5/12/2011: Lord of the Rings: Warriors of Minas Tirith

A bit late posting this but my internet was playing up yesterday...

These guys were a bit of a funny bunch for me because I painted them almost entirely in Games Workshop on Monday Nights when I've been going in, so I didn't do anything at home at all other than the undercoat. Actually the Dudley store is not a bad place to paint because the air in there tends to be quite dry, and therefore the paint and even the washes tend to be dry by the time you get to the end of the batch. The lighting's good as well, or at least I think it is. A career painter probably wouldn't but my alternative is the energy-saving lightbulbs at home, which do the job but it is true, they do distort the colours slightly!

here they are, resplendent in all their glory - my soldiers of Gondor. What made me want to do Gondor? Well, when I've collected armies in the past, and I'm talking specifically about when I worked for Games Workshop, I tended to just buy whatever I felt like and figure out how it was going to work in the army later. With Lord of the Rings, my army is Harad, and I didn't really know how to put an army together in the usual sense; War of the Ring was coming out and I wanted to do an army no one else was doing and use Mumaks. So far, I win about as many games as I lose, but I was always inspired by the Gondor army in the War of the Ring rules, and how they'd used a relatively limited pallette (We're talking 50+ colours I've used for painting my Harad,) to create an army that looks quite good.

What I didn't want to do was plan out my army list. Not being funny but I find that quite constricting. I also didn't want to put together an army on an ad hoc basis because it almost always turns out to be next to useless when I put it out on the gaming table. With the Gondor army, I've gone for the middle ground in between - I know what I want and don't want in the army, and I know where I'm going with it, but in the meantime buy whatever I feel like from the Gondor range and build the army up that way. It's hardly wrong to add more core choices to a War of the Ring army...

For painting them, I largely followed the guide in the Lord of the Rings rulebook. The more interesting parts are starting them off from a basecoat of Tin Bitz, to the point where one of the GW staffers thought I was literally doing the whole army in bronze. Actually, drybrushing Boltgun Metal over this and highlighting it with Chainmail creates a nice rusty effect, giving the impression of seasoned campaigners who've been in the forces a while, have been round the block and know the game. The other cool trick from the guide, which is conducive to the same effect, was to paint their sheilds a very dark grey rather than black, to give a worn impression. To be honest, black is rarely a good colour to use anyway if you're going for realism, and that's quite important in Lord of the Rings where the models themselves are true scale rather than heroic. Realistic is a rather flexible term to use when applied to models, but the LotR models do take themselves a bit more seriously than the Warhammer ones or 40K.

The one place where I deviated slightly from the guide was with the faces. For those, I used Tallarn Flesh, washed down with Ogryn Flesh, Dwarf Flesh for the mid-tone, Elf Flesh for the highlight and then a neat little trick that Griff taught me ages ago where you water down some more Ogryn flesh and glaze the face, which ties all the highlights together. Bearing in mind that a lot of those colours, plus some others used elsewhere on the models, were released after the Lord of the Rings rulebook was published, I think it goes to show that I've been learning quite a bit! Which is good because I find faces very hard to get right. Especially when most of them are covered with helmets...

That's about all I'm going to say about them. So, am I collecting these for Lord of the Rings or War of the Ring? The movement trays would suggest the latter, though if I'm honest I'm a fan of both. I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings at the moment, simply because I could play a simple game with the stuff I've got now; they just need a few additions like a banner and a hero. And on that note, the next step for the army is Faramir, who I'm painting now, and the Command secion, who I've just ordered.

Whether or not I'll get any games in is anybody's guess; the 82s are starting back up again soon so Monday Nights will become busy for me again before too long. If I get a night off then maybe.

14/11/2011: War of the Ring

Sometimes, when you're playing games, things just don't work out. There'll be something going along in the game that will generally mean I haven't got a hope of winning and I'm knackered from the start. Ususally when this happens this is something to do with my opponent - power gaming does not sit will with me at all - but one could hardly accuse this weeks opponent of that; Lewis is a great kid and plays well. No, the problem this time was the scenario...

