More orc & goblin cavalry

Still terrible photos from my phone but here are the rest of the orc & goblin cavalry I’ve finished.

First up: some boar riders. These are some Citadel figures — an orc and a goblin.

The next two are from a company I have found very little about. They were called Enigma, naturally. They had a short run in late 1990s, making figures that were chunky knock-offs of Citadel’s Warhammer Fantasy and 40k lines. They always came with solid metal bases that were separate from the figure, but with no slots or points to attach them. These two are a leader/boss type and a shaman.

Net up various conversions. The first two are Milton Bradley/Games Workshop BattleMasters figures mounted on toys — in this case a chicken and a rat. They were pretty fun to do.

The next two are Ral Partha hobgoblins which were meant to ride boars as well. I used one boar to draw my Grenadier orc beer wagon, and the other I use without the rider, so these two needed mounts. I used some home-cast horses from Prince August molds for them, and I think they look pretty good.

 

This next figure was really beast, both to assemble and to paint. It’s a very old Grenadier war mammoth. The mahout is original (I think it’s an orc or hobgoblin?) but the two crew are from the AD&D Orcs Lair set. The axe-man in that set breaks easily and mine has a pike to replace it.

Here’s a look at the crew before I glued them into the howda.

Lastly, an orc riding a dragon from the Grenadier Fantasy Lords line. I repainted this one as the paint was worn off in several spots.

Wolf riders

Long time no posts. I have been painting here and there though. Here’s a photo dump of some orc and goblin cavalry — all wolf riders. Assorted other mounts to follow.

First up, some really old Custom Cast figures: Warg Riders from the Der Kriegspielers line. I had a few from an earlier lot, and they were bolstered by a set of someone gifted to me. They have a mix of bows, axes, and spears.

The giant pumpkin heads on them are great.

I also painted a bunch of wolf riders for Ral Partha Legacy. Below are some archers (the ones I sent in to RPL; they sent me a set of similar figures as “payment” but I haven’t taken pictures of them.

There were the first wolves I really tried to give something approximating a realistic coat to. In the past I always just did them uniformly black or grey, but for these I checked a reference photo of a wolf and tried to follow that.

 

Before I did the archers, I did a group with hand weapons. I don’t seem to have photographed them, but here are the “payment” set. I based them on 1.5″ poker chips, and later added flocking.

Here’s a group shot with a few that I didn’t photograph separately, and a couple of oddballs on nonwolves.

Finally, a line up of wolf riders showing some variations. The far left one is a Tom Meier sculpt, recently released by Ral Partha Legacy. I think they may have been originally intended to be part of his Thunderbolt Mountain line, before it shut down in 2017.

The next one is a Nick Lung wolf rider from Grenadier’s Fantast Warriors line.

Next to him, with the axe, is a very early Ral Partha wolf rider, also sculpted by Tom Meier decades before the Legacy one, perhaps around 1978. He is also re-released by Ral Partha Legacy, though my copy is from the 70s.

And last is one of the Custom Cast again, from about 1976 I think.

 

The Compleat Orc’s Lair

At long last, I’ve finished painting my collection of Grenadier AD&D orcs! I got the original “Orc’s Lair” way back in the 1980s when it first came out, and as I recall the shaman was broken, but it had an extra axeman in the box, so no complaints. An “Action Art” set acquired some time later had another orc captain (which for some reason I remember having a more ostentatious name in the painting guide). Since then, I acquired a few more of each pose secondhand in game shops, in large “job lots” I bought online, in trades, and a few outright gifts from people who didn’t want them any more.  My original crew were painted back in the 80s, and mostly in the bright green used in the box art. For the rest, I decided to paint them in a more muted olive tone, but kept the dominant black and reds used for the originals so they look more uniform.

These orcs are all more ape-like (as drawn by Jeff Dee in modules at the time) than pig-faced (like the Monster Manual illustration), which is also more in line with Tolkien style orcs. They are also considerably less bulky than most orc miniatures. I like the mish-mash of weapon and armor styles, suggesting it is all looted gear.

The crouching short swords men were never my favorite pose. These came in both the boxed Orc’s Lair and separate blister pack of five figures, which may explain why I have so many. They are simply more common than some of the others.

The archers only appeared in the boxed set. I actually have one more who will serve as a crewman on an even older Grenadier war mammoth. 

