This month's randomly themed attempt to try and reduce my overwhelming collection of metal, plastic and resin miniatures has been rather waylaid by Roger 'Dick Garrison' Webb's agreement for us to both paint up a twenty four point "Hordes Of The Things" (HOTT) army over the next few weeks. Roger will be documenting his progress on a Conan the Barbarian force using 15mm "Copplestone Castings" over on his excellent blog, "Rantings From Under The Wargaming Table", whilst I'll be working on an Elemental Army by "Alternative Armies".
My particular HOTT Army is readily available from the Scottish-based wargaming company as a single pack containing an entire Magical army, and comprises of a multitude of figures taken from their HOTT and Tabletop TTF miniatures 15mm metal ranges. It consists of:
Magician General (Human Elementalist) @4AP - Human Wizard
Behemoth (Giant Elemental) @4AP - Fire Elemental
Behemoth (Giant Elemental) @4AP - Earth Elemental
2 x Warband (Lesser Elementals) @2AP - totaling six Water Elementals
2 x Shooters (Lesser Elementals) @2AP - totaling six Fire Elementals
2 x Hordes (Lesser Elementals) @1AP - totaling ten Earth Elementals
2 x Lurkers (Lesser Elementals) @1AP - totaling four Air Elementals
I have always wanted to play HOTT and as a result own a couple of armies for the fantasy miniature wargame published by the Wargames Research Group. However, up until my whimsical challenge to Roger, I've never managed to find the inspiration to actually knuckle down and paint one of them. Unsurprisingly, this isn't the case any longer, so I've already started work on many of the Elementals, as well as the force's leader, a little known human wizard called Gandalf the Grey...
Painting wise, the past four weeks saw me enjoy my second most productive August since this blog started, with my "Planet Of The Apes" project using "Crooked Dice Game Design Studio" miniatures really helping me keep my enthusiasm high for the entire period. I've actually still got a few more of these twenty-four hour 'Paint An Entire Project" Challenge hobby sessions left to complete, so realistically expect to finish even more Simian Minions over the next few weeks.
In addition, I managed to clear through all of my Oozes, Slimes and Puddings by "Otherworld Miniatures", and diminutive resin "Ballmonsters!" by "Precinct Omega". The vast majority of these characterful sculpts were admittedly rather straightforward, but they all helped me maintain a steady stream of tabletop ready models every couple of days...