(Lead) Mountain Musings - "The Lord Of The Rings" May 2021

"Isengard is a mighty fortress sited to guard the Gap of Rohan."

This month's effort to chisel away at my rather large backlog of metal, plastic and resin models will primarily focus upon the completion of a 500 point Isengard army for the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game by “Games Workshop”. Fortunately as project’s go, this particular one shouldn’t prove too difficult as I already own a sizeable amount of painted Uruk-hai from the Nottingham-based manufacturer’s old "The Lord Of The Rings" range, and have spent a fair portion of the past four weeks ‘picking away’ at some of Saruman’s sword-wielding super-strong orcs.

In addition, as I want my force to be lead by the treacherous White Wizard himself, then I actually only now need to paint up a figure of the Head of the White Council to be done. However, my ultimate plan is to be in a position where, should I wish to replace magic with sheer weight of unnatural numbers, I can swap Saruman out with a hefty horde of extra Bezerkers and crossbow-carrying Uruk-hai.

"Rocket Pig Games" WIPs - Tin Construct, Dwarven War Construct, and Twig Fiend

Alongside this cunning plan, I also thought it was about time I started dabbling in the increasingly impressive wargaming world of 3D printed miniatures. I have been contemplating buying my own additive manufacturing machine for a while, but thought as a first step I would simply purchase a few models from different sellers on Etsy, and explore the quality which the different materials used to create the figures employ.

For now I’m sticking with some of the simply marvellous sculpts produced by “Rocket Pig Games”, and had the company “FullyCycled” print these out for me in different scales and materials. The results have certainly been somewhat mixed, but I’m still hopeful to have enough playable pieces fully-pigmented by the end of this experiment with which to game the eternal struggle for domination between an all-conquering Clockwork Mage and the Forces of Nature…

April 2021 - "North Star Military Figures" dominated the month thanks to its range of Frostgrave models

Painting wise, the past four weeks have resulted in the biggest turn-out I’ve ever experienced during the month of April, thanks largely to my ability to work through a number of animals and monsters for the second edition of Frostgrave. This ever-increasing bestiary has seen “North Star Military Figures” suddenly become my second favourite manufacturer of the year so far, and with even more of their Frozen City-based fauna currently sat upon my painting table I’ve little doubt they’ll continue to make an impressive showing in the months to come too. 

I’ve also managed to make some healthy progress with my Iron Star Alliance force for Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika. I’ve never actually finished a model by “Privateer Press” until I started getting the army’s various paladins tabletop ready, but am now reasonably close to getting all the figures in their Command Group Starter Set completed, as well as some additional reinforcements in the shape of three Annihilators.