The two axemen broke fairly quickly after I got them — the axe handle was somewhat thin. The thirc I acquired later was already broken. So all have new weapons grafted on: a plastic axe head, a plastic sword blade, and a broken bit from a later Grenadier goblin figure. The axeman, like the short sword, was both in the box and the blister, so they should be fairly common as well. I have a fourth (also broken, of course) who is also serving as a mammoth crew with a pike.

The swordsmen were in both boxes and blisters, so they ought to be common. It’s a decent pose and would good for wargame stands.

The “captain” should be the most common by far, as he was in the box, the blister, and a large “Action Art” box set of monsters. The one in the center had his axe replaced but the rest are intact. I always liked this pose, and the crested helmet.

The war-club orcs were only in the small box, so it’s surprising that I have four of them. I like the vaguely Aztec theme. One had a broken club and I replaced with a plain, rather than obsidian-studded, club.

The last trooper with a mace appeared only in the blister pack, and is the only one I have just one of. Presumably he’s the rarest of the AD&D orcs. 

The “Command” types are all pretty nice too. The shaman has a skull and some kind of spike club or rattle made from a bone. This club was also break-prone so one has a replacement (on the left) and for the other (on the right), I carved the back of the handle into a a curved knife which you can’t see from this angle. The center shaman is intact.

The standard bearers are both lightly converted. (I was very confused, as a kid, that this fellow was labelled “standard” on the box, since I thought they were saying this what a “standard/tpyical” orc would look. Only a bit later did I learn that a standard was a banner or unit insignia. On the left, I converted the club to a sword for reasons I no longer remember. The club certainly didn’t break off on its own. The other has a standard from a Heritage kit (the Middle Earth orcs with a drum on a cart). I was missing his standard, and this one was superfluous so it was a luck meeting.

Lastly the “leader” types (or in some boxes, he’s labeled the “captain” and the captain above is an “axeman,” and the axeman is a “w/waraxe”). His axe broke on both models as well, so one got a replacement from a Prince August mold and the other has a warhammer from a Ral Partha dwarf (who in turn was converted to hold an axe to match a player’s character in some long ago game). Another very menacing pose despite the relatively small stature of these orcs.

And here’s how they all go into storage in a small bead organizer.

 

 

 

Wolf riders

Here’s the second batch of minis I painted for Ral Partha Legacy. They are a relatively more recent vintage — Thunderbolt Mountain minis from the mid 2000s.

Thunderbolt Mountain was an independent venture by Ral Partha’s best and arguably most famous sculptor, Tom Meier. Meier was a sort of ‘wunderkind’ for Ral Partha, starting as teenager and introducing techniques that allowed him to sculpt much more realistic proportions and details than the competitors in the mid 1970s. Only Superior Models really rivalled Ral Partha’s classic ranges from 1977 to 1979, in my opinion. When Meier left Ral Partha around 1988, he started the Thunderbolt Mountain line, which produced several historical and fantasy ranges. Towards the end of Thunderbolt Mountain’s run, he did elves and goblins in a slightly larger scale than his 25mm Ral Partha but in a similar and recognizable style. RPL is recasting these as well as the older Ral Partha lines. I was stoked to be able to get the wolf riders to paint for the RPL armies.

Like the Rakshasas, I painted these beginning with a black undercoat. This photographs pretty well and is very forgiving, although the colors can get a little muted. Truth be told, I spent more effort on the wolves than the riders, because I don’t think I’ve ever painted realistically colored wolves before. I tried to give them a distinctive brown stripe along the back, gray fading to black on the belly and limbs, and reasonably accurate facial markings. The black undercoat makes them look suitable filthy — I doubt these goblins spend much time worrying about their own hygiene, let alone grooming their mounts.

They came with a bonus goblin on foot, wearing a wolf skin. I’m not sure if he simply outlived his mount or ate it.

All the minis came with open hands and assorted scimitars for the riders and clubs for the footman. as well as separate shields. I gave two clubs to the footman because I couldn’t decide between the crude spiked club and the Iroqouis style war club.

The poses are very dynamic, even for Meier, and the details are great.

Jacob at RPL also sent a few extras minis which I’ll start on some time later this summer when I have time to paint again. Right now I’m focusing on getting my house ready to sell and looking for a bigger place, so the figures are getting packed away for a while.

 

Makin’ bacon : Pig-faced orcs

Pig-faced orcs (“Porcs,” as they prefer not to be called) have been having a minor renaissance lately.

