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!