The Great Bubblegut

A little bit of Rogue Trader renegades and human reinforcements.
Here's the Great Unclean One known as the Great Bubblegut. The real power behind the renegade champion, Bubblegut's aim is to take over Tishtrya IV and destroy everything through corruption, decay and disease.

It's a classic daemon but after leaving it unpainted and trying different horns for years I decided it actually looks good and kind of disturbing with this plastic dark eldar helmet crest/mane. 

 Some generic cultists. This is a mix of humans muties and aliens.

 
Harlequin/Black Tree ghouls, North Star martians, Citadel halforcs (one K.O.-ed) and a Copplestone lady. The half naked african lady I had for ages but I had no use for it. In the end I decided the only plausible explanation for anyone going around naked like that would be adhering to a chaos cult. The daemon is Ral Partha, I think by Tom Meier.

This here is a techpriest. Orignially a space marine armour variant, or artifier armour. It's a Copplestone sculpt and the same height as the Imperial Guard.

I did some vehicles over the year that I didn't show.

Converted mouse, Penal Battalion APC:

Mantic Dropship with crew: 

work in progress Tau devilfish used as a human transport.
I really like the hard sci-fi design. I imagine this crewed by pirates, poachers and smugglers.

Chaos Renegades

My last Rogue Trader post has been November last year!
I started with collecting Copplestone's imperial guard but I have to finish them. I've been sidetracked by many things. Lord of the Rings stuff mostly, a little bit of 15mm. Team Yankee (cold war apocalypse in 1980's Netherlands). And a bit of Neu-hammer. I find this whole thing about Kill Team very inspiring and now with the upcoming Rogue Trader supplement it's just brand new rules for all my old toys.

Because that's how I always collected. I only ever had small teams of miniatures I liked. Some space orks, a couple of eldar, some space pirates, imperial guard and a bunch of Nurgle renegades.
I never had an entire army. Or so I thought, because a couple of weeks ago this happened: a fellow oldhammerer blogged about the Chaos Renegades armylist.
Without me ever knowing, I always had an entire army of Chaos Renegades, but the army list was only ever published in White Dwarf 107, november 1988. Two years before the Lost and the Damned, published only in 1990. Before I bought my first White Dwarf anyway.
This list allows a Chaos warband leading an army of other warbands, renegade marines, space orks and human outcasts. All of them together! 
I have the Lost and the Damned. That book was how I learned English (apart from hip hop)and made me dream about a massive Nurgle army. I wrote down lots of armies, with doodles of miniatures and conversions I would make. But in the end I only had my small collection of different miniatures.

So what else could I do than dig up the entire army:

My warlord with heavy bolter. A very old conversion even though the heavy bolter was added much later and the guy with the autogun used to have a zombie head. The Epic daemon was added later. 

Chaos cultist, now human degenerates apparently. the scavvies are missing their topknots because they used to have pointy hats made of DAS clay, inspired by Lost and the Damned illustrations.

Nurgle renegades with two Space Crusade marines.

Nurgle Pigmies. Blatantly racist miniatures as most of us would agree these days, but at the time I thought they were fun as alternative halflings. I think nobody realised. There were also beautiful Paul Bonner drawings of these Lustrian pigmies.
I have more but I couldn't find them immediately. One double has DAS clay breasts and hair done with sand. The cool thing were the shields that were an early attempt at freehand painting.

a Great Unclean One with more Human Generates behind him.

The Daemon is a much later addition: Games Workshop opened a store in Amsterdam and you could mailorder bits through the store. So I ordered the Epic daemon above but instead they send me this one, and a buch of loose arms, heads and bellies. They send the replacement and let me keep this one.

Renegade psyker with familiar. Ork henchmen in the back.

More ork henchmen. The Renegade in power armour I got this year. the demon is Heartbreaker while the 2nd plastic orks are a Khorne stormboyz project I already was working on this year.

Forces are gathering

It has been a while since I updated this blog, but I didn't sit still.
First is old Gollum, a Harlequin figure.

I really like this fig. He's holding a dead rabbit in his left hand, not visible in the picture. I opted for a dark skin as described by Tolkien and not the pale cave-creature as most of us imagine him, especially after the Peter Jackson films.

