Lord of the Rings SBG on a budget - Full update as promised!

Ok so I said I’d do an update of my haul and here it is. I managed to trawl through it all last night and pull together the disparate bits in to some form of order. I’ve now got the sticky problem of deciding which bits I don’t want and would like to trade, Hmmmmmmmm.

So in no order of preference here’s what I’ve managed to put together through various acts of grovelling, cajoling, bartering and just plain buying!

Elves

Gilgalad, Elrond, Haldir, Galadriel, Glorfindel, Mounted Arwen with Frodo, 13x High Elves with 2 handed weapon and 12x Highelves with Bow

Last Alliance Men/Gondor

Elendil & Isildur, Boromir of the White Tower, Denethor, Faramir, Imrahil and 14x Last Alliance plastics

Wizards

Saruman, Sharkey, Radagast and Tom Bombadil

The Shire

Farmer Maggot and his hounds, Bilbo Baggins

The Fellowship

Plastic Gandalf, Aragorn (sword raised), Aragorn (Mtd King), Aragorn (Mtd ranger), Aragorn (Running sword), Plastic Gimli, Metal Gimli, Legolas, Merry (Esquire of Rohan), Frodo (metal), Sam (metal), Frodo (plastic), Sam (plastic), Merry (plastic), Pippin (plastic), Boromir kneeling.

Haradrim

6x Spears, 6x Bows

Uruk Hai

Lurtz (bow), Lurtz (sword and Shield), 3x Uruk Scouts (metal), Uruks with Merry & Pippin, Uruk Captain.

Rohan

24x Warriors of Rohan, Mounted Theoden

Goblins

35x Goblins (sword and shield), 50x Goblins (bow), 49x Goblins (spear), 2x Cave Trolls (metal)

Dwarves

King Dain, 7x Khazad Guard, 4x Khazad Guard (damaged axes), 2x dwarf (2 handed weapons), 2x dwarf (sword and shield), 1x dwarf with bow.

Company of Thorin Oakenshield

All apart from Thorin and Bilbo.

Now what the heck am I going to do with this lot. Well it looks like I’ve got a Goblin army for War of the Ring doesn’t it. I just have to come up with a paint scheme that suits a factory style process! I’m tempted to keep the elves simply because the models are quite cool and will probably paint up well but I’m not sure about the last alliance men and Gondor metals. I definitely don’t want the haradrim as that part of the Tolkien world doesn’t interest me, nor do I want the dwarves so they will have to get listed for trade me thinks. I’ll keep Saruman but the other wizards can go as well (I don’t like the Tom Bombadil model or the Radagast one. I much prefer the way that Sylvester McCoy portrays him in the Hobbit!).

So what do I still need. Well I still need to source both my Rohirrim and Uruk Hai although I’m probably ok for characters for the Uruks. But I do need Rohan Characters as I intend on starting my campaign in the Westfold so need Theodred, Erkenbrand, Eomer, Hama and Elfhelm. Not to mention the metal Gandalf (because he’s ace), Boromir, Merry and Pippin.

So still a little ways to go however when looking at my haul and then my spend to date (£31) I think I’m doing pretty well. I’ve managed to acquire 396 mini’s at a ratio of roughly 7p per mini, and yes some of them are plastic, some metal and some large models but it’s a good way to measure success and keep yourself motivated. I suppose part of the appeal of starting a project like this is the challenge itself.

So, on to some more trading I think.

Oh and here’s a WIP shot of the plastic Gandalf that I painted up whilst on holiday the other weekend. Still needs some washes and a little more highlights but I’m quite happy with the way he’s turned out so far. For a better paint job and decent comparison of the plastics vs metal go see Neldoreths blog - http://www.hourofwolves.org/?view=armies&which=fellowship&thumbs=1

IHMN - Scotland Yard

Section ‘H’

Charged with investigating the activities of the "extreme" criminal element within the Greater London area and having authority to act anywhere within Her Majesty's Empire in pursuit of these nefarious ill-doers. 

