More Mordor

I genuinely had no intention of doing the whole Orctober thing, but it's just turning out that way.

I found myself in Wargames Emporium last weekend and took advantage of them selling single sprues to pick up some Wargames Factory Goblins to add to my burgeoning horde of Orcs for MESBG.

I was particularly keen to get my hands on some of these as the images I'd seen online were very reminiscent of the artwork of Angus McBride, who illustrated many if the source books for the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game (MERP) that o bought but never played back in the early nineties.

As such I endeavoured to construct my five Goblins in homage to the image above, which remains (along with the animated Lord of the Rings film) amongst my clearest references of what Mordor Orcs actually look like.

The best element of the sprues in my opinion are the very McBride-like helmets, and as you'd expect there are plenty of options for weapons.

The major downside is the fact that the arms don't really fit on the torsos and so they all needed trimming to work and ended up leaving some awkward shoulder joints.

The other odd element is the fact that two of the bodies are clearly designed to work as wolfriders (in fact there's a saddle on the sprue) leading to odd widely-spaced stances.

I've used these two as archers, partly because of the stance but also because they are more lightly armoured.

Here they are with some of the rest of the horde. They scale up well enough but have much larger feet and heads. They also have a more barbaric look than the LotR Orcs.

They aren't my favourite for several reasons, but I'm glad to have a little McBride tribute as part of my collection, and they add more variety to the table.

I've also been doing a bit of selling off some of my dad's unpainted miniatures. However, along with a bundle of Scots Pikemen and English Archers from the Battle of Flodden, I also sold 30 miniatures my dad had given me years and years ago.

20 similar models from the same range actually featured on the very first post on this blog back in June 2011.

Although I sold about 100 miniatures, I'm only counting the 30 I had beforehand in terms of lowering the acquired tally, as I hadn't bothered to count the rest in.

This does mean that my stats are probably the healthiest they've been all year. I'm quite conscious after the last few years that I need to build up a bit of a bulwark in the run up to Christmas if I'm going to paint more than I acquire and continue to reduce the lead pile.

Acquired: 114

Painted: 171