback is that GW never supported it, releasing more armies. So I was thinking that one could use historical figures for the various human factions, and Normands look pretty Gondorian to me, at least in 10mm scale.

I just had to try it and ordered a couple of packs from Pendraken Miniatures.

Size matters not.

I started these at the beginning of the summer, but after prepping and priming a base of figures I lost interest. Summer vacation then got in the way, but as I wanted to enter these into the Wargamer's Guild Pendraken build I picked up the pace about a week ago.

A better view of the shields designs, which are printed and glued onto the models.

Tiny as they are, they are dead easy to paint. Some of the details are exaggerated, like the telephone poles the figures carry instead of spears. This is partly to ease painting, but they are still only 1 mm thick and would break if any thinner. The infantry stand took about two evening's worth of painting, and the command stand another evening. This included cutting out and glueing the shield patterns onto the figures. With some assembly-line style of painting I bet you could do a full unit in a couple of evenings really.

The last thing the enemy will see... hopefully!

I downloaded the shields and banner for free from Toshach miniatures which also have some really nice paper terrain for sale in various scales. They have a Dol Anduin keep for free as well that I will try to glue together some day for my brave Gondorians to defend.

The bases are from Warbases (left) and Renedra (right).

In standard Warmaster style the infantry are mounted in two ranks on a 40x20mm base while the commanders are mounted on a round 20mm base. A unit should be three stands though...

Leading from the front? Far better to stay alive behind the troops.

The only downside with Pendraken figures are the large lumps of metal they stand on. I tried to file them down a bit but I was afraid the figures' ankles might break if I was too heavy-handed. In the end I tried to conceal them with Vallejo Sandy Paste and Gale Force 9 Summer Blend flock instead. The result is quite ok.

Onwards men! Onwards for glory and Gondor!

I'm regarding this as proof of concept; I ordered enough figures from Pendraken to do two units of infantry and two units of cavalry (twelve stands) and some command stands. I plan to finish these eventually, just because I like the Pendraken figures and the look of arrayed infantry in a warmaster unit. If I get them done I will probably order more. Kallistra has Normands in their historical range, and Copplestone do "City Infantry" models that I'm tempted to get too. Heck, I might even get a game in if I'm lucky.

So there you have it, I hope you like them.