OSR bloggers were talking about them for while; the most compelling look at the origins of the pig-faced orc for my money is here, but I’ve also read that there was some sort of miscommunication between writer Gary Gygax and illustrator David Sutherland which led the best know example in the Monster Manual.  Not sure where I first heard that either. Another theory holds that the Tolkien calendar for 1977 by the brothers Hildebrandt introduced pig-faced orcs, but honestly the orcs in that calendar don’t look very pig-like to me for the most part. I think Zhu is on the right track with the Disney goons (See also Telecanter’s Receding Rules;  Sword & Shield; Realm of Zhu 1 and 2 ; TOTFF; Greyhawk Grognard; Grognardia).

For a long time the only ones available would be the old Minifigs AD&D line.

But several manufacturers put them back into production — Otherworld starting the trend in 2010, which inspired several of the blog posts already linked above  (Casting Room; Otherworld; Splintered Light; and yes Minifigs has them mostly back in production too!).

I was not really a fan of pig-faced orcs back in the day, since I came to D&D after being exposed to Tolkien. But more recently they’ve grown on me, and while I couldn’t justify buying any more orc figures (I have scores unpainted and literally an army of them painted) I thought about doing some conversions on my own. But then I saw the incredible workmanship over at Belched from the Depths and got cold feet. No way am I sculpting anything near that standard. More recently I saw a simple conversion on a Facebook page (and who can ever find something again in that Book of Sand?) and I could at least copy that. So I took some plastic orcs that were unlikely to be painted any time soon and tried making snoots from epoxy putty. They are just tiny balls pressed onto the nose, with the tip flattened and nostrils made by poking the end with bit of florist wire. The only thing I forgot to do was make one an obvious leader. I have a plastic GW “black orc” that should fit the bill though. For reference here’s the basic plastic orc as I painted one some time ago:

A small, somewhat ape-like nose typical of GW.

And here are the pig-faced versions (I also did some weapon swaps from other kits for variety, and gave some shield bosses).

The yellow and purple shields will likely get decals from the BattleMasters game on their shields.

Finally some Grenadier UK plastic orcs:

For reference, here are some I painted in the usual manner, and with their shields.

Both the pig-faced spearmen had their weapons modified; a third is below:

This guy could be the shaman of the tribe, and will be the leader for now.

Lastly a couple of metal orcs (Ghost Miniatures, the fantasy arm of Old Glory Miniatures) that I painted along similar lines, though I left their noses as they were. They might be half-orcs from the tribe.

Orc ID

So blogging has mostly ground to a halt since I’ve taken a new job at an academic library; maybe it will resume some time. But today a publisher got in touch to get a license to publish a short article I wrote and they recommended I get an Orc ID.

No, not like that. But that is definitely what I imagine.

An ORCID is actually an identifier used to disambiguate people. Libraries have been doing this for centuries, but in the past couple of decades there’s been a push to use numerical identifiers rather than textual ones. Libraries have long kluged the problem of many people with the same name by adding qualifiers to names, such as middle names, years of birth/death, or other titles or even activities. So because there are many “Michael Monaco”s in the world,  I might be established as “Monaco, Michael Joseph” or “Monaco, Michael Joseph, 1972-” or something like that. But a simple number would make the identifier more useful worldwide. Consider Tolstoy — written in Cyrillic his name is be Алексей Константинович Толстой; “Толстой” is variously Romanized as “Tolstoi,” “Tolstoy,” or “Tolstoĭ”. Likewise Korean, Japanese, and Chinese names may vary a lot depending on the language they are publishing in. There is an effort to bring all the forms together in individual countries’ authority files (for example the US has the Library of Congress’ National Authority File or NAF) and the NAF-equivalents of many countries are brought together in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF.org — where Tolstoy is VIAF # 96987389). But these are focused mostly on people publishing books, albums, films, and so forth. More minor works like journal articles don’t get cataloged individually in library catalogs and there is no need to disambiguate the millions of academics who publish worldwide for library catalogs since their articles are not individually described in a library catalog. Journal articles and such are usually in databases, institutional repositories, and other kinds of bibliographic utilities. So the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Id.) is meant to work a bit like the VIAF but for researchers and academics (as well as journalists, etc., in principle) in databases etc. In my case I have stuff mainly in journals, and so that my publications as “Michael Monaco” (or “Mike Monaco”) are not confused with other “Michael Monaco”s, and use a string of numbers (in my case, 0000-0001-7244-5154).

