The first hobbits — Minifigs ME6

 In addition to digging out my original Dungeons & Dragons for my birthday last week, I also took the opportunity to haul all of the 25mm fantasy boxes (of painted figures, that is) up from the basement.  I needed to return the last set of troops sorted out for a batle to their proper storage locations, and I also wanted to conduct a quick census, since I was pretty sure that my estimate of numbers in my running project diary was off.  (I had somewhat over 1600, by the way, rather than the 900 I had estimated—so I hadn’t caught up in a while.)

In the course of that, I took a look at all of the Minifigs ME figures I have painted so far, and decided that I was ready to get back to that project.

The family gamers have been meeting for a group discussion, and sometimes a painting session, on Saturday afternoons for a while. Painting seemed like a good idea yesterday, so I dug around in my supply of figures already primed, and came up with some ME hobbits that had been awaiting attention for a while.  As noted in the title, these would have been the first purpose-cast hobbit figures released, back in the dawn of fantasy miniature production.

I have lost provenance on these, but I think that they are ones that I collected back from my brother, so they’ve been in the family since 1975 or thereabouts, if true.  The ME6 catalog number was a strip of three hobbits, as can be seen on the Lost Minis Wiki.  These guys are one strip, plus a spare spearman presumably representing a lost second strip.  They stand about 16mm tall from the base of the foot to the top of their hairy heads, and therefore are a rather small canvas upon which to work.  The MEs were sculpted in the traditional Minifig manner, prior to the invention of the greenstuff/epoxy sculpting pioneered by Tom Meier (if memory servies correctly), and there was a whole lot of detail with which to work.  The faces, in particular, are quite rudimentary.

When it came to basing them, I decided that I didn’t want to base them individually.  My brother and I have several times run the 1975 Lord of the Rings strategic tabletop game Ringbearer at conventions, and that calls for the Fellowship of the Ring to be pared down to 2 hobbit bases, the Ranger, the Elf, the Dwarf, and the Gray Wizard.  I have been gradually working toward the ability to run Ringbearer alone, and to do the whole thing with Minifigs, so I decided that i would make these guys my 2 hobbit bases, by mounting them in pairs on 25mm circular bases.

I checked my unpainted cache yesterday as well, and found that I have three more strips of these, plus three strips of ME48, the better-armed hobbit militia strip.  If I mount them all in pairs, I will only need to find one more strip to be able to field 2 Dragon Rampant units of hobbit militia.  That’s not enough to reproduce the Battle of Bywater (from “The Scouring of the Shire” in The Return of the King), but would add something unusual to a larger army of allied Free Peoples.

December and January

I had been back to blogging regularly for a while there, but the Christmas season preparations overwhelmed me this year, and things got out of hand again.

I only got a little bit of painting done during the month.  My 1/72 scale fantasy campaign collection started from a core of Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood figures I had painted around the turn of the century for a kids’ game, and I have been using it recently with both Dragon Rampant and Hordes of the Things.  While Hordes uses single bases as the maneuver elements and any random stand can take its place in a battle line, Dragon Rampant is generally geared for units of 12 normal infantry.  I’ve had 6 of the armored archer from the Sheriff set (with 2 per box) and the recent Encounter at Terril’s Tavern wanted a distinguishable archer unit of 12 (two stands), so I finished up another stand of 6 for the next time.

My son and his wife came for a weekend of cookie baking, which seemed to fill most of my crafting urges for the month.

Dean Family Christmas Cookie Assortment 2019

I did get a few games in.  I even took miniatures on the road, and we had the now-traditional family Christmas battle with my brother and both sons.  We borrowed a table from the nice folks at Pandemonium games in Garden City, Michigan, for a try at Chaosium’s 1978 rules Perilous Encounters.  My brother has been collecting old rules to go with his vintage miniatures, and had been wishing for a test of these rules for some time.  Unfortunately, we didn’t really care for the results, with the morale rules, in particular, being a bit dd.  It was still good to see all the vintage lead on the table.

