Blood Bowl: The Orcland Wanderers

Once upon a time, an entirely unremarkable Orc team was making a decent living on the tournament circuit in the Dark Lands. Then one day, they chanced upon an orc who claimed to be a prophet of Nuffle himself. Nuffle had given him a vision: he would lead the team out into the Blasted Wastes, where they would find a golden city, rich beyond their wildest dreams but lacking a Blood Bowl team. The team, almost certainly very drunk, was gripped by the prophet's vision, and they cheerfully set out into the desert, singing songs about the promised land that awaited them.

Eventually, of course, the enthusiasm (not to mention the fungus beer) wore off, and the team realized that there was no golden city. Once they'd eaten the supposed prophet of Nuffle, they were so far into the wastelands that there was nothing to do but keep going. After a succesful tour of the Chaos Dwarf circuit, the greenskins took to their new way of life and started travelling all over the Old World to play. With no home stadium, they took to calling themselves the Orcland Wanderers.

**

In other words, I was going through my old Warhammer stuff and found my old 3rd edition Blood Bowl plastics. This is the team:

6 linemen (300,000)
2 blitzers (160,000)
2 black orc blockers (160,000)
2 throwers (140,000)
4 re-rolls (240,000)

And here's the roster:

#4 Drek Garr, thrower
#8 Mark-um Maaarrgghh, thrower
#15 Nelson Agharghaaarrgh, blitzer
#28 Ork Truk, lineman
#29 Lawaaagh-Joiner, lineman
#52 Waaagh Mack, black orc blocker
#55 Von-Tar Perfect, lineman
#75 Orcius Latham, lineman
#87 Jaaarrghh Cook, lineman
#89 Aaargh Cooper, blitzer
#95 Jihad Waaargh, lineman
#98 Maxx Gross, black orc blocker

**

I started with the linemen. They were primed with Army Painter's Greenskin Primer, and they're wearing Medium Sea Grey loincloths, Ivory socks, Off-White shirts and Gunmetal Grey helmets, for what I think is a quite decent Orcland look! I drybrushed a little Deep Green over the Greenskin Primer.

And here are the positional players, as well as a goblin. I apologize for that, I don't know how he got in there.

I also apologize for the picture quality: my old phone stopped working, and the camera on the new one is rubbish. Anyway here's the team:

**

Painting these guys was a fun little project! I'll see if I can find my humans next.

Let's Paint Star Wars: Armada

On the sixth week of summer the Norwegian fleet neared Whalsay.
- Tattúínárdǿla saga, Chapter 36: Concerning the Norwegian Fleet

I made my first ever Star Wars: Armada purchase in 2018, when we first played Star Wars: Rebellion. That game ended memorably when the Emperor himself led a single assault carrier to the just-relocated rebel base. In honor of the Imperial victory, I bought an assault carrier pack for Armada, which served as a TV table ornament. Because my co-commander is a big TIE Fighter player from back in the day, I also bought the Imperial Fighter Squadron II expansion on a whim, as it includes Maarek Stele.

**

Eventually, the pressure to buy the actual game became overwhelming - especially as it was dramatically cheaper at our friendly overseas gaming store, and I finished painting Star Wars: Rebellion. However, the lockdown scrapped our gaming plans - especially when our table was taken over by the Reformation. But I found painting the little starfighters surprisingly good fun, so for the moment, I guess I'm mostly just collecting the models.

I don't know why I got such a strong sense of deja vu spraypainting them, though!

I finished the X-wings first. It's very satisfying how much better they look with just a simple paint job compared to the unpainted models. I did the same here as I did with the Rebellion ones: Black details, Gunmetal Grey guns, Ivory hull, the squadron stripes and a Smoke wash over everything.

**

On the Imperial side, I started with the VT-49 Decimators and Lambda-class shuttles. I tried to keep things simple, so I started by painting the windows and whatnots black, and then giving them a base coat of Dark Seagreen and a Light Grey drybrush.

Again, very simple and very effective. The Rogues and Villains pack was somewhat more interesting because of the variety of the models, but I'm quite happy with how I did.