Chief Inspector Charles Johnson

Chief Inspector Charles Horatio Johnson spent his formative years at a boarding school in Rugby, excelling at the self same sport whilst struggling at the more academic disciplines such as mathematics and literature. Luckily for the young master Johnson his skill with a funny shaped ball brought him to the attention of well connected military individuals and he gained a commission in the 11th King Edward's Own Lancers. This rather delighted his parents who despaired of him ever finding any useful outlet for his (limited) abilities, his two brothers overshadowing his contributions for most of his adult life (one serving as personal secretary to the Governor of the Colony of Natal, Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the other achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel after distinguishing himself at the Battle of Tamai during the Mahdist uprising).

What followed was twenty years of average service interspersed with excellent performances in the interservice rugby competitions, both as player and coach, eventually achieving the rank of Captain. In a rather bizarre twist of fate he also managed to avoid nearly every conflict that the Empire was involved in, and yet was injured during a suspicious incident with a senior officer, a woman, a goose and wager of £4. Following a period of convalescence and the assistance of his brothers Charles Johnson was invalided out of the service and straight into the role of Chief Inspector with Section H of Scotland Yard (its not what you know but who you know!).

Special Branch Sergeant Arthur Johnson

Although he bears the same surname as his superior this is where the connection ends. Born and raised in the city’s east end and having an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the back streets makes him the ideal subordinate for the less informed Chief Inspector. During his youth he trained as a boxer and what he lacks in academic learning is more than made up for in street smarts and an ability to extract information from recalcitrant informants.

Special Branch Constables James Smith & John Brownlow

James Smith & John Brownlow have been friends since early childhood, growing up in rural Kent and moving to the city in their late teens. Hailing from close knit farming communities they both felt the need to spread their wings and find their own path in life. Finding very little employment in London’s sprawling metropolis they both agreed to see the wider Empire and enlist in Her Majesty’s armed forces joining the King's Royal Rifle Corps. They both excelled at marksmanship and scouting however it was the close bond they shared that brought them to the attention of a certain Major Johnson who promoted them both to the rank of corporal in his command staff. Following the Battle of Tamai they both left military service to join Scotland Yard, it being rumoured that they were placed there to keep an eye on the Chief Inspector by his brothers (although they both deny this!)

Special Branch Constable William Bletchley Hughes

Currently on special assignment [Classified] - information to follow at a later date.

Uniformed Constables

Sergeant William MacTavish

Billy MacTavish is not happy about being in the big smoke. Hailing from a small village in the Highlands of Scotland he only recently joined Section H following an incident involving certain civilian consultants on his patch. On the advice of Sergeant Johnson the Chief Inspector pulled some strings to get Sergeant MacTavish assigned to Scotland Yard to ensure that he did not discuss said events. They need not have worried for Billy MacTavish is a loyal servant of Her Majesty and an excellent policeman and has already stamped his presence upon both his constables and the criminal elements he has come into contact with (sometimes literally).

Constable Stan Peabody

Stan likes a drink, sometimes too much and it is this vice that has stopped him progressing through the ranks. Having his mother die when he was a child and an alcoholic father possibly has something to do with this. He does however have reasonable deductive skills and can occasionally be found assisting the Yards chief consultant when off duty. Unfortunately he has on occasion been found intoxicated whilst on duty and as a consequence is on disciplinary supervision, with Sergeant MacTavish keeping a close eye on him.

Constable Frederick Butterfield Smythe

Being the son of the well known explorer Francis Butterfield Smythe (and I heartily recommend you read his book “Adventures in the darkest pit of hell, a guide to the Colonies of Africa”) has resulted in Frederick having the best of everything except a father (he did not accompany his father on his travels, in fact he has very rarely met him). His mother spent most of her time enjoying her many pastimes, most recently attending meetings of the Esperance Club, with Frederick being raised and supervised by his Governess Lobelia Llewellyn Johnson, cousin (by marriage) to the Chief Inspector. It is this connection that has led Frederick to the Yard in search of structure and a father figure although he may be looking in the wrong place.

