Tuesday, 7 January 2014

A Trio of Trolls

Good-evening Internet,

Part 9 of my Norse Saga: Trolls!


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I never intended to do any Trolls as part of this project, but I got into reading about Ragnarok the Poetic Edda and, being be, decided that I needed to do a second Norse Force to go up against Freyr and the other 'good gods' of Norse mythology.


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I sort of always knew this would happen. I wanted to do a very themed force to be led by Freyr, consisting entirely of Dwarves and Elves - the creatures who's lands he was lord of.


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However, much of the really cool stuff (Fire Giants, Dire Wolves, Trolls, Frost Giants, Witches, Great Serpents and the Living Dead) is on the 'bad guys' side. So, yeah, I'm going to do a second force for Of Gods and Mortals.

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Of course, seeing them as two distinct 'sides' is a very artificial, self imposed divide. There are no set army lists or anything in Of Gods and Mortals, so I can mix and match different models in games as I like.

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Anyway, I digress. These three 'Trolls' are Reaper Miniatures Dark Orcs that was given by a friend (thanks Crystophyer!) who got them as part of the Reaper 'Bones' Kickstarter. They are made out of some kind of nasty wibbly-wobbly plastic - however, my friend was kind enough to give me a whole heap of 'Bones' models that I will be using in this project, so I will do one big 'What I Think Of Bones' post, rather than moan a little bit in each post.

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I had to do a little converting on these models to bring them up to scratch, but nothing major. With these three all I had to do was swap out their bent-beyond-all-hope rubber blades with new ones from my bits box. I think the blades are from some old Games Workshop Chaos warriors of some kind. I just cut the old blades off and pinned the new ones on. Easy peasy.

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Painting was a little more troublesome. The 'Bones' wibbly-wobbly plastic is allergic to spray-on undercoats. After trying a few black paints (which all 'beaded-off' on the surface) I found an old pot of 'Cote 'De Arms' Black that worked. With a solid base-coat down the rest of the painting was pretty straightforward.

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Norse Trolls come in all types, sizes, shapes and colours so I just had a bash at a few variant skin-tones. The only other thing of note is that I cheated when painting the armour, simply dry-brushing it with a dark silver and then covering it with 'Model Mates' Rust solution. I love this stuff, but before I painted these guys I had only used it to rust-up post-apocalyptic vehicles and scenery. These models are pretty big, with nice flat areas of armour, so I thought I'd give it a shot - and I think it works.

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Final Scale Shot. Thats a 1p coin. Big Trolls.

Its fair to say that I'm not 100% happy with how these guys have turned out - the details on the models are just a little too soft for my liking, but they'll do. I'm going to source a fourth Reaper Orc at some point to complete the Unit. It'll be interesting to see how the metal version compares to the bones one, but thats a post for another day. 

What do you think?

Oh, and next, I think I'll finish the last of my suspiciously Norman-looking huscarls....

MM.

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