Shire Protectors Battle Company Battle Report 2

While down in the goblin infested caves, Hedging Bets (the Shire Protectors battle company) hear a forlorn howl in the distance. Hedger scouts on ahead and finds an enormous black wolf held at bay by a swarming crowd of goblins. Never one to let an animal suffer, Hedger convinces the group to move forward and attack the goblins!

About 120 points worth of goblins (and one goblin riding a warg) versus about 120 points worth of good guys!

Fortunately, even though the goblins are many, they are a bit spread out, so as long as the rocks and arrows hit their marks, the goblins shouldn't be too tough, though if they can get into a lot of melee combats against hobbits there'll be trouble! Goblins have spears, so can get their two against one bonus - and against a combat weak hobbit that's a problem! Turn one starts off really well, Cookie throws a stone and knocks a goblin out on the first turn!

No way! While Skodi faces off a goblin, a goblin arrow from further afield thwacks into Loki, taking him out! That's a massive blow to the good force, as they only had three proper fighters, now suddenly down to two!

Skodi takes out his goblin just in time to join in the melee against the warg rider, who charged in to battle and was swarmed by as many as could pile in! Hedger and his squad rolled nothing higher than a four! Fortunately the goblin rolled a one and a two!

The two archer hobbits, Tom and Harry, take aim at long range and take out a goblin archer! The archery so far has been dreadful for the Shire force, there were turns where everybody missed (all 1s and 2s) and many other turns where even the hits didn't manage to get any wounds, so this was a good feeling!

And the archery continues! Hedger and Harry take out two goblins! Skodi and Cookie smack down another goblin - Cookie smacks his frying pan right into the goblin's chittering face, sending it to the gravel. Jolly, Hugo and Rory similarly gang up on a goblin, only winning because the Shirrifs have a massive fight value of 3 while the goblin only has 2! I think this turn turned the whole battle around, as the goblins were getting close to swarming us! Thank goodness that sometimes the archery works!

Pushing forward, Hedger and the team manage to gang up on some more goblins, Skodi taking out another in close combat while Harry takes aim and shoots another hill-top goblin!

Skodi takes on two goblins and loses the fight, but the spear thrust is turned aside by his shield. Hedger pushes back a goblin but can't get a damaging strike in. Cookie, however, frying pans another goblin!

There are fewer goblins now, but Hedger and Skodi continue to take on as many goblins as they can to spare the Hobbits. Skodi pushes a goblin away from the Hobbits. Hedger slips on something and the goblin lunges forward and takes him out! Hedger got one bow kill this game and did nothing else except distract goblins from Hobbits! Meanwhile, Hugo clonks another goblin in the head and knocks him out!

Vengeance is theirs as the Dwarf, Skodi, and all the remaining Hobbits pile in to thwack the final goblins down! They hear a cheerful barking and snarling sound in the distance and see the massive black wolf claw down two goblins as it howls in the direction of the Hobbits as it bounds away into the distance. Mission accomplished! But at what cost?!

Post game rolls - Loki rolls snake eyes - DEATH!?!? But then as we're making a fuss about what rotten luck we realise that the whole way through the game we had Hedger's stats wrong (I thought he only had 3 defence) so that he shouldn't have even been knocked out! So we fudged the results by one and had Loki roll a three instead. So our next mission will be trying to rescue him as he wasn't found after the battle - the goblins have dragged him off somewhere!

In better post-game rolls I got double sixes (thanks to the horn bonus) and got a Wood Elf Sentinel, Geleth, and another hobbit, Farmer Maddock. Also, Cookie rolled and got a six, promoting him to a Hero! A hero Hobbit with a frying pan! Skodi and Hedger also qualified for promotions. Skodi has decided that the Hobbits need protecting and so he is now a Khazad Guard, ready to lay down his axes for the little folk. Hedger has donned better protective armour and is now a fully fledged Ranger of the North. Here's hoping that will help him in future battles!

