Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (undead warband for Mordheim)

[Hummster]

I'll have to dig around and put some of my old stuff into the painting queue after this inspiration, I like what you have done with the old cave goblins.

[Dr. Kevin Moon III esq.]

Looking good as ever! Excited to see how the dwarves come along.

[Severian]

Fine work on the cave goblins and oni, and on the terrible pun front...

Also looking forward to seeing what you make of the FT dwarves; they're amongst my favourite figures, for a whole host of reasons, some (of course) purely nostalgic. Certainly by today's standards they're a bit rough and ready, but there's a plausibility and character about the best of them that works for me just as it did thirty years ago... One of the great charms is the seemingly endless number of variants, of course; I keep coming across ones I've not seen before.

I think they exemplify one of the best traits of early Citadel stuff, its believability - no oversized weapons or ninja acrobatics. You can really see their roots in RPGs rather than mass battle games: each one could work as a player character (and hence all the slightly odd dwarven thieves and clerics &c).

You make a good point, too, about the morally ambivalent nature of dwarves in folklore; some of this is still left in Tolkien, of course, in the noegyth nibin in the Turin cycle, and especially in the earlier versions of the nauglamir story. But in the LotR appendices, his dwarves have dropped all that in favour of a stoical northern warrior's code (and nothing wrong with that, but it IS a development). The cheery red-cheeked ale-quaffing stuff is indeed a bit tiresome, but I think this is probably down to a combination of early warhammer jokiness and infection from bad Christmas illustrations &c. There's a bit of it in the Hobbit, but really only in the early chapters.

Fearsome weaponry is right, too, though I'm not sure about magical (in the strict sense). But certainly better-than-any-human-smith-could-make and so on. I'd better not get started on to the whole dwarf-technology question, though; well-forged weapons and ring mail for sure, but beyond that? I always reckoned crossbows were dangerously uncanonical, and as for gunpowder weapons....

Anyway, I could burble on about this at length, but won't. As I say, looking forward to seeing them in due course.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

Also looking forward to seeing what you make of the FT dwarves; they're amongst my favourite figures, for a whole host of reasons, some (of course) purely nostalgic. Certainly by today's standards they're a bit rough and ready, but there's a plausibility and character about the best of them that works for me just as it did thirty years ago... One of the great charms is the seemingly endless number of variants, of course; I keep coming across ones I've not seen before.

I was thinking about this the other day. When I first started to get into miniatures as a primary-school child, there was a considerable thrill in going to a shop (Edinburgh's Games Master on Forrest Road for the most part) and looking through the blister packs, because all manner of unexpected delights might be lurking there. There were variants that never showed up in any of the catalogues, as well as curiosities that had never been advertised. That lasted well into the slottabase era. Here's an example:



These were the first savage orcs. They're not entirely successful, as the separate arms are generally too big/long/mismatched even for orcs, but they were never advertised, as far as I know. They appeared in blisters in the shops, and there was a drawing of one in Ravening Hordes or Warhammer Armies, and then they disappeared without trace.

But of course that "box of delights" sensation has largely gone now. Ebay is a sort of substitute, I suppose ...

I think they exemplify one of the best traits of early Citadel stuff, its believability - no oversized weapons or ninja acrobatics. You can really see their roots in RPGs rather than mass battle games: each one could work as a player character (and hence all the slightly odd dwarven thieves and clerics &c).

I couldn't agree more. I've got quite a few of the early dwarfs. Most of the ones I'm painting up for HOTT multibasing are slightly more "wargamey", in that they're largely variants of two poses. The contemporary or slightly later solid-based ones  that are a bit more individual - like this guy - are destined for individual basing (most of them are Norse dwarfs, I think). But this fellow could easily have gone in the middle of two of the wargamey sorts to make a HOTT element:

You make a good point, too, about the morally ambivalent nature of dwarves in folklore; some of this is still left in Tolkien, of course, in the noegyth nibin in the Turin cycle, and especially in the earlier versions of the nauglamir story. But in the LotR appendices, his dwarves have dropped all that in favour of a stoical northern warrior's code (and nothing wrong with that, but it IS a development). The cheery red-cheeked ale-quaffing stuff is indeed a bit tiresome, but I think this is probably down to a combination of early warhammer jokiness and infection from bad Christmas illustrations &c. There's a bit of it in the Hobbit, but really only in the early chapters.