So to clarify, because it's been a long time since I played War of the Ring, I was using Harad and Lewis was using Isenguard. I've got a balanced but fairly low-powered force, and Lewis has got one of those armies that were built up gradually over a period of collecting. So was mine, as it happens. Which usually makes for quite a fair fight. But this time we rolled up Maelstrom for deployment, and we were playing Objectives. It was the deployment that got me. The fact that some of your army will turn up in any one of 4 table edges, if at all, scuppers even the best-laid plans and all you can do is hope for the best. I put my guys down where I thought they would be the most effective, but due to where most of Lewis' men ended up, the only character I have that is in the slightest bit effective - The Betrayer - was miles away from anywhere.

In retrospect, deploying The Betrayer with Haradrim Warriors was one of my worst ideas in playing WotR, since the Betrayer's effect will only really work at a distance if you put him with bows. The actual game itself was in essence a step-by-step guide in splattering my army, there's not much point talking you through it but everything I did, everywhere my troops went, the forces of Isenguard had something more nasty waiting for them. Hell, Lewis didn't even cast any spells with Saruman! He wiped most of my forces clean off the table and won two objectives to my one, winning the game quite comfortably.

Not one of my better games, really. I need to put myself in a better mindset for playing games in the shop; I can't really stop to think about things and that does cost me.

Until next time. I actually think I'm clear on the blogging front for about 12 hours...

31/1/2011 - War of the Ring

It's a funny thing, some of the guys at Games Workshop think that Lord of the Rings and War of the Ring are 'My Games,' because those are the games that I tend to be involved with the most. They're really not, I'm in to 40k every bit as much, perhaps not Fantasy so much but there you are. But it's actually far more to do with convenient timing that I find myself at Games Workshop on Monday nights more often than not, and even though there aren't very many of us, I can usually get a game in at some point...

In this case I ended up using a small 500pt force of Harad soldiers lead by The Betrayer against 500pts of Gondor, lead by Aragorn. My opponent was an enthusiastic but inexperienced young man and the scenario was Sieze the Prize, with Battle for the Pass deployment. I don't know so much about the 'pass,' I'd actually managed to set up the battlefield to resemble a small town, and most of the coins that we used for objectives ended up around there.

The opponent siezed a couple of coins early on and had he held on to them he might have won the game. However, while it is important to keep sight of your objective, staying alive is just as important. Having a few objectives isn't going to help you if you get yourself killed the moment you take them, which once the arrows started flying is what happened here.

In games this small, your characters really need to earn their money and The Betrayer really did that for me tonight. 2 things won the battle for me - the ringwraith's aptitude for magic meaning that I could cast the Sunder Spirit/Visions of Woe combo on the Knights of Dol Amaroth, and the effect of the Betrayer making my already formidable archers even more deadly as they get to re-roll all their misses for having poisoned weapons, rather than just the dice that land on 1. Against cavalry, this is lethal, because it makes it very easy to force a fall-back move which in turn forces the opponent to drop the objective, and even units of infantry need to watch where they step. If I'd have thought about it, I might have followed up my magic combo by moving the Betrayer into my cavalry unit, casting Terrifying Aura (presumably the effect on the target's courage is cumilative?) and charging the knights, but the archers did the job just as well. In the same respect, my opponent more or less cost himself the game by putting Aragorn in with the Knights; formidable opponent though this undoubtedly makes, if I manage to shoot them to pieces - which I did - then the very expensive character is lost along with them.

In the end, it was quite an easy victory for me, though with War of the Ring draws are few and far between; I haven't managed one yet and there doesn't appear to be much middle ground between victory and defeat. Hopefully my opponent learned something from the game too!

I don't envy the lives of the doomed villagers who's homes were taken by the Haradrim. Who knows what horrors they'll be subject to, particularly with the presence of the Ringwraith, who will have his own reasons for wanting that village secure...