So anyway it’s nice work and hobbies encounter each other like that.

Orcs, and Hordes of the things

Although the dictionary definition of orc is merely “monster,” modern authors universally follow the lead of Tolkien in using the term as a synonym for a large goblin.  These have not had a fair press. They are fanatically brave in spite of being weaker and less practiced than most other humanoids, and must be kind to animals, since they train them so well.  It is interesting that Tolkien’s characters describe them in terms very similar to those used by medieval chroniclers to describe Mongols, who in our day are considered a nice friendly people of slightly eccentric lifestyle.  We might instead think of such goblins as a fantasy counterpart of the apocryphal northerner: clannish, rough spoken, given to imbibing of strong but peculiar liquor, keeping analogues of whippets and pidgeons, prone to mob violence at away fixtures and perhaps too easily influenced by radical politicians of other races. –Phil Barker, Sue Laflin Barker & Richard Bodley Scott, Hordes of the things

The paragraph above is the caption for the orc & goblin army list in Hordes of the things (or HOTT).  I love this “defense” of orcs.  The write-ups in the army lists are not all as good, but here’s my other favorite, for the “Generic barbarians” list:

Humans lacking in non-oral culture and fond of old fashioned sports like head-hunting, cattle raiding, or world conquest.

What else do you really need to know? HOTT is a fantasy wargame that was first released in 1991 and which uses fairly simple principles found in De Bellis Antiquitatus (DBA).  It uses the same standard unit size (an ‘element’ or base of several miniatures, usually three or four but as many as 8 or as few as one miniature might be used, depending on the troop type), but whereas DBA uses 12 elements for every army, HOTT has a ‘points’ system allowing armies of varying sizes depending on the troops bought.  The rule book includes a large number of army lists, although in principle there are relatively few restrictions on what kind of army you could field.  The list of armies is helpful because it gives examples of what the authors intend by some of the very generic troop types, and also as sort of bibliography for some classic sources for fantasy gaming. The “generics” are elf or fairy, dwarf, goblin or orc, gnome, undead, reptillian, ratmen, medieval, barbarian, nomad, pirate, evil humans, chaos, good kung-fu, and evil kung-fu (the last two based on 70’s and 80’s movies). Here’s the rest, the parenthetical entries being separate lists:

• Summerian myth (human, good demonic, evil demonic, hosts of the dead, Asag and the stone allies)
• Homeric myth (Greek, Trojan)
• Greek myth
• Amazon
• Arthurian epic
• Carolingian epic
• Irish epic (Ulster, Irish)
• Norse myth (Aesir, giants)
• Arabian myth
• Persian epic
• Japanese myth (Imperial descent, Kumaso)
• Indian myth (Rama, Lanka)

Those were the armies of myth & legend; there are also some semi-historical types that would incorporate mostly historical forces, but which are highly speculative and include fantasy elements.  These are inspired by films, period legends, and popular culture.

• Semi-historical Egyptian
• Kyropaedia (Persians, Lydians) [after Xenophon]
• Arthurian semi-historical (Arthur, Saxons)
• Chinese semi-historical
• Da Vinci Italian [renaissance Italy + Da Vinci’s drawings of war marchines!)
• Japanese epic [including legends as well as Kurosawa films]
• Aztec semi-historical
• Conquistador semi-historical
• Munchausen 18th century (Russians, Ottoman Turks)
• Napoleonic semi-historical
• Victorian science ficiton
• Boxer Rebellion (Boxer, Foreign devils)
• Alien invasion (Aliens, Humans)

Various fantasy books and stories:

