1/72 Magic User/Adventurers for Hordes of the Things etc.: 2021’s Last Stand

[Rob Dean]

December was an interesting month.  I was apparently painting early in the month to avoid getting to my Christmas/holiday baking, and got a bunch of vintage vintage Minifig Tolkien figures done for some more retro-wargaming.  Eventually the baking bug caught up and I got a reasonable amount of baking accomplished, after which it was time to pack up and drive to Michigan for some family time.  I usually take some sort of hobby project with me, since I’m often up an hour or more before anyone else in the family.  While I took painting this year, I ended up working on some fantasy maps for gaming (This, and this).  

 

Getting home involved some resting, but, by yesterday I was ready to paint again.  My desk had been cleared off and all the surplus paint packed away and struck to the basement again, so I didn’t have anyhting in particular in progress.  I decided to shake out the travel paint kit in a bid to see if I could get something else done and logged before the end of the month/year.

 

My son has recently been adding a few things to his Hordes of the Things collection, and my travel paint box of miniatures had a couple of adventuring types, so that’s what I did.  I probably have enough fantasy/medieval individuals in my Portable Fantasy Game kit at the moment.  I started with the partially finished axeman, and then did the magic user.  She started off as a Caesar Miniatures elf, but I trimmed her cat ears to deploy her as a human. That took me to lunch time.  I wanted one more bodyguard for stand balance, so I grabbed an archer, glued it to a wine cork, ate lunch, and came back to prime it.  I let the primer dry while I took a nap, then speed painted that figure.  I played some Kingdom Builder on Board Games Arena with my sons while that dried, and then put some brush varnish on, and assembled the base while that was barely dry around supper time.  I comfortably let everything dry/set for a couple of hours and put the final spray varnish on around 9:00PM.

 

 

 

 

 

So, there you go, 2021’s last stand.  Both bodyguards, by the way, are from a Strelets set (006, Army of Henry V).

 

If the running total in my log is correct, that takes me to 163 figures for the year, which is about where I was last year, but rather short of my son’s logged 368 figures.

[Chaoswolf]

Good work!

[Glitterwolf]

Great stuff!

[Darcstaar]

Excellent productivity.

[TGP]

You should get a figure the same size as Sir Forscale to be a Giant for this army. If it can have a giant. [?]

[Dr.Bedlam]

Never actually played HOTT, but I've seen it done. Looks like a hoot. Splendid work!

[Rob Dean]

11 hours ago, TGP said:

You should get a figure the same size as Sir Forscale to be a Giant for this army. If it can have a giant. [?]

 

In short, yes.  Sir Forescale would be a rather more civilized giant than I would be prone to use, but the basic idea is sound.  I currently am using some Bones in the project; these ghasts being trolls, for example:

 

 

Bones Saprolings serve in various capacities as well.  A few years back, I was collaborating with my friend Ross Macfarlane from Nova Scotia on a 6 player Dragon Rampant game for Huzzah, in Portland, Maine, and he decided to implement that idea, except using old 40mm Elastolin figures. (The link to his blog goes directly to a teaser for an upcoming all-Ealstolin game, btw.)

 

 

As for whether an army can have a giant, I’m mostly using these figures with Hordes of the Things and Dragon Rampant.  Both sets of rules are pretty “army list agnostic” as well as being “miniatures agnostic”, so anything goes.  

 

6 hours ago, Dr.Bedlam said:

Never actually played HOTT, but I've seen it done. Looks like a hoot. Splendid work!

 

I’ve been playing HotT since it was first released, which is, hmm, about 30 years now.  (The introduction is dated October ‘91, but it probably took a few months after that for a copy to find its way across the pond, so likely early ‘92…) I wouldn’t want it to be my only game, but it has more or less become the family default miniatures game, and we all enjoy it a lot. My older son was just recently adding a few stands to his collection, and I hope to get together with him in the next couple of weeks to give the new units an opportunity to be tested. Our most recent game was in August, in conjunction with a scenery building day, when he proposed that we try an idea he had for a Battle of the Five Armies scenario:

 

 

(Just as an aside, as best I can reconstruct it, we started building 1/72 scale HotT armies relatively recently. It was probably 2010, to correspond with the initial release of some purpose-manufactured fantasy figures, and got a considerable boost by the year it took my son to get a job after graduation, since he was painting as a stress reliever.  Before that, we usually used to play HotT with the even more eccentric 6mm fantasy figures from Irregular Miniatures…)

[72moonglum]

These are great Rob!