Constable Nathaniel Johnson

Constable Johnson is nephew to the Chief Inspector and to all outward appearances is a model police officer. He is punctual, smart and versed in the articles of law, well educated (at Oxford no less!), from a well bred family (his father is personal secretary to the Governor of the Colony of Natal!) and should have an outstanding career with the Yard. However not all is as it seems for Nathaniel is beholden to a certain criminal genius currently at liberty in the city. Constable Johnson is able to hide this connection from most of his colleagues however the Yards chief civilian advisor is aware of this and has kept it secret, for his own purposes. 

Lord of the Rings SBG Project Update

Well its been a fun couple of weeks since my last post. My wife surprised me with a nice little holiday, I've got a swanky new bread-maker so have been playing with that and I've gathered together a great haul of The Lord of the Rings SBG miniatures.

Ok so on to the good stuff. What have I managed to get together then. Well via the Lead Adventurers Forum I've managed to acquire some Warriors of Rohan (on sprue), most of the Fellowship in metal (big thanks to Joe5mc and Just John) and am having ongoing discussions on trading the Khazad Guard for something I actually like.

From my gaming club I've also purloined Boromir (after the taking of Osgiliath) and a bucketload of Moria Goblins all for the cost of a smile and grovel. I'm still digging through the box to see what's hidden in their but I've already found a Cave Troll!

I'm going to dig through and itemise my current acquisitions later tonight however my budget expenditure currently stands at £41 however I'm hopeful that I can recoup some of that through trades whilst acquiring the Riders of Rohan and Uruk Hai that I'm short of.

So I’ll post an update tomorrow with some pics of my haul and the plastic Gandalf model from the Fellowship box that I painted over the weekend (see I've even started painting them!).

See ya!

IHMN - The Casebook of Inspector Johnson 1

I do enjoy a good AAR for any game system and as such I thought it might be fun to do my own. However I've come to the realisation that there are a lot of AAR's out there that are significantly better than what I can do.

So in that vein I've decided to give it my own spin.

So what follows is my literary account of the activities of Chief Inspector Johnson of Scotland Yard and his attempts to foil various nefarious schemes of evil doers in the setting of In Her Majesty's Name!

So click the pic to view this literary masterpiece!

I hope you enjoy.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Official Teaser Trailer [HD]

Nifty, I have to say I'm really rather excited to see this, the trailer looks great. And there's a first glimpse of Smaug at the end of the trailer, which unfortunately doesn't look that great. However I have a sneaking suspicion that he'll be a lot better animated in the final film (after all Gollum wasn't even designed when the Fellowship was released).

Next up - Lord of the Rings SBG!

Quick update, I played with my fantasy army on a budget at our club tournie and ended up in the middle of the board as far as results go. However on a massive plus side out of 16 players I won most popular army.

Woohoo, not bad for an army that was painted in a week and cost £11.09!

Well now that the silly plastic Warhammer army is out of the way I guess I should crack on with the next silly project, and that project is Lord of the Rings SBG on a budget. Now this one is going to be a problem as I want to do two things, skirmish games using the main rules and then mass battles using War of the Ring. Now I know that WotR is broken however I intend to play at my club with like minded individuals so hopefully we can house rule out the silly bits.

Now the main problem with doing it on a budget is that I really like the imagery of the films and therefore I’ll be using the “official” miniature range produced by Games Workshop. However therein lies the problem as I refuse to give them any more of my hard earned and as far as I’m aware there are no other miniature companies licensed to produce models at the scale that I want.

So I’m stuck with GW figures, now how to do this on a budget? Well the basic premise is to beg, borrow, plead, trade for mini’s from friends, enemies or the good readership of this blog. Additionally I'll be looking to the lovely world of second hand online, currently my favourite seller is this one - http://allhistoric.co.uk/index.html

I’ve already started the scoring off by buying some metal Khazad Guard  and assorted plastics off a chap at the club for £10 however this isn’t the force I want to collect so I’ll be doing a gaming quality paint job on them to fund part of this project.

