As you know, my usual first hobby weekend of the year is the Middle Earth Grand Tournament at Warhammer World. This is normally because it takes place in February, but in more recent years, it's moved to March. Fortunately, this resulted in more planning time for the event, so I was able to easily decide my theme for the tournament.
My first thoughts were that I didn’t want to paint up new armies for the event, which is something I've done in previous years. This is for two reasons – 1) so that I can spend more time working on other painting projects, and 2) because it will help clear my backlog – I ended up adding 80-odd models by painting two new armies for last year's GT, and whilst they were painted quickly, it meant I hadn’t made any actual impact on my backlog.
So, to the armies themselves. I toyed around with a few ideas, before deciding that I wanted to take my Easterlings as my evil list – I had a lot of fun painting them last year, so I was quite keen to take them to some events as a result; I took a 650 point list to the 7th City Grand Prix back in February:
The caveat with this list is that the Kataphracts were only added after I accidentally forgot to pack several other models I had originally planned to include. As for the remainder of the list, I felt The Dragon Emperor and Rutabi were both solid heroes, and I had plenty of numbers to back them up.
Unfortunately, the army only managed to win two out of eight games, losing the other six. However, five of those losses were by very narrow margins, where the game could have gone either way had a dice roll gone differently. I also learned that the cavalry aspect just didn’t work – Kataphracts are heavily armoured, but unlike Riders of Rohan or Knights of Minas Tirith, they don’t have quite the same hitting power – often they would get bogged down and be my first casualties of the game. The other learning point was that Rutabi's warband definitely needed a banner – when the army is fighting in the same place on the tabletop, they benefit from the Emperor's banner, but they tended to struggle in scenarios requiring the army to split up.
So, with the cavalry dropped, I had to find some replacement numbers – the GT is 700 points, so this also meant I had an extra 50 points to play with, and I decided I needed another hero. Captains would be useful for marches, but I ultimately settled on Brorgir – mostly because I've not used him yet and he's a lovely model, but also for his magic – a tremor in the right place could hopefully do some damage, plus making the Emperor s6 in a fight would greatly help his killing power – there were a few instances at the GP where he was fighting against a heavily armoured opponent, but failed to do any damage, meaning his momentum stalled.
I also wanted to throw in a couple of War Drakes, again because they're lovely models, and they could be a threat with their ability to reduce a model's fight value and their number of attacks – Aragorn's a lot less dangerous when he only has two attacks instead of three. With Brorgir and the drakes added, I still had some points left over, so I decided to take a couple of archers. Maybe not the most effective Easterling troops, but there's always the chance I could maybe snipe out a horse, a banner or even take off a couple of wounds or fate points off a hero / monster.
So, with that done, I had my 700 point Evil list:
So, to the good army. Themed match-ups are always fun (and look great on displays), and having taken Host of the Dragon Emperor for my evil list, the only logical choice was the Defenders of Erebor. I had previously taken this list to the GT in 2023, where it did fairly well, winning two games and drawing the other:
Dain and Brand are both very solid heroes, and they add a banner effect to the warriors around them. I did briefly consider adding Bard II and Thorin III Stonehelm, but decided the points limit was too low to justify taking all four heroes – there wouldn’t have been many points left over for warriors, so I would have easily been outnumbered.
Not shown in this list is that my Captain of Dale was armed with an Esgaroth bow, which they could take in the previous edition. Now however, they can only take a shield, which is built into their points cost. So that was an immediate change to the list. I also decided to scrap the ordinary Warriors of Dale and simply run a front line of Knights of Dale – they have the same fight value, a slightly better defence and it also means my entire front rank will have +1 to wound when charged. Despite the banner bonus for the army list, I also kept the physical banner, because you need one for scenarios where victory points are available for having a banner left on the board – there's a few of these in the Matched Play Guide, and considering you play six games at the GT, there's a strong chance of playing at least one of them
I kept the dwarves' warband the same, given that it worked very well last time – hopefully they should make a solid anchor for either the centre or a flank, with the two crossbows hopefully adding some extra firepower. Tweaking done, my Good GT List was also ready!
So, the armies are decided, and I don't need to paint anything either! This is quite a relief considering that when I last took Knights of Dale to the GT, I was up until 1:45am on the Saturday morning painting them… that just left the display board!
I've built some big boards in the last couple of years, taking a 2' x 2' board to last year's GT – I wanted the board to be one of my best, but unfortunately there were a few things that didn’t go the way I wanted to – particularly the attempt at creating a water effect using rippled plastic sheeting – the glue refused to dry, and was still visible on the Sunday, two days after I'd applied it. So, I decided to keep it simpler this year, and also tried to use up some scrap pieces of material from last year's board.
I knew I wanted the board to be the valley that sits before the gates of Erebor, but I also didn’t want it to be a completely flat, knowing from watching The Battle of the Five Armies that there were several raised areas before the gates. I ultimately decided I wanted a two-tiered board, which would allow me to set up some vignettes of the defenders of the mountain holding back the Easterling horde. As they were smaller warbands, I decided to put Dain and the Dwarves on the lower tier, fighting off the Dragon Emperor and his Black Dragons, whilst Brand and the Men of Dale faced down Rutabi and her Easterlings on the tier above.
My starting pieces for the board were an A3 photo frame (these are really useful for making display boards, which gave me a nice black border to complement the board, and some Styrofoam I could use as the base. I built up gradual layers of foam, before shaping the foam with a hot wire cutter so create a slope up to the higher tier. I then managed to find a plaster-cast rock face lurking in the box of scraps, which quicky became a cliff face on the lower tier. Once I was happy with the shape, I covered the entire board in filler, to cover any gaps in the foam and generally tie everything together
So, to painting. The armies used the same basing scheme (dark brown, drybrushed with lighter khaki colours), so I simply copied it for the board on a larger scale. The rocks were also basecoated brown, but were given grey drybrushes rather than khaki so that they stood out. I then touched up the edges with black acrylic paint, and the board was almost done!
To finish the board, I added the same static grass and tufts that were on my model's bases, so that the army blended in nicely, but taking care to keep it sparse, rather than flock the whole thing. With the board done, I added the models, and the Battle of Dale was complete!
As to the games themselves, sadly results did not go my way. Although all of my games were very close finishes, I ended the weekend with a single win and five defeats. Not to say the games weren’t enjoyable - in most cases it came down to either a single turn / phase where things just didn’t quite go my way - the new 20VP scoring system is a huge improvement to matched play in my opinion, given that it gives you much more opportunity to score points in games than the previous 12VP system.
So, with the GT out of the way, my attention turns to the next weekend on my hobby calendar, and it’s one of my absolute favourites - Seven Stones! Once again Sam and I are pairing up, and we think this year’s army is going to be a lot of fun. Stay tuned to see what we come up with!
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