The Ultimate Middle-Earth SBG Thread

If 40K can have its own General Hobby Chat thread, Middle-Earth deserves one too! @Killer Angel if you would do the honours of pinning, that would be fantastic.

This is the thread to discuss all things Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, including its expansions Battle Companies and the much-missed War of the Ring. Feel free to post army lists, pics of models, conversion ideas and house rules for any of these three games based in Tolkien's world here. I'd rather that forumites not post memes here (save that for any of the random post threads in General Chat), but the occasional Middle-Earth-related meme might be tolerated, if it's a very good one.

I can certainly see @Imrahil posting stuff here besides myself, and anyone else who is either already involved in or planning to jump into any of the three GW Middle-Earth games is most welcome.

I myself have beginning armies for The Kingdom of Khazad-Dum, Moria, Goblin Town, a collection of Mordor Orcs and Uruks that would probably fit best as Isengard and some Rivendell Knights who will make a good starting point for an Elf army (as well as a Great Eagle, Ent, the Fellowship and Thorin's Company for the Good side).

The board is set, the pieces are moving...

 

First up, I found this awesome blog post about combining Oathmark Goblins with Warlord Early Imperial Romans to make Black Guard of Barad-dur:
https://dramatickatastases.blogspot.com/2020/03/black-guards-of-barad-dur.html


Alongside GW models:


Personally I would have also cut off the shield bosses and painted Sauron-Eye designs on them too just to ensure that they would fit in alongside other Mordor models and in particular to match the GW ones, but otherwise a nice cheeky way of making a large number of these elite Orc warriors affordably, while also producing a version with a unique look (as these weren't seen in the films, you can be more liberal with how they look than, for example, Riders of Rohan).

 

Thoughts on whether this lad would make a good Dweller in the Dark for my Moria army?


Don't know how big he is, but I'd like to think he'd be Monstrous Infantry size like the Troll I got from Reaper last Christmas.

 

... the great battle of our time.

Yes of course I will join you in this thread!

Grrr, Imrahil

 

That is a really great idea they fit in quite nicely. With some freehand eye of Sauron even better.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

@Imrahil I may have asked you this before, but when did you get into SBG? With this new Edition or one of the previous editions?

 

The Dweller of GW has some bigger horns, but that is not mandatory. From the amount of detail I'd say his total height will probably be the size of a troll, so a little small for a Dweller. But that is just a guesstimation.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

How tall is a Dweller? Given he's only on a 40mm base I would have thought he'd be the same size as a Cave Troll, smaller than a Mordor Troll

 

I was introduced to the hobby by a friend in my last year of 'highschool' (the year 2006) after that I dipped my toe in Warhammer Fantasy, but did not take the plunge. Stayed with Lord of the Rings. I remember the introduction of 'War of the Ring' game style. Then I dropped out of the hobby due to finishing collage, marrying and starting a job. I sold the main rules book, but I still have the supplement of 'Gondor in Flames' from 2007.

Since end 2019 I got back in to MESBG in particularly because of the Battle Companies expansion (motivated by the Youtube channel Zorpazorp).

That is it. and you?

Grrr, Imrahil

 

According to references below you might be close:



both next to a Balrog. The Dweller seems to be a bot bigger but not by a lot.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

It is indeed, just for the record these aren't mine I just searched for reference material

Grrr, Imrahil

 

I got into Middle-Earth not that long after I got into Warhammer Fantasy, when upon my very first visit to a GW Hobby Centre I bought a box of Lord of the Rings Dwarf Warriors then for a mere £15 (and that was the big box of 24, not the midget boxes of 12 that replaced them between February 2012 and the arrival of the current edition). Not long after I got the Mines of Moria boxed game for my 11th Birthday, and after I also bought the Khazad-Dum book soon after my journey into playing the game began. It was around this time that, upon a later visit to the same GW store, I was given my first demo game of War of the Ring, where my plastic Gimli and Gandalf, Dwarf Warriors and metal old Bilbo were organised into shop-owned movement trays and sent against a Moria Goblin army, where Gimli stole the show by Epic Rampaging through a Moria Goblin unit and hacking everything he touched into a red mist, which was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Sadly though I never got into that expansion as my collection wasn't really big enough at that point, even when I bought a box of Dwarf Rangers and an Ent ally to swell the throng ever bigger, while the Moria Goblins gained allies through what was then perceived to be a Mordor contingent with Orcs, Warg Riders and an even bigger Troll.

