Warband Fantasy: Lord of the Rings (Gondor)

I recently completed a 28mm Isengard army for use with Warband Fantasy, and obviously these little horrors will need an opponent to take on. 

So delving into the box, I separated out the Gondorian figures and made a start.

I don't think I have enough for a full Gondorian army, so it'll definitely have to be an "alliance of free peoples", with a mix of Gondor, elves and dwarves.  I did my Rohan figures single based a while back, so perhaps I may rebased them for Warband at some point. For the moment I'll press on with the Gondor miniatures. 

They are divided into swordsmen, spearmen, and archers, and I think I'll building with each of these weapons separated into units of each type.

Once again I gave the figures a zenithal highlight, and set about deciding on the colour scheme to use. 

As a preamble, Games Workshop made faithful representations of Gondorian soldiers, as seen in Peter Jackson's movies. I prefer to go with the original souce - Tolkien's books.  For Gondor this presents a few issues. There are almost no references to plate armour in Tolkien's work, beyond a passing reference to a "vambrace". Almost all armour referred to in Tolkien's books are described as leather or maille ("chainmail"), except for some references to scale armour among the Haradrim. 

However Jackson decided to clad his Gondorians in full plate armour and therefore GW's miniatures are similarly armoured. Ugh...OK, so I'll go with it.

Onto the colour, and again, Tolkien is surprisingly sparse with this sort of detail. 

He refers to the city guard of Minas Tirith as being clad in black and silver. There are references to the Knights of Dol Amroth wearing blue and white (with swan or boat icons), and there are a few references to green livery.

Jackson went all in on the black and silver motif and I think I'll stick to that as it seems the most definitive colour scheme we have for at least the Gondorians of Minas Tirith.

I'll paint them mostly as black and bare metal, with some brown leather as accents.

More to follow...

EDIT 1: Some more...

And so onto the next stage of progress; painting the Gondorians. Given the chosen colour scheme, these are pretty tedius, but surprisingly quick and easy to paint as they are essentially monochrome.

The predominant colour is the bright steel armour, but I chose to accent this with a flat colour palette of brown, blue (brown and blue always compliment each other), and black.

So, as our societies drop all Covid related restrictions, and people "return to normal", among my gaming friends we've so far stayed away from meeting in real life for games. As it turns out, a rolling series of Covid infections among us has made that a wise decision! But throughout the pandemic we've maintained gaming online, using Board Game Arena for board games, and Roll20 VTT for wargames. Both have served us very well for the last couple of years. 

However, we're now looking seriously at returning to the table. Our local club has its "main meeting" on Thursday evenings, but to avoid a crowed room, we're thinking about returning on another night.

The upshot is, that chatting during our last online session we came around to the issues of what we'll do and when. For "what" we talked about giving Stargrave a go. I probably have enough random sci fi figures to use, but I became enthused and so I'm going to halt this Gondorian project and get stuck into some figures together for this sci fi skirmish game. A change is as good as a break, so they say.