Shire Protectors Battle Company Battle Report

What happens when a hobbit who is fond of his grog is abducted by a group of goblins to force him to provide them with booze?

Why, the Shire Protectors leap into action (though some of them only at 4" a turn)! We thought it would be fun to have another good company to do some team missions later on with my son's elves. I really like hobbits, so we decided to put together a battle company that represents what may happen if something happened to a hobbit. We know that the Dunedain are always out there keeping an eye on the Shire, that dwarves trade and travel through the Shire and that every now and then there'll be an elf around. So we put together a company that is mostly Hobbits, but with a few extras that may appear from time to time. At it's core you always have to have more Hobbits than anything else, so it'll always look more like a Hobbit company than anything else. It's probably not that competitive, but should be fun =)

Hedger the Dunedain (so called because he always seems to be lurking in foliage) calls up Skodi and Loki the Dwarves to help mount a rescue of Jolly Wilcom who has been abducted by goblins. He is joined by several brave Hobbits, Cookie (with the frying pan), Tolman (Tom) and Halfred (Harry) the archers and Hugo and Roriamac (Rory) the Shirrifs.

The goblins don't suspect a thing, as if Hobbits would attack them down in their caves?!

The goblins are half sozzled (and therefore use random patrol rules) so the company sneaks up slowly and takes out one with a hail of arrows and stones!

Here's how we do our random patrols, roll a scatter die and a D6 for each goblin, they move the indicated direction by D6" (for goblins it maxes out at 5). It's a much quicker version than normal sentry rules, though loses some of the "back and forth" of swapping who moves them.

Slinking forward, another goblin is taken down in a hail of hobbit pelted rocks!

And there goes another one! At this stage Oscar is bored (he's controlling the goblins) and keeps taunting me to just go for it and don't worry about the alarm being raised. I keep reminding him that Hobbits are even worse than Goblins at fighting!

And then the fateful turn where I miss with all my ranged attacks thanks to some in-the-way rolls due to the high hill!

The goblins begin charging towards the company, the alarm having been raised! A lucky stone from Cookie takes out one of them!

Hedger nocks an arrow and shoots another incoming goblin - they're coming from all directions now!

Fortunately my shooting is pretty good, Harry takes out another incoming goblin.

Loki climbs up the hill and is attacked by a goblin! Skodi is forced back by another goblin (and saves a wound with his fate) and Rory falls to an arrow from the archer on the top of the hill!

Cookie and Hugo charge in to fight a goblin, who shoves them back but fails to wound them.

Three archers manage to take out the goblin on top of the hill! The goblin with a spear shoves Loki back down the hill, he falls but manages to land unhurt!

Meanwhile Skodi manages to take out another goblin in the archway!

The goblin archers shoot into the combat between Cookie, Hugo and another goblin - they hit! Unfortunately (for the goblins), they hit the goblin and kill it!

Skodi pushes a goblin forward, away from the Hobbit archers and Loki and Hedger double team and use some might to take out another goblin

Cookie, Hugo and Skodi surround a goblin, ready to take it out... but another goblin arrow flashes into the melee and thunks into the goblin, slaying it! This was soooo funny! We were like, what are the odds of that happening again?! Hedger and Loki come up towards the goblin on the hill from two sides this time.

They take him out together, freeing Jolly Wilcom from the clutches of the goblins.

And the rest of the team overwhelm the remaining drunken goblin archers.

Jolly has been helping himself to the beer and is a bit surprised that there's a crowd of people around him. He's had a great time and doesn't quite get what the fuss is all about!