• Hyborian (Northern barbarians, Picts, medieval states, Shem, Stygia, Black nations, near eastern nations, Vendhya, Khitai) [R.E. Howard and later pastiches]
• Barsoom (Red men, green men) [E.R. Burroughs]
• Fairie queen (Gloriana’s knights, League of enchanters) [Edmund Spencer]
• De Camp Novarian (Othomae, Shvenite, Fedirun, Mulvanian, Paaluan) [L. Sprague DeCamp]
• Well of the Unicorn (Vulking, Salmonessan, Dalarnan) [Fletcher Pratt]
• Kregen (Pre-Prescott Vallia, Imperial Vallia, Loh, Clansmen, Radvakkas, Pandahem, Hamal, Moorcrim, Shanks) [the Scorpio/Kregen/Antares series by Alan Burt Akers/Dray Prescot]
• Deryni (Army of ex-queen Ariella, army of grand-master Jebediah, amry of King Nelson, army of Archbishop Loris) [Katherine Kurtz]
• Tekumel (this one does not list separate nations but just gives a list of possible troops) [M.A.R. Barker]
• Dragaeran (Dragaeran, Easterners) [Steven Brust]
• Black Company (Plain of Fear army, army of The Lady, army of The Limper, Shadowmaster’s army) [Glen Cook]
• Dracula (Dracula, Dracula’s foes) [Bram Stoker]
• Discworld (Ahnk-Morpork, Seriphate of Klatch, D’regs, Agatean Empire, Agatean insurgents, Lancre) [Terry Pratchett]
• Atlantis [H.Rider Haggard and others]

and lastly pure fun

• Christmas wars (Santa Claus, The anti-claus)
• Garden wars (Garden gnomes, Ants, Wasps)

The army lists are NOT in the free pdf that HOTT’s publishers have kindly provided while HOTT remains out of print. (N.B. this pdf is for personal use only!) <update: as the newest version is finally in print, the pdf link is dead>  However using the rules and some imagination, you should be able to make up whatever army you want.  HOTT is designed with large scale battles in mind, but as you might have inferred from the inclusion of lists like “Dracula’s foes,” scale really doesn’t matter.   A wild range of armies were on display on the Stronghold, a web site that for years provided resources for HOTT players including house rules, variant armies, galleries of armies, and so on.  The site has been down for a few years but you can still see the front page and many of the pages archived here. <update: the Stronghold is now a blog here> The mythological and literary lists are generally well-researched (as you might expect a community of wargamers to do; after all considerable number of ancients wargamers have learned ancient Greek and Latin just to research the armies and battles of the period). One of my favorite variants was called “D20 HOTT,” which attempts to create a point of conversion for D&D games to HOTT, so that your character can participate in mass battles.  The only problem with such a scheme though is that players who expect the battle to ‘feel’ like a D&D combat will certainly be disappointed, and this might go even more so for spell-casters who will find their powers reduced to artillery or counterspells (if mages or clerics, respectively).

Some more little people for the Bruce Galloway Memorial Home

So I’ve been getting some old lead minis from generous donors who share my appreciation for the golden age of Heritage, Grenadier, Ral Partha, etc.  I’ve been calling this the Bruce Galloway Memorial Home for Wayward and Convalescent Lead Figures, not that Bruce Galloway was all that into minis but more because he deserves some kind of gaming-related memorial online to counteract all the sniping by internet trolls regarding his Fantasy Wargaming book.  At some point I do hope to find new homes for any minis I don’t expect to use, but as it is I’m kind of behind on my painting lately.

Anyway  Scottsz of Old School Jump/Sorcerers of Doom/The Cold Text Files sent me yet another shipment, mostly of Grenadier:

The goblin is Heritage and the sea-troll is TSR, but all the rest are Grenadier, from the AD&D line.

Scott is entirely too generous, not that I’m complaining.

The dwarf with the sword and dagger is easily my favorite dwarf thief ever cast. The orc in Aztec regalia is one of the more interesting designs Grenadier came up with too. I wish they’d done all the guys in the Orc Lair box as Aztecs. I can really see orcs performing barbaric sacrifices of prisoners of war.

In fact, that sounds like a pretty straightforward adventure seed: rescue the villagers from the orcs before they sacrifice them at solstice, which is just a week away! That should give the party barely enough time to scout out the orc’s temple complex (Chitzen Itza would be a nice template) and plan and stage their daring raid…

For Greywulf

A day or two late, a dollar or two short, but, in honor of International Orc on a motorcycle day:

Army of the orcs

Man, I loves me some orcs.  The army below takes up  two tackle boxes, and I have about three more tackle boxes of loose orcs based for RPGs, including cavalry (but not counting goblins and half-orcs!)

This army can field everything in the Mordor and Misty Mountains lists for DBA, with many extras (Shooters, chariots, etc.).  About half the pictures didn’t come out so well, so there are not a lot of closeups, but you can always click to embiggen.  See the army of Robilar for some pics of the orc infantry.