6mm Fantasy Project


Another of my long term goals has been to build a suitably impressive Epic Scale army for fighting battles from Lord of the Rings or perhaps WFB.  My son received the LEGO LOTR game for the WII this last Christmas, resulting in many hours of Father-Son adventuring through Middle-Earth.  My wife and I went to go see The Hobbit in order to pre-screen the film for its suitability for a seven-year old's psyche.  We deemed a few of the scenes as slightly more graphic and intense than necessary  (we are old fashioned like that.), but the Wii game experience has already stoked in interest in the stories within the boy.

As an aside here is a snippet from the post movie discussion between the Mrs. and myself:

Her:  "How many Orc battles do we really need to see?"
Me:  "Um?  ...All of them!"

Nerdy indeed, but 6mm lends itself to Epic spectacle, and I have often considered trying to recreate the WFB armies I built in the 80's and 90's in this scale.  I have considered 10mm, but I would really prefer not to delve into yet another scale.  Instead I have determined to play the long game and start building a 6mm fantasy force over time as an interesting distraction from my normal historical projects.  (There is something liberating about making up your own paint schemes and force structures.)  The goal is to have a viable set of forces prepared to unleash when the boy reaches his 9th summer.  As I already have a massive 15mm Undead and Dwarf army completed, I will instead focus on Orcs/Urak Hai for one side and Gondor with a touch of WFB Empire on the other side.  Those offended by such trivialities on this domain of stalwart  historical reference will at least be able to console your injured sensibilities with the fact that I only want to do 1-2 units a month at best.  The key is finding figures with the right look.  I have looked at Irregular miniatures, for example and they are far too rough to suffice.

As you can see from the first image, by lead into this project was to finish some Man O' War flyers that I have been meaning to finish since the mid 90's.  Man O' War ranks as one my two favorite games GW ever produced (the other is Necromunda), and is simple enough that my son played a few games with me last year.  I have a sizable Dwarf and Empire fleet, but never really got around to painting any of the non-dwarf flyers, until now.  I found lots of bits and pieces but have so far only been able to cobble together the following:

Two Empire Griffon Riders

Three Wood Elf Eagle Riders

One Elf Dragon rider

Several of the others were chopped up for other conversions or pieces have been lost to the depredations of time and five different homes.

The scale is optimum for 6mm, and they seem to fit in nicely.  Now to figure out what comes next....

Comments

  1. I really am interested in following this as my own son is showing a keen interest and this would be great for him to get into miniatures

    Oh and you won the Baccus Giveaway on my blog ;-)

    Ian

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  2. Some of the irregular miniature ranges are actually very good when painted. Other manufacturers are baccus and microworld games. There is also a 6mm fantasy yahoo group with lots of pics and ideas

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    Replies
    1. I will take a look at the group. I have some Irregular miniatures, but they just do not compare to other 6mm manufacturers when it comes to quality. I plan on using some of the War of the Roses (WOTR) infantry from Baccus as test models for some Uruk Hai (WOTR?). I just broke down and orders some of the Microworld Dwarves so I will be posting them sometime in 2013....

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