Shaun's Moria Adventure, Part the Second: Puttin' On the Table

Our buddy Shaun is a newcomer to the world of miniature wargaming, and this is the short story of how his first army comes together.  

Continued from Part 1.

Shaunny’s been hard at work on his goblins of Moria list, and the project continues at a solid pace.  I’m impressed with his ability to work with new mediums and techniques in a short period of time.  He’s at the stage where the army he sees in his mind is going to become painted actuality.  We’re going to examine the next step in that process.

After building the list, he had to actually obtain those models.  For a while, it was quite daunting to try to build an adequate Lord of the Rings force.  There was a lot of confusion, but the new sourcebooks make it much easier.   Also, Games Workshop reworked a lot of the plastics lines to include 12 warriors each.  So a lot has changed over the years.  For Shaunny, as a member of the club, he had it really easy.

Our friend Captain Video had a Mines of Moria boxed set, and was wanting to divest himself of the goblins and troll.  A short barter later (goodbye, metal Legolas) and the core force of goblins and the cave troll was in Shaunny’s possession, brooding and wanting a chance to be evil.  Of course, they still needed the treatment.

Wash, rinse, paint.

Let the troll-bathing commence.

Shaunny already made his decisions about the list, so all we had to do was fill it out with the command models he needed.  These were readily available from the GW website, so a short time after figuring out we wanted Durburz, some Blackshields and the Blackshields command we had it on the way.  Good ol’ GEE-DUB.

Once they got arrived, Shaunny cut his teeth on preparing models for painting the proper way.  He painstakingly got all the mold lines, flash and vents cleaned up from his shiny new models and glued them up.  He even used some Liquid Green Stuff on his plastic troll, which worked fantastic.  Once they were ranked up and he saw his army taking shape, there was no going back for our intrepid gamer.  The new goblin king has arrived!

It’s always a good idea to wash every box set you get to remove the release agent, especially on plastics.  Once all the models were washed, Shaunny set about painting them right away.  Like I said, I was quite impressed with his speed, and he was very eager to learn all the techniques such as drybrushing, overbrushing, layering, inking, glazing and highlighting.  We’ll see the finished army here quite soon!

Now, these goblins are waging war in our Dragon Sword campaign, and not doing such a bad job!  They look great on the table, and it seems Shaunny’s just a natural at a lot of the angles in the hobby.  Yet the fighting is frenetic here at the Wargate.  We’ll see how the endless waves of war take their toll! 

Our Season 2 campaigns are wrapping up soon!  More news on Game Day!  See you then!