Build me an army worthy of Mordor!

Dear Internet, I haven't written in a long time. It's not you, it's me. Truth to be told there haven't been much to write about, but I though the new year would be a nice time to make an effort and restart the blog. We'll see how long it lasts this time, but at least I have something to write about right now. (I also painted something, skip to the end if you just want to see the pretty pictures.)

Just before the new year I met up with my fellow Scandinavian Lardies (or Lardie Penguins) Jocke, Koen and Thomas for our annual shits and giggles game. In a moment of hubris we decided to play Dux Gondorianum -- which is more or less just Dux Britanniarum with Lord of the Rings figures.

The forces of go.. evil I mean.

Dux Brit is a large dark age skirmish game from Too Fat Lardies which is quite brilliant if you fancy playing saxons vs romano-britons. Which is nice, I guess, but we don't have any of those kinds of miniatures or any connection to that bit of history. What we do have is a lot of Games Workshop's  Uruk Hai, Gondorians and Rohirrim. The biggest hordes of painted stuff belongs to Koen and Thomas as I sold most of my Uruks and Riders of Rohan to Thomas a while back. Still, I had a handful of painted Mordor Orcs and a bunch of Wargames Foundry viking archers that didn't look too out of place in a Rohan Army. For some reason I even had two Grishnak!

One of my Grishnaks leads the charge!

We hadn't played in two years so the rules were a bit hazy and to top it off Koen had found  more adapted force lists on the War to end all Blogs blog. It feels a bit more Middle Earthy to have Uruks behave like Uruks rather than Saxons. (Unless Saxons did in fact fight, look and smell like Uruk-Hai, but I'm no historian.)

Koen even had a Cave Troll!

Even though the battle was drawn out by numerous rules discussions and tactics debates it was a fun battle and I realised just how much I miss fantasy gaming.

Thomas said "I will make the charge on anything but three ones." Don't tempt the Dice Gods, Thomas.

Back home again I had a rummage around my stash to see if I could locate more Mordor stuff which I knew I had somewhere. I did find a bunch of old metals that were all based with gravel glued to their bases. Some were sprayed black a long time ago while others were still bare metal. (I also found several versions of the Fellowship and 48 plastic moria goblins, but no sign of the dwarves I remember buying... I must dig deeper.) I couldn't resist painting some orcs so I selected four of the black primed orcs and just slapped some browns and a reds and metal on them and then let several washes do most of the highlight and shading.

A WIP shot of the first four painted figures of 2019, they were done on the third of January.

I then did a few touch ups and called them done. They are not masterpieces but they are more than table worthy. And they are orcs, the sloppy slap-dash painting style actually suits the models. I didn't time myself but I thought they took no time at all, so I decided to press on with five more and both document the method and time the different steps and the total time. So here goes.

Wet brush Calthan Brown all over the black, making sure to get a good coverage. 15 minutes spent.

Paint various clothings Khorne Red or Zandri Dust, fur and fletches Celestra Grey. Time 30 minutes.

Wargames Foundry Flesh (base) on the skin and P3 Pig Iron on the metals. 40 minutes spent on this stage.

Hit everything with Agrax Earthshade, 10 minutes tops (not counting drying time).

Then then metals were washed with Nuln Oil to darken them down. 5 minutes spent.

Touchups with Khorne Red on the clothes, highlighted faces and knuckles with Foundry Flesh (mid) and then washed with Reikland Flesh shade to tone the contrast down. Teeth were done with White Scar and finally the bases were drybrushed Rakarth Flesh. Time for the last stage 20 minutes.

Not counting drying times I spent two hours painting five figures. That's 24 minutes per figure, not bad. After that I treated the bases to some tufts, cleaned up the edges and varnished them, along with the four previous figures. Then I took some nice photos of the lot!

So will 2019 see a return to Middle Earth for me? I think so. We are looking at maybe trying Dragon Rampant to see if it suits our playstyle better then Dux Brit/Dux Gondorianum. While we are Lardie fan boys we do recognise that there are other rules writers out there.

Happy gaming!