With the points from the mission success I buy Harry a Horn so that I'm more able to get good reinforcements! Let's face it, rolling for reinforcements and getting a Hobbit Militia worth 4 points is not quite as good as getting... anything else from any other battle company! On the plus side, Hobbits are cool =)

Stay tuned for further adventures! The plan is to level this team up so that between the elves and the shire protectors we can do one of the missions like the warg attack one, where we play with one another rather than against one another. Oscar's not a fan of us actually attacking each other, but has no qualms taking out random baddies =)

Monty and the Wolves

We had a very sad week this week as we had to put down one of our dogs. He was a black Scottish Terrier named Montgomery (Monty for short). As a sort of memorial we bought some wolves to paint so that we will have Wild Wargs, Fell Wargs and Wolves (Oscar thinks the wolves should be good guys as a sort of counterpoint to the evil wargs.) The wolves are from 40k, Fenrisian Wolves and the big wolf is a Winter Wolf from Nolzur's D&D range.

Anyway, we used Contrast Paints for the wolves and a lot of black paint for Monty! Contrast paints are so quick to use, though I feel the quality isn't quite as good as traditional methods. Still, only one coat and it's done! I also did a light drybrush over the top, but each model can be cranked out really quickly compared to the usual painting! Monty is quite an enormous model! If you click on the image for full size you'll see that Monty has a big bone with his name on it so we'll always have a reminder of him.

And for scale here are some normal dogs and Radagast standing on a rock. The wolves fit on a normal cavalry base, while Monty is on an even bigger base.

Anyway, that's it for now.

Beastcaller Battle Company Battle Report

So what do you do when you quite like playing with beasts, but have always loved a little bit of narrative play? You make up a battle company to suit your purpose! The battle company book gives lots of good ideas, so I just made a starting company with the same number of points as all the other companies. It represents one of the beastcaller goblins (Druzhag and Ashrak) and their pack of beasts. 

And I made up a Beastcaller path that is essentially the same as a shaman, but with spells that are about the beasts instead of other people.

So the first mission represents the goblin and crew coming out of the caves and spying some elves just across the river. What better prey?

They are just hanging around, playing their musical instruments and singing annoying songs... destroy them all!

Off to a pretty good start, the two spiders take out two elves as the beasts emerge out of nowhere and attack without warning! Another elf, though, takes on two wargs and the shaman and one of the wargs falls!

Another elf falls to spider poison, while the other spider takes a wound and the hero warg barely avoids defeat by using a point of fate!

These last two elves are surrounded by all the luck of the Valar! Down goes the yellow spider, even after the point of fate it had and the green spider loses a wound too!

Finally the last two elves are defeated! Shar'lok the shaman urges on the gigantic warg and green spider to feast on elf-flesh!

While the beasts are nursed back to health, the shaman does a little healing and as the night progresses a swarm of bats flocks to his pack and report that three bands of dwarf rangers are coming towards the river - time to get back to the cave!

This is the second mission, but the first mission only took about 10 minutes so we just launched straight into it! Three batches of three dwarven rangers are blocking the river crossings!

The high speed of the beasts means that they're less likely to plunge into the river! One dwarf is quickly dispatched as the beasts begin their crossing.

Two more dwarves fall, while the shaman gets closer to the bridge, he's so much slower and is starting to have to dodge dwarven arrows!

In a massive ganging up, another dwarf falls to a warg and two spiders!

To try keep Shar'lok safe, the bats and the hero warg attack a dwarf, who beats them back and takes a wound from the bats!

Two other dwarves hold off the beasts and inflict wounds on the spiders!

As another two dwarves finally make their way around the hill, the brave archer near the river falls beneath flashing teeth!

Near the cave the two dwarves who were doing a great job against the spiders fall under the willow.

The hero warg intercepts the other dwarves to keep Shar'lok safe from throwing axes! He is defeated by the dwarves, but has kept his master alive!

The bats and other spider also put themselves between Shar'lok and harms way.

The dwarves pay for their encroachment!

The final dwarf falls as the shaman makes it back to the safety of the cave!

With so few models, and quick ones at that, the missions are fast and furious! I'm hoping the beastcaller will be fun and might go well against the elves, but then again, I'll probably have to make another hero army so that the elves are never in any "real" danger =) The beasts take a long time to level up, but can be extremely powerful, especially as the spiders start with two attacks and two wounds!