A place of power in no time

   For my Lord of the Rings game night, I had to build a themed terrain piece to reflect the scenario and setting straight from the campaign.  Because I was focused on the transition between the Fellowship and the Two Towers, I determined that the Ambush at Amon Hen was the best choice.  There's a couple of reasons for that, and one of them just happened to be that the terrain is easy to build.  This is especially useful if you only have a couple of days and a lack of sharp blades...

  Admittedy, the instructions, templates, and measurements are right out of the Fellowship of the Ring campaign book published by GW in 2005 (these three books are still the best!).  The only changes I made were the columns (I have a few cake columns laying about, so I used them instead) and the statues around the seat (I do want them, but I would need sharper blades to avoid complete catastrophe).  Otherwise, this is almost step-by-step.

  

  The foamboard was not happy and cutting each of the layers to be 4mm shorter for the stairs (did I mention that the measurements are all in milimeters?!) turned out to be a long and error-filled task.  This was three days before gameday and it would now be two days to put it all together.  

  Next was gluing everything together.  This involved some superglue for the pillars on the base and lots of white glue for the foamboard.  That same white glue was then coated onto the base and some other necessary areas for the good 'ol sand-dump!  This was the day before gameday...

  I woke up on gameday with a paintbrush in my hand and a mission to complete.  After priming the models with black spray (I'm out of time, so I'm trying to find the quickest approaches to everything) and then grey spray, I immediately doused the base of the building and all other sandy areas with that coffee brown (the only craft paint brown color we own, and that wasn't ideal).

  Then we went crazy with the white glue and green flock, the white glue and blobs of static grass, and then the superglue for the clump foliage.  

  And finally, I pulled out a cream colour (I wanted white, but my hobby supplies betrayed me often for this project) and drybrushed and dappled around all the groundwork and across all the stone.  It game it that depth that it needed to mostly hide it.  By now, it's time to leave for gameday.  Like, 'wash the brush off and take the terrain to the car' time to leave.  But i finished it.

  This is obviously not the highest quality of work and certainly not what the Emperor would allow me to get away with in his shops, but I was satisfied and my gaming group really dug it!  I'm always excited to build and paint terrain, but getting this one done in just a few hours spread over three days while working on other stuff...  Damn, I'm good!

  Do you have a speedy '3-out-of-5' project that you've pulled off lately?  Do you have a project that you followed step-by-step from a good source and still nearly destroyed?  Comment below (I do read them)!

Happy Hobbying!

The hunt is on!

   I've been like a machine these last couple of weeks- executing project after project.  And somehow, I ended up pulling out the ol' Lord of the Rings miniatures for a game/movie night with my DnD group.  It's been almost two decades since I painted a LotR miniature (that can't be right, but I've been slipping for long time now...), so this was a bit of fun that I didn't expect.  

  In this previous post, I noted that point of these guys.  The group is partially assembling just to 'get out of the house' (no matter how old guys get, we still want to play with our friends!) and maybe watching the Two Towers.  We already watched The Fellowship, so a transition between those two would be awesome for these noobs, and I have the miniatures to play those scenarios.  But I also have to paint them, so I got to work!

These models took far longer to paint than I planned (and I forgot to do the cleaning for flash and mold lines and texture, so...), but I finally got them done.  Below are all the colors that I used- remember that I'm just using what I have and am not really following any colour-schemes.  

  The Three Hunters (Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli) just needed to be based.  But I also had to paint up the most important models for the Ambush at Amon Hen- the Uruk-hai carrying Merry and Pippin away!  I knocked those out very quickly (I've painted so many Uruk in my time that I don't even try anymore- hopefully it doesn't show!), and then got to basing all those models.  

  And with that, I have all the models for the scenarios painted and ready to play.  Now I just have to build the Seeing Chair ruins for the terrain...

Let me know what you think and whether you're into the LotR stuff at all yourself!  Most importantly- Happy Hobbing!