Now then, what do I want to collect? And their in lies the rub. I love the films (I watch them through maybe 3 times a month) and read the books at least once a year so I'm pretty keen on story style game play therefore I think I'll be throwing together the fellowship to begin with. Now luckily included in my £10 bargain box was most of the fellowship in plastic so I'm part way their, just Aragorn, Boromir and pretty little Orlando with long blonde hair to go (and their's my other sourcing route - come on blog readers if you've got some scrap in your bitz box let me know?). Also to ensure that I have a gaming partner in all this I'll have to collect up some Moria Goblins as they were the first main battle opponents for the Fellowship. I already have the Cave Troll (see pic above - sorry Pete but its too good a model to leave as a trophy) so am just looking for some more plastics.

Now on the back of this I need a War of the Ring force as well. Now I always loved the Isengard Uruk Hai, so brutal and aggressive and kind of unique in the fantasy genre. Ok so that’s the baddies covered, what next. Well the obvious (and quite satisfying answer) is Rohan. Oh no not just any Rohan army but Eomer’s Rohirrim, “why” I hear you ask, well because they are supremely cool.

So the target is to acquire these forces as cheaply as possible in comparison to their actual cost. I’m going to start off with the Rohirrim based on the below list:

Eomer	£    8.20
Rider of Rohan Captain	£   12.30
7x Riders of Rohan	£   90.00
7x Riders of Rohan
6x Riders of Rohan
4x Riders of Rohan
4x Riders of Rohan
Total	£ 110.50

So there’s my starting point and I’m already -£10 due to the dwarves. So first task is to paint up the dwarves and get them sold (via a mate on ebay as I don’t do ebay). This should hopefully fund the rest of the purchases through various second hand sources to see how cheap I can get it. Obviously it’ll take some time so I’ll update everyone periodically.

Now I’m off to paint Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson for IHMN - See ya!

Warlord Games - FREE INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING!

Yes that’s right, for all you no UK gamers Warlord Games have decided to do free international shipping for all purchase through their webstore. Pretty good huh!

My most recent experience of Warlords web store was one of shock, nay horror at the ridiculous customer service levels they ascribe to. Now before you run screaming to the hills let me outline what happened: 

1. I ordered a sprue of Zulu wars British Rifles for my In Her Majesty's Name company and also a copy of The Battle of Salisbury - graphic novel.
2. Two days following my order I receive an email from my Pay-pal account saying that I have received a refund from Warlord due to a product being out of stock. The same day I get an email from Warlord with confirmation of the refund and that they were sorry but The Battle of Salisbury - graphic novel is out of stock
3. A day later my sprue arrives with a hand written note inside from Dom (presumably one of their mail order operatives!) apologising for the out of stock and because of this they have added an extra sprue to say sorry.

That’s right!

I had no issue with the product going out of stock and will happily wait for it to come back in however Warlord decided that its unacceptable and “gave” me an extra product, something they didn’t need to do. Now you may think this is a one off however I suggest that you pop on over to their discussion forum where you will find many tales of exceptional customer service that unfortunately is not duplicated with many other companies.

So if you want good value products, delivered in a timely fashion and with excellent customer service then I suggest you dip your feet in the Warlord sea - its lovely and warm!

Really, really small print disclaimer thingy: Off T’Club  is not sponsored, affiliated, funded, tickled, or provided with tea and biscuits by Warlord Games. Any reference to Warlord Games, their products or personnel is made because I think they’re a top notch company with snazzy products and a nice attitude.

Warhammer On A Budget - where I got the bugs!

After posting the pics of the last project I've been bombarded with requests for clarification on the actual toys I used.  So in true open source, free IP, no copyright and careing and sharing fashion here's a pic of the offending article sat on the shelf in Poundland.

Enjoy!

Warhammer On A Budget Part 2

So after much tinkering, messing and gluing and the occasional splash of paint I have now completed my little Warhammer Fantasy army on a budget (barring two character models which my mate Chris is buying for the princely sum of £0.48p each from the museum giftshop).

