An Unexpected Journey – My Flirtation with Lord of the Rings
Written by MikeH, September 11, 2017, 4 Comments
It all started with a game of Lion Rampant and ended up with me starting a huge new project.
Way back in the beginning of August I had an intro game of Lion Rampant put on my good mates Matt Slade and Ralph Plowman, they did a Lord of the Rings scenario and whilst I didn’t like the rules that much, I loved the scenario and it got me thinking about LotR
Here’s some pictures of that game
As it happened I’ve also been working with some other mates on a large fantasy skirmish game and I decided to do a couple of small LotR armies for that, you know nothing too much just 30 or 40 figures for a couple of armies.
I mentioned this to my mate Ade Deacon, who smiled at me and said “I might be able to help” Ade it appeared had a fair bit of LotR figures, 2 big boxes of it to be exact some of it was even painted.
One deal later and I was the proud owner of 300 figures, I was sorted there was nothing else I needed
Well maybe some Wargs, I only had 6 of them
Here’s a few pictures of the figures I got from Ade, it was lots of Uru-hai, some orcs, some Rohan, and a few Elves. I also got given a few Gondor figures from another mate Jim
Did I mention I needed some more Wargs?
One eBay purchase later and I had another 6 of them
But more than that as the eBayer if got the figures from turned out to be an old mate who I’d lost contact with and he decided to send me about 10 sprues of Gondor and Orcs as he didn’t need them.
That put me over 400 figures
Then I got a message of a twitter friend (Jeff) who had a huge pile of LotR stuff and only lived 10 miles away from me, so I popped over to see him
I then popped back a couple more times and with each visit my collection grew
So now I have 2 very large boxes filled up with a very large collection of LotR figures, I have armies for Uruk-hai, Mordor, Rohan, Gondor and the Elves. Plus, loads of the small vignettes that GW did, I think the collection is now somewhere in the region of 600+ figures
oh I’ve also been sent a lovely Mordor troll by an old mate off twitter, just to complete my collection (for now)
However, I have started painting the figures and the results of phase one will be the subject of my next post
Flirtation? Blimey, what does falling for look like!
A “small” skirmish game.
What rules do you think you will use for your “skirmishes”?
As I’m the proud owner of about the same amount of unpainted LOTR figures (maybe even a bit more), I might get tempted to paint mine too.
I’ll be using a set of homebrew rules myself and a few friends are working on.
it might get released but currently we are still working on the basics
It’s funny, my sons and I were disappointed that the original SBG was a skirmish game rather than big battles. So cheered when GW released War of the Ring. Then realised I would go bankrupt trying to buy and field their official formations. Plus the rules were all over the place. Skip forward 8-9 years and we prefer skirmish games at the moment, and now appreciate the LoTR SBG for what it is (but more than 20-30 figures a side bogs down. However we do have all those Uruks & Mordor Orcs and Rohan & Easterlings and Dwarves and Gondor to use in something..