Orctober wrap up

Orctober is over - what did I do with it?  Well, I didn’t take it too seriously, but did use it as motivation to get the bulk of my Orc and Goblin army tabletop ready.

Alongside the Wolf riders, bolt throwers and warlord, that mostly meant a lot of basing. Many of the models are still in old paint jobs, either my own from many moons ago, or as they were purchased secondhand, but they look coherent enough now.

Still about 20 goblins to do, plus I still have some more EM4 orca, and I need to sort some black orcs of some kind, but there is a table ‘legal’ army there now for both WFB and Fantasy Warriors.

Two bolt throwers, including a Notlob original

20 orc boys 

One of my giants (orc for scale)

The Wolf riders - will count as boars for WFB purposes

14 orc archers

Warlord and two shamans

20 more orc boys

A somewhat grisly standard

The three trolls

Another giant

Green, Plastic and Cheap! EM4 Orcs

Following on from the Dwarves, here are the first test pieces of the EM4 orcs.  Again, there are three poses: archer, spear and sword.

I will freely admit the paint job was quick and fairly basic, definitely not my finest work.  I just wanted a general idea of how they would turn out.

I would say that they are cruder than the dwarves - the sculpting on the faces in particular is very soft. It's not great on the Dwarves to be honest, but the beards and helmets compensate.  With these orcs there's nowhere to hide.  That said, they still don't paint up too badly, and they definitely have that Oldhammer vibe.  I've not compared them to the other (former) Grenadier models I own yet, but I suspect they will do just fine filling out the ranks - especially if I can sort some shields for them.  They are certainly in the same sort of general style.

Like the Dwarves, they come on an integral base about 25mm x 25mm - just the right size for Warhammer.  I rebased one onto an MDF base as a test.  It was easy enough to do, but I'm not sure it was really worth the effort, and one of the ankles did show signs of being under stress when I trimmed it off the base (that sinking feeling when the grey plastic goes white...).

They have the same badly placed molding lugs on the back as the Dwarves but, as you can see, they're pretty easy to clean up.

Short, Plastic and Cheap! EM4 Dwarves

As regular readers may be aware, I'm quite fond of the old Grenadier Model's Fantasy Warriors game.  The original game came with two plastic armies of Orcs and Dwarves, each with three different models - and did it before Warhammer Fantasy Battles did!

I wasn't able to get the game when originally out, but you can still get the models from EM4 miniatures, and they are ridiculously cheap!  I finally got around to ordering some  of everything to bulk out the dwarf and orc armies that I seem to have developed almost by accident.  I got nearly 100 models for about twenty quid, so now I have a pile of grey plastic!

I thought I would start with the Dwarf crossbows.  My understanding is they were sculpted by Mark Copplestone, but to fit in with the style of Nick Lund.  They are cast in a firm grey plastic, which is solid but easy enough to cut, and takes polystyrene cement well.  I did a couple of helmet swaps for variety (these came from the GW Empire Militia and Frostgrave soldiers), which were really easy to do.

Unpainted, they look a bit basic, and they do have a really annoying casting lug on the back.  But the lug can be chopped away fairly easily.  The crossbow is a little odd - the arms are very short, but I think they actually paint up really nicely overall!

Pre painting (you can see the orcs in progress in the background)

 

You can just about see the lug, but it's cleaned up pretty well

Style and size wise they seem to fit in pretty well with my other Nick Lund Dwarves (the difference in flock actually stands out more than the models)!  They look slightly shorter, but I think that is partly because the metal models have an MDF base, and then quite a thick metal base as well.

One issue to be aware of is that they come on a roughly 25mm integral base.  As most of my Dwarfs are on 20mm bases, I wanted them to fit in.  Ironic given recent announcements by GW about the forthcoming Old World!  For a couple of them I chopped the existing base down to size, but realised they were solid enough for me to just cut them off the integral base and mount them on a ready cut base, which was quicker and neater overall.  Could be more interesting with the spear Dwarfs though, as I don't think the pose will rank up well on a 20x20!