Yes - the early Tolkien dwarves are much more like mythical dwarfs. The gaming characteristics of toughness and strength really just appear with Dain's troops at the end of The Hobbit (and they're meant to be a particularly fearsome bunch of dwarves). In LotR, Gimli is a great warrior - but it's clear that he's much more at home fighting uruks (his size!) rather than Men: he says as much at Helm's Deep.

As an aside, I thought the film adaptation made a dreadful mistake by giving Gimli a Scottish accent. That was really playing into the Warhammerish tropes, and it did nothing to establish the dwarves as people to whom the words Khazad-dum were native.

Fearsome weaponry is right, too, though I'm not sure about magical (in the strict sense). But certainly better-than-any-human-smith-could-make and so on.

Ah - but magical weapons, magical items and spells are a huge - even a defining - aspect of dwarfs in mythology and folklore. They make the ship Skithblathnir, Odin's spear Gungnir, the ring Draupnir, Freya's golden boar and numerous magic swords. They also know healing magic and can cast potent curses. Here's the description of the dwarf Regin from Reginsmal: "he was wise, grim and knew magic".

I'd better not get started on to the whole dwarf-technology question, though; well-forged weapons and ring mail for sure, but beyond that? I always reckoned crossbows were dangerously uncanonical, and as for gunpowder weapons....

Anyway, I could burble on about this at length, but won't. As I say, looking forward to seeing them in due course.

Burbling at length is precisely what this thread's for! I agree on technology: it doesn't really sit with the magical nature of mythical dwarfs or the firmly Dark Age vibe of Tolkien's.

Here's where I've got to with one of the HOTT dwarfs. Quite crude paintwork - very much "battlefield". But the miniature itself is quite crude, and I just want it to look reasonable on the tabletop.

[Severian]

Good work on the dwarf - he was the original(?) White Dwarf, I think? Crude, yes, but fun and properly dwarvish...You've brought him out very well indeed. If you'll forgive the intrusion, I've appended a picture of mine: he's a reconditioned mid-80s teenage paintjob, hence the traces of gloss varnish...

Re dwarves and magic - you're of course quite right to mention all the eddic evidence, but somehow that always seemed to me more like the work of artifice, making stuff (albeit more cunning and subtle than anyone else's), rather than magic in its strict sense, whatever (of course) that may be. But I suspect this is semantic quibbling on my part. Oddly, the supreme artificer, Weland/Volundr, is explicitly described as a "lord of the elves" and not a dwarf at all. There's good reason for wondering how clear any of the elf/dwarf divisions were, in the folkloric material anyway. But you know all this already, I suspect.

And as for the Peter Jackson films' take on the dwarves...Well, let's not go there. But nothing in the LotR films was a patch on the horrors of the Hobbit films; especially the last one. What were they thinking of? Billy Connolly on a pig? And (to name only the weirdest random and unnecessary departure from the books, but arguably not the worst) where did those ruddy goats come from? Did they find a lost war-goat stable in the bowels of Erebor with an endless supply of fodder and water where they'd somehow survived, uneaten and presumably unsmelt, all the long years of Smaug's tenure? Ho hum.

That's enough burbling for now, I think. And here, with apologies, is my dwarf.

[Dr. Zombie]

This is a truly spectacular thread. I don't comment enough on it. But that is because it would only ecco what everyone else is saying.

You have come to a point however, where you have to rename the thread. It is no longer just "some" miniatures for sobh. It is HORDES of miniatures.

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, both!

Dr. Zombie, you have a point on the title. And there are hordes more that are almost finished (at one point, I'll devote a week of evenings to getting those finished off ...).

Severian - no intrusion at all - and nice work! In an affront to current trends, all my miniatures are gloss-varnished. I know it's deeply unfashionable at the moment, but I genuinely think that it looks better on the table. I like the Aly Morrison/John Blanche approach of making the figure look almost like porcelain. Gloss deepens the colours and provides a better contrast with the matt base. I also think that gloss-varnished figures tend to age better. My old HOTT forces have humdrum paintjobs, but the finish on them looks much better for the time-subdued gloss effect than equivalent matt-varnished figures, which tend to look - and become - a bit dusty over time.

