More additions to my old-school Middle Earth stuff

My local Kings of War group has been doing an escalation league, and I've been using it to bulk out my Middle Earth stuff. I can use the army as an allied Kingdoms of Men and Elf force. The movement trays give me the right unit footprints for the game.

 The whole army so far.

 A mounted hero and standard bearer from Gondor, amongst Rohan allies.

 a unit of Gondorian spearmen, and a large Beorning in bear-form. All the Gondor stuff came from Warrior Miniatures, and the bear is from Irregular Miniatures' 54mm range.

These charmingly lumpy chaps are of unknown provenance. They'll serve as man-mode Beornings, or possibly good Dunlendings.

Old School Middle Earth

In a few weeks' time, my gaming group will be starting its second escalation league for Kings of War- building an army a little at a time, in 500 point increments, and comparing progress. It really helps with motivation, and gets you a playable army in no time. Here's the dwarf army I built during the last one.

A little while ago I acquired a few hundred very old fantasy miniatures from a friend, and I intend to use these as the main source for a 'Middle Earth Good Guys' army, possibly using an allied Herd and Kingdoms of Men list. Many of the figures  were homecast, either using Prince August casting kits or by recasting (mostly Minifigs Mythical Earth range) existing miniatures. Recasting isn't something I take lightly, but it's hard to object in this case- it's been done with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and purely for personal use, many decades ago. It's also given many of the miniatures a pleasingly indistinct look that reminds me of Spencer Smith miniatures. I've repainted a few already in a 'shiny toy soldier' style that I really like- it suits the figures and is very quick to achieve. Here are some Beornings, Wargs, a Winged Nazgul and some assorted knights.

The Beornings I'll be able to use for the 'Good Guys', and I'll supplement them first with some Riders of Rohan. Here's a test miniature which I painted as a banner bearer, following Tolkien's description of the horse colour, hair, shield device and banner.

And here's the miniature before I started. Under the dust of years, it's got a very nice solid colour scheme, and a great banner painted in washes over a dot matrix printed pattern which has a sort of  'Persian Rug' feel to it.

Creatures and Warbands for Frostgrave.

I've been playing a little Frostgrave lately, and I've been using it as an excuse to paint a lot of models from the 1970s in a very clean bright and shiny 'toy soldier' look that I think looks good and suits the era of the miniatures. I've also created a few larger scratch built creatures, painted in the same style.

Here's my Giant Spider, made from dressmakers' pins, bamboo skewers and Milliput.

...and here's my Giant Worm, made from Milliput again, and a child's coat hanger! The orc-for-scale here is an old Prince August one.

Lastly, here's some sort of slime monster composed entirely of bamboo skewers and hot glue. The other figure is a golem, probably by Minifigs.

I hope you can see the kind of look I'm going for with the paintjobs. It polarises opinion a bit I think, but I really like it, and it's QUICK! A huge plus. Here are two of my Frostgrave warbands which also sometimes see action in Song of Blades and Heroes and Open Combat as well as dungeon crawls and whatnot. I'm hoping to expand both into opposing good and evil armies for Dragon Rampant.

THE GOODIES

The Fellowship of the Red Wyrm

THE BADDIES

The Thrall of Kronos

These two warbands are mostly composed of old Minifigs, Ral Partha, Prine August and Minot stuff. The giant mushroom is a 'proof of concept' for a fungal forest I'm hoping to finish later.