When the fateful month of February 2012 passed and the army building rules were drastically reworked, I largely ignored it at the time and continued playing at home with my dad using the armies as they were (plus reinforcements upon receiving the Escape from Goblin Town box in the December of that year to celebrate the first Hobbit film coming out), but I still bought the Free Peoples sourcebook to organise my Dwarves into an army acceptable for GW games (which included using one of my Dwarf Warriors as a proxy Dwarf Captain to get past the hero requirements). I managed to get a couple of games in upon later GW store visits, both of which invariably resulted in my army getting stomped by a Mumak, though I did have some success in the second larger game by killing all the Easterling Kataphrakts and Khandish Horsemen that fought alongside the Mumak and my Ent lacerating a big gash into the Oliphaunt's hide and getting it to flee combat (only for it to rally next turn and trample my Ent into matchsticks). I followed the development of the game throughout that time, including the dark times of 2014 when the planned Battle of the Five Armies releases were relegated to a couple of terrible-value Finecast sets for the Armoured Elves and Orcs, the Iron Hills Dwarves being nowhere to be seen, Thranduil incorrectly being mounted on a horse and the third film supplement being reduced to a White Dwarf exclusive and free PDF. My interest in it waned, mainly because I was driven by a rush to buy up as much Warhammer Fantasy stuff as I could following its execution and replacement with the mess that was AoS First Edition,

Since the game's reboot in 2019 it does look in better shape than it had during that dark period, with the new edition receiving more support and the return of Battle Companies, but I personally think it'll never recover fully because of the following:

1. GW's continuing obsession with releasing new models for it mostly through Forge World is a poor decision. Never will we see the likes of the 24-man plastic boxes again, and while some of the character packs are about the same price as GW's plastic ones, unit-building with any of the new units is still as expensive as it was in 2014
2. A lot of ranges for the different factions on GW's site are piecemeal - a fair few models are missing for Moria for example - and some have been wiped entirely - I certainly feel sorry for Arnor players, and anyone who wants to play a Garrison of Dale army will be sadly disappointed that they can only field one warband as the Captain model will only be available for one week only through Made-to-Order (unless the new models for War in the North are usable in the same force).

I don't know if I'll get into the new edition, especially given the cost of the books (at the minimum I'll need the rules + Armies of the Lord of the Rings + Armies of the Hobbit) and the fact that its still very similar to the previous two editions (pre-Feb-2012 LoTR and post-Feb-2012 LoTR/The Hobbit, particularly the latter unfortunately with the warband format being prevalent still) makes me wonder if it is at all worth it.

However, I am planning to give some more attention to my Middle-Earth collection in the future, what with my Oathmark Dwarf Heavy Infantry and a box of Rivendell Knights to make, plus plans to reboot my Mordor collection as Isengard given I received a box of 20 Uruk-Hai with pikes a while back that won't fit in a Mordor force but will fit into Isengard with all the other units (my Orcs are scrappily-painted so it won't take much extra effort to change their allegiance, and with the Troll I can repaint his shield to look Isengardian), though I'll need to get some more hero minis annoyingly . My Moria force is in better shape given I bought the Moria Goblin Commanders set a while back and have the Balrog as another hero, though I'm currently looking up ways to convert Prowlers and Gundabad Blackshields as those models are nowhere to be seen on GW's site.