On magic: I wonder if your "somehow" is to an extent from reading things from Tolkien and his inheritors back into the sources. It's certainly something we're all prone to do, I think. Yes, dwarfs are clearly great artificers in the Eddic and other Norse/Germanic sources, but they also do quite a bit of shape-changing (e.g. Andvari) and cursing. And they are, of course, big on magic rings (the use and the manufacture)! I think all supernatural beings in Norse myth tend to be explicitly magical: dwarfs, elves, giants and trolls (where they are distinct from the other classes).

I agree with you on the elf/dwarf blurring. The dwarfs appear to be identical to the svartalfar (black elves) in the Edda, and there are good reasons to believe that the dokkalfar (dark elves) are the same thing too. And of course one of the Eddic dwarfs is called Gandalfr - "Wand-elf" - which started Tolkien puzzling as to why this was: a great proto-geek moment, I think, in that he entirely sidestepped the obvious explanation (they're the same thing) to embark on a proto-Gygaxian taxonomy!

I only watched parts of the third Hobbit film; I let my kids watch it after they had both (been) read the book. They were fairly disgusted by its lack of relation to the story: "They couldn't even get the five armies right"!

More dwarfs to come over the weekend as child-wrangling and rugby-watching permit ...

[Hobgoblin]

The fourth oni, Soul Stealer, isn't quite done - he needs a bit of detail here and there, along with some tidying up. His eye-sockets are so deep that his eyes, which are painted in, don't appear to show up in photos.

I can see these chaps working as a Frostgrave warband when I've got enough of them done - illusionists, perhaps. The two larger ones here would be candidates for the wizard and his apprentice.

[Dr. Kevin Moon III esq.]

Love his snazy jacket/kimono!

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks! Yes, these hobgoblins/oni are a bit more bling than the typical dungeon-dweller.

I did a bit more on Soul Stealer last night. I'm finding it hard to get a good photo of his face. I'm pleased with how it looks to the naked eye, but the combination of my terrible photography skills and the idiosyncrasies of Nick Lund's sculpting makes it hard to capture.

[Severian]

Nice work on the oni (great colours!) and the continuing puns - keep them coming...

I'm sure you're right about the tendency to read Tolkien's interpretations back into his sources, and indeed the obvious explanation is to make elves and dwarves two names for the same thing - but one of the endearing things about old school philologists is their stubborn notion that different names must on some level, in some way, correspond to differences in the things named: to argue, in fact, that the source was mistaken. Tolkien does the same thing when he's editing texts, emending manuscript readings with a boldness that makes later editors come over all faint. But I reckon his Old and Middle English were a good deal better than theirs, and a lot of scribes are clearly baffled by what they've been copying, so who can say. Even his more fanciful reconstructions are compellingly and plausibly made...

Anyway, a good deal of the fun of old school miniatures, I think, is how eclectic a lot of them are in their sources and inspiration. These hobgoblins are absolutely a case in point; and you've brought that out very well.

[Hobgoblin]

I'm sure you're right about the tendency to read Tolkien's interpretations back into his sources, and indeed the obvious explanation is to make elves and dwarves two names for the same thing - but one of the endearing things about old school philologists is their stubborn notion that different names must on some level, in some way, correspond to differences in the things named: to argue, in fact, that the source was mistaken. Tolkien does the same thing when he's editing texts, emending manuscript readings with a boldness that makes later editors come over all faint. But I reckon his Old and Middle English were a good deal better than theirs, and a lot of scribes are clearly baffled by what they've been copying, so who can say. Even his more fanciful reconstructions are compellingly and plausibly made...

Yes, that's very true. And it's that sort of obsessively taxonomical bent that was behind so much of his creativity. "Just who is this wand-elf in among all these dwarves?".

Anyway, a good deal of the fun of old school miniatures, I think, is how eclectic a lot of them are in their sources and inspiration. These hobgoblins are absolutely a case in point; and you've brought that out very well.

Thanks! I made good progress on Shylob Carcassbreath last night, so should have him done tonight.

[Hobgoblin]

And here he is.

[Hobgoblin]

And perhaps a better shot of his face. I've often thought that "Two Hand" in the N12 hobgoblin range is a poor man's Shylob Carcassbreath, just as "Thruster" is a poor man's Sileth Frothlip.

[Hobgoblin]

Here's another addition to the oni band - an ushi-oni. These chaps are just about to see action in Dragon Rampant, as an elite foot unit with the spellcaster option.