I began this in part as a giant screw you to GW (which is kind of pointless as they couldn’t care less) but also to see if I could do it to any level of acceptable quality. I did preview these lovely little creepy crawlies at the club last week as they shall be my Daemons of Chaos army for the tournament this coming Sunday and I was a little shocked at the response:

“So guys what do you think” says I all innocent like

“What are they“ says one, “What do they represent” says another.

“Oh that’s a plague bearer unit, that’s a Beast of Nurgle and they’re Furies”

Choruses of “I’d think they were all swarms, I don’t get it” and “where’s the champion and standard bearer” and “you can’t tell what they are”, oh and this was the best “I wouldn’t play it because they aren’t WYSIWYG!”

So it would seem that there’s a lack of imagination at my club. I did explain that each unit would have a nice little label on the base identifying the unit choice, but that was ignored in favour of the general reply of “it’s not GW”.

Huh?

I really did think this hobby was about imagination however it would seem that there’s a group out there that don’t want to use it but would rather have the “official” imagination foisted on us by a corporate entity aimed at maximising profits for shareholders……….rant rant rant.

Sorry got sidetracked, so without further ado here’s the finished article

The full 1500 pts Daemons of Chaos

Plaguebearers

Ooh look - Standard!

Plaguebearers again

And another Standard!

Beasts of Nurgle

Fleshounds of Khorne

Second unit of Fleshounds

Furies of Nurgle

Nurglings

Sorry for the pics, took them on my phone.

And for reference here's the costs:

6 x pack of childrens toy insects  - £6

Sheet of 3mm balsa wood - £2.10

Mixed sand - Free

Twigs, moss and flock - Free

2 x Auto spray paint - £2

Uhu adhesive - £0.99p

Old GW paints that had dried up - As I was throwing them I’ll say free.

So that’s a grand total of £11.09

Whats on the painting table?

There are always too many projects on the go, its quite shameful how much of a gaming butterfly I am and may of you out there can probably relate to this. So in the interests of shifting some of this pile I’m going to name and shame myself, put it all in order and set a deadline for everything. So here goes:

Warhammer on the cheap - I need to finish this by the 9th June for the Pennine Pillage so about 6 days and counting (argh)

Bolt Action British - This is ongoing however I still have the following to complete:

Tamiya Cromwell

Rifle Section (10 men)

MMG & 3” mortar

Airborne Section (half painted so I’m getting there)

Airborne HQ (as above)

Airborne PIAT and MMG (as above (blimey there’s a theme here))

In Her Majesty’s Name

Scotland Yard (they’re base coated so I’m nearly there J)

British Rifle Company & Native Natal Contingent (still on sprues, arghhhh)

English Civil War

3 x Pike Blocks and musket wings

Parliamentary cavalry (trotters)

Mounted Dragoons

Characters (General, Colours and Second)

Firelocks

Forlorn Hope

Mortar

WW2 Naval

HMS Hood, Prince of Wales, Suffolk, Norfolk

Bismarck, Prinz Eugen

Dark Ages

Gedricht/Thegns (2 units to paint)

Duguth/Thegns (lovely Musketeer miniatures models)

Geoguth/Geburs (one unit and still need to order some more)

Vikings (wargames factory - awful figures but I shall make them look acceptable).

Bolt Action German Heer

3 x 8 Man squads (not even started)

81mm mortar and MMG

Early Imperial Roman

4 units of legionaires

A unit of praetorians

Auxillary Cavalry

Auxiliary infantry

German Allies

3 units of skirmishers

WW2 15mm (because I’m not sure what system to use yet)

10 x Sdkfz 251

10 infantry stands

Ancient Greeks

Still in boxes (doh)

So there’s my shame, the current sum of my painting mountain and I shall endeavour to complete this chunk of stuff before the end of 2013. That’s a grand total of 692 to paint.

Now where did I put my time machine?