 

I agree on the whole hero warband structure being pure money draining, but with good will and most friendly games you are able to mark a (somewhat) converted and recognizable warrior as a captain.

There were made some questionable decisions along the way, but still I like the game for the ambiance of the models and the battles. Battle Companies suits this perfectly.
The Forge World route is one that I would like to see changed. I hope thoroughly that the new Easterling releases will be for GW. And I actually think that the Black Dragons will be because they are already featured in the Armies of the Lord of the Rings books. The heroes probably not though...

At the moment I am assembling an Isengard force as well. I try to go fully secondhand, but not sure if I'll pull it off.

Grrr, Imrahil

 

That's what I'm certainly planning to do with my Oathmark Dwarf Infantry - I have enough models there to make 12 each of Khazad Guard and Iron Guard, which should be more than enough for most battles, plus 6 models left to make some Captains, perhaps a Shieldbearer and I'm planning a King's Champion and Heralds.

I doubt it but I'm willing to be surprised. Certainly a plastic Black Dragon kit would mark a new step forward with GW returning to making plastic units for Middle-Earth, one I'd love to see.

There's no need to go secondhand with ordinary Uruks and Scouts as those are in plastic and can be bought affordably from GW, but any second-hand ones will bulk out the force and second-hand characters will certainly be more affordable than brand-new counterparts.

 

True but there are quite a lot unpainted Uruk-hai in my second-hand market at the moment
Manage to score 3 metal berserkers as well

Grrr, Imrahil

 

As part of this thread I thought I'd chat to you all about conversion possibilities for those Middle-Earth models that are either on the more costly side or are currently non-existent thanks to GW's retarded rotation scheme.

First-up, Lake Town Militia:


The Lake-Towners are by-and-large extremely difficult to convert without greenstuff due to their aesthetic style being an unusual hybrid of fish and Medieval Russia. However, I think I've cracked it for the Militia.

As part of their many Medieval lines Fireforge Games make a set of Mongol Infantry, called Steppe Warriors, with bodies wearing long winter tunics that exactly match those of the Esgaroth Militia:

The heads are Oriental-looking and wouldn't fit well with the Russian Lake-Towners, but on each sprue it seems there are several separate winter hat and hood pieces (to the left, above and below the bald heads), originally designed to be interchangeable with the Mongol heads, but I imagine also interchangeable with European Heads from other kits from Fireforge and other companies like Gripping Beast, whose Dark Age Warriors set in particular has great unadorned bearded heads that should hopefully be able to sport the winter headgear. The large wicker shields would look pretty good as crude shields cobbled together by fisherman militia, and while the Oriental composite bows are different from the bows wielded by the Lake-Towners, it appears their ancestors in Dale used composite bows too:


Other than the heads, the only other thing you'll need to source from other kits are hand weapons, i.e. swords, clubs, axes, e.t.c, but I certainly imagine anybody can scrounge some spare swords from other kits, whether historical or fantasy, for this purpose - in particular because they're Militia you don't even need to be too picky about the origin of their weapons, any number of them could have scrounged weapons from slain Hunter Orcs, Goblins or even Elves or Dwarves. If you're out of spare bitz at the right scale, you could even still use the oriental swords and say they're the blades of fallen Easterlings that your Militia have been fighting in eras after the Hobbit. A mixture of different races' weapons will only emphasise how motley and disorganised your Militia unit is, which is perfect for modelling bands of scruffy refugees.

One box contains six of those sprues, enough to make two standard-sized Warbands' worth of Militia, all with either spears, Hand Weapons and Shields or Bows, covering all the options in the rules (or at least the last version of the rules I found ), and also contains War Horns if Militia are capable of taking them.

Hope you enjoyed this conversion guide, more to follow!

 

Great Idea, the esthetics do match pretty fine. The spears can be used as well, I think. They do come with square bases though, so you might have to get or make some round ones as well. But still way cheaper than GW.

Grrr, Imrahil