Here are some Rohan footsoldiers. A garrison at the Fords of Isen or a small settlement. Foundry ancient germanic tribesmen and Crusader late romans with West-Wind Saxon heads. I discovered Little Big Man shield transfers and must say they are fantastic. Very good quality of the print and transfer material. Other transfers are rom Schildschmiede in Germany who do specific Rohan horseriders, or 'pferdeherren', waterslide transfers

I got one Wargames Factory plastic orc sprue and used the heads with the new Oathmark orcs. I think it works great. They look like the Angus Mcbride paintings for the MERP RPG.

I finally decided how to do half-orcs, or goblin men. I'm going to use Crusader Normans. They wear long mail coats and carry axes. Armed by Saruman they don't look like classic orcs. 
For Dunlendings I had already decided for Varangians and Irish axemen but I only painted them this week. The guy in the middle is a half orc, a beard-less Varangian model.

I found my old Rackham 'Fomors' and tried to paint one like a wingless Balrog. The scult was obviously inspired by the Newline balrog. It kind of works, apart from the crypto-celtic decorated armour.

 

Dúnedain of the North

Despite a week of Prednisone medication with really irritating side effects, I managed to paint some more Middle Earth characters.

Here are the first four of the Grey Company, armoured Dúnedain rangers of the North.
Their shields feature the Star of the Dúnedain. According to the books members of the Grey Company only wore a brooch with a star. They did cary shields but there's no mention of any shield heraldry. Still, I think it looks good.
These are West Wind arthurians. Dressed and equipped like this I can see them do shielwall formations too, if necessary. A bit of Winter King action in Middle Earth.

The Corsairs of Umbar in the south seem to have a parallel with the Vandalic empire in North Africa. The Vandals with their Moorish allies were feared for their raids and piracy by the Byzantines.
I've been trying to find out what 6th century Moors would look like and for what I've gathered they probably looked like heavily romanised ancient numidians. Unfortunately there seems to be hardly any more information available.  
In any case, the miniatures here are late romans with head scarf and later Moors. They will be supported by a mix of ancient numidians and germans. The guy on the left must be a Donatist christian priest doubling as an advisor to the Corsair captain.

Here are two wicked orc drummers. Both by Copplestone, but sculpted with a twenty years distance.

I bought myself a gaming mat from Sagebrush, a generic Steppe layout. I'd never thought to get myself something like this. But after years promising myself to make a table myself without doing a thing I figured I'd better pay for a nice cloth that just looks good. Here a Rohan farmstead is being raided by orcs.

Return to Middle Earth

What started out as a restructuring of my old orc army has quickly escalated in a whole Middle Earth revival.

Likeminded spirits on the book of faces have created a group for Wargaming in Middle Earth. A very inspiring group of people willing to discuss anything from historical equivalents to ME armies and suitable miniatures, the colour of orcs and wheter or not the Balrog had wings. It made me paint this old Grenadier Balrog. At the moment I'm of the opinion that the wings on a Balrog may either be real or an illusion, but being a supernatural creature it would not matter too much. He may be able to fly anyway.

 A while ago I got myself some West Wind Arthurian miniatures. This range comes with separate heads and I really like the style. They fit well with both  Copplestone and Mark Simms' Crusader miniatures. While the original idea was to do a unit useful for Arthurian Britain, generic mainland late Roman AND the Men of Arnor, it occurred to me that using the seperate Picts heads the work very well as Dúnedain rangers of the North. A small guerilla unit fighting the evils of Angmar but also Sarumans Uruk Hai on the southern border.

Which reminded me I made the Rohan footsoldiers/Ostrogoths years ago:

And while reading on the Rangers of the North and Angmar, I decided I could use my Ancient Germans as Hillmen of Angmar. For years I was tempted to use thes as Dunlendings, but Tolkien made a point that Dunlending were dark haired while the Rohirrim were fair haired. As such Dunlendings would be better represented by dark ages Welsh, Irish or Scots.
Now 'Hillmen' is a generic term for tribes of 'savages', and there were also hillmen at Angmar. I read somewhere that the men of Rohan were related to the men of Dale and Laketown. It's quite plausible then that other related tribes moved west past Mount Gundabad into Angmar to become servants of the Witch King.

At last, a Werewolf. 
Gandalf mentions to Frodo at Rivendell: "not all of Sauron's servants and chattels are wraiths; there are Orcs and Trolls, there are Wargs and werewolves."
Now, JRRT mostly describes his werewolves as giant, sentient wolves. Created by Sauron, he even took the form of a werewolf himself at one point. So they wouldn't be humanoid shapeshifting lycanthropes walking on their hind legs. But this miniature from North Star was too nice not to include. Maybe I'll even use him as a leader, instead of the usual Ringwraith or Balrog.