Black Guards of Barad-dur

   Last August Wargames Illustrated came with a free plastic sprue of ten Romans. That gave me the idea to build a unit of Black Guard of Barad-dur for my Lord of the Rings evil force. I had six original miniatures, a blister of three old Ral Partha miniatures of Minotaurs in Roman uniforms and an extra miniature of Shagrat with the shield of Cirith Ungol to lead all of them! 

The Black Guard of Barad-dur

   I changed not only the heads of the ten Romans with heads from Oathmark Goblin miniatures box but their hand weapons as well. 

The ten Romans

The Romans' hand weapons and the Goblins' heads

The Goblins' hand weapons

Heads OK!

   Four Romans held their swords so their scabbards were empty. I secretly cut four pins from my wife's wire pin hairbrush to use them as pommels of the Black Guard's swords.

The black brush pins as the pommels of the swords

   Since the original miniatures of Black Guard warriors have capes, I had to make capes from green staff for each one of the plastic Romans. 

The first five warriors

The second five warriors

   I don't even remember when I bought this nice Ral Partha miniatures. Probably it was between 1992 and 1995. The year of production written on the base is 1990!

Minotaurs of the Imperial League

   I kept the Captain as he was. I gave a flag pole from the Goblins box to the first Minotaur warrior to be a banner-bearer and a drum and two drum sticks instead of bones to the second to be the Drummer of the unit.

The Captain

The Banner-bearer

The Drummer

   I had a spare miniature of Shagrat so I thought he was perfect to lead the Black Guard warriors, the most fearsome of all the Orcs breeds!

Shagrat bears the Shield of Cirith Ungol

   I used the shield of the Drummer together with another flag pole in order to have a second Banner for my Black Guard warriors. I added also a helmet and a couple of spears from other miniatures.

The second Banner

   I faced a little problem with the swords of two of the original miniatures. There weren't any! So, I added hand weapons from the Goblins' box.

Black Guard warriors with weapons from the Goblin's box

The six original Black Guard warriors

All the unit ready for primer

The ten plastic Black Guard warriors

The Black Guard Command

The Drummer

The second Banner

The three original Black Guard warriors

and the other three

The family photo!

   That's it for today! Stay tuned for more!

Rocks and Galata

   The battlefield of our last "Lord of the Rings" battle on a previous post reminded the Sahara desert. Some days later I visited a friend, who had an amazing table to play "Age of Sigmar" battles. So we had the challenge to improve the appearance of our table as well. I made some rocks while my friend made some trees for our next "Lord of the Rings" battle. 

The "Age of Sigmar" table with many nice terrain pieces

   For my rocks I used foam, putty, gravels, small stones, sand and static grass.

   After that, our battlefield had three rocks and seven trees as you can see below. We played an Orcs against Gondor warriors battle.

The battlefield

All Gondor force warriors are WIP.

Rangers

Knights of Minas Tirith

Warriors of Minas Tirith

The Orcs

First group of Orcs with bows

Shagrat and his Orc warriors

Gorbag and his Orc warriors

Second group of Orcs with bows

   It was a very nice game. We really enjoyed it. Finally, Gondor force was victorious because the Orcs' dice rolls were mainly like this:

   The last photos of my trip to Constantinople are:  

a nice view of Galata neighborhood,

 the view from my hotel window, trees with snow,

kebab and EFES beer,

and delicious food!

   That's it for today! Stay tuned for more!