My brother and younger son commanding the Younger Sons Alliance

My ancient McEwan lizards supported by Broadsword rangers

A Superior lizard moves up in support of Minifig archers; RAFM wizard overseeing 

Elder son Norman received a copy of DBA 3.0 for Christmas, and thought that it would be interesting to dust off our somewhat neglected joint 1/72 scale Bronze Age project to use with the rules, so as the calendar turned over to January, he started painting Caesar Hittites to put on regulation bases. Our previous efforts were mounted as the 6-8 man 60mm by 40mm infantry bases we have been using uniformly across our 1/72 scale projects, and chariots were mounted on the same bases oriented toward the 40mm edge.  DBA wants chariots on 60mm by 80mm bases, so I cautiously pried four of them loose from their old bases for rebasing, rather than building sabots of sort sort.  They looked a little lonely on the large bases, so I started my efforts to support his enthusiasm by painting a pair of chariot runners for each base:

With that done, I could field an Egyptian army, as long as I didn’t mind using the original double rank infantry stands.  While I will probably paint single rank Egyptian infantry on regulation-depth stands fairly soon, I then turned my attention to the first of the opponent armies.  I should be able to do Libyans, Sea Peoples, Nubians, Syrians, and my own Hittites eventually. I have the stockpile of miniatures already, at least, even if the inspiration sometimes comes and goes...I decided that the Libyans would be first, and began with their 5 (?!) light infantry stands:

Libyan archer psiloi for DBA 

Libyan javelin psiloi for DBA

They also get two stands of swordsmen (‘Warband’ by the rules):

That leaves me three stands of warriors at three figures each, a commander in a chariot, and a stand of Sea Peoples swordsmen to go before a test game.

The  other things that has been occupying my paint brush this month has been vintage Minifigs “Mythical Earth” figures.  I’d had a unit of little goblins on the work bench for a couple of months, and finished them off as the “skull” tribe at the end of my vacation, before going back to work on January 6th.  I based them in 3s for flexibility.

I also finished off eight “true orcs”, based as single figures, which should give me a round two dozen for use with Dragon Rampant or as opponents for the heroes in some potential retro-style D&D game.  

Inspired by the rapid success of that effort, I tackled the next dozen goblins, of the “red hand” tribe:

With the completion of that unit, I was down to the last dozen on hand (and they are not presently available from Caliver Books collection of old Minifigs molds) and had the pattern of painting them worked out, so finishing up the sixth (and final, for now) “mountain” tribe did not take long.  I had based the first tribe on 1” individual bases, but thought that it might look better if they weren’t in quite so loose an order. I therefore chose to mount this last group on individual 3/4” bases, which will make it easier to use them in that potential future D&D game as well as in Dragon Rampant.

There’s still one more weekend left in the month, so it’s possible that I’ll get some more Libyans or the next Mythical Earth true orc unit done, but even if I don’t, it will still have been a solid month.

25mm Minifigs Elvish Reinforcements

I've decided that the next couple of months will be devoted to painting a few pending projects.  One of these is the vintage Minifig Middle Earth bands.  I inventoried all of my carefully gather stocks recently and concluded that I have about three hundred to paint, so I hope eventually to have a game like the one I wanted in 1974 when I first bought these.

I had a team of 15 elvish reinforcements in process, and finished them up over the weekend.  I am anticipating that they will be used for Dragon Rampant, but I am trying to keep the basing fairly flexible.

So, after that, I have two 12 figure units, a six figure scout unit, a command stand, one lone individual, and a stand of three:

The stand of three is an anomaly.  I stumbled into a handful of ME figures at Cold Wars in 2015, including three elves and seven dwarves.  Having not seen any in years, I did not anticipate that I would be able to find any more, so I gave them special base treatment.  With another twenty or so on hand, awaiting painting, I now expect that I will end up with a second base done to match that one (and to form a Dragon scout unit), a second command stand, a pair of mounted elves, and a handful of singles.  The current two and a half units of twelve should become four.

I'm working on some goblins and orcs this week, but I think that I will set up a dozen human spearmen (really Saxons but ready to stand in for Lakemen, Rohirrim, or Dunlendings) next, so that I can field a basic 24 point Dragon Rampant war band of the northern allies after the Battle of the Five Armies.