The Falcon, for instance, is just Ivory with black details and a Smoke wash, but I think it works excellently. I never really had any particular feelings about any of the rebel hardware from the movies - I still don't - but painting the Rebellion miniatures made me appreciate how important the worn and scuffed aesthetic is to the rebel side. I'm thinking about some Tau in rebel-like broken white for Warhammer. Incidentally, I'm really happy with Boba Fett's ship:

The YV-666 is in yellow because that's what it looked like on the squadron card? Anyway I don't know how much use we'll ever make of these things, but it's nice to have a tiny little Millenium Falcon, and they were fun to paint. Now if only we could get the Ebon Hawk!

**

During the quarantine, we found a good deal online for the Corellian Conflict expansion. I was interested in it for the campaign rules, but it also comes with squadron cards for Norra Wexley's Y-Wing Squadron and also Poe Dameron's mother. So the sensible thing to do was put in an order for the Rebel Fighter Squadrons pack. I painted the Rogue Squadron X-wings, Poe's mom's A-wings and the Y-wings.

I said earlier I don't have any particular feelings for any of the rebel hardware from the movies, and that's still true, but I'm discovering a real affinity for the Y-wing. It kind of reminds me of the one-man spaceships in Frontier: Elite II, which was a pretty big experience for me as a kid. I repeated what I did with the Rebellion models, so black and gunmetal for the nacelles, copper for the dorsal wiring and, of course, Ivory and Smoke. Norra Wexley flew for Gold Squadron, and I'm painting the other squadron green because I like green.

**

Oddly enough, during all this Armada squadrons have become my favorite thing to paint right now. I wasn't originally very interested in Rebel Fighter Squadrons II, but painting the Y-wings got me thinking about a Rebel fleet with lots of cheap fighters, and the Z-95 Headhunters would be perfect for that. But I mean I really got it for Ketsu Onyo. Look at her!

As an added bonus, there's a VCX-100 freighter, and even E-wings. Bizarrely, I got two extra E-wings! Not sure what to do with them. Looking at pictures of the VCX-100s and Lancers online, their base color seems to be grey, but I've taken the liberty of painting them with the same Ivory/Smoke scheme of the other rebel ships.

And here are the E-wings, Z-95s and Wedge Antilles' X-wings.

**

Finally, yes, I did also eventually get around to painting all the gazillion TIE Fighters that came with the core set, and the TIE Phantoms too. I did what I had done with the Rebellion TIEs as well and started with a Neutral Grey drybrush on the hull, but I did the edges and "spokes" on the wings in Light Grey this time.

And the TIE Defenders, including Maarek Stele's squadron. On the one hand, I could have done better with these; on the other, I never want to see a single Defender on my desk ever again.

Then I made it worse for myself by getting the Corellian Conflict expansion, because it meant I had the squadron card for Ciena Ree's TIE Interceptors, so I got the only squadron expansion I was missing: the Imperial Fighter Squadrons.

And here they are.

**

So yeah, apparently a thing that happened during the pandemic was that I ended up owning every squadron expansion to Star Wars: Armada. I still haven't painted everything, but I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. This has been a really good reminder that my first love in miniatures was 6mm Epic, and I still really enjoy painting the tiny stuff. Now, I still have piles of Warhammer things to finish, but I should really look into more smaller-scale miniatures.

Let's Read Tolkien 72: The Black Gate Opens

Two days later the army of the West was all assembled on the Pelennor.

Aragorn leads the army of Gondor and Rohan, with assorted hangers-on, toward Mordor. They pass over the Great River at Osgiliath, where it's suggested that they should assault Minas Morgul. Gandalf vetos the idea, because if that's where Frodo is trying to get into Mordor, they need to make sure Sauron is busy somewhere else. So they head for the Black Gate itself. On the way there, as they enter the wastes of Dagorlad, some of the soldiers refuse to go on. Aragorn takes pity on them, and suggests that if they don't want to go on, they should head southwest and capture the island of Cair Andros from the enemy.

Somewhat reduced, Aragorn's army arrives at the Morannon, where they parley with Sauron's herald. He makes even Gandalf completely lose his shit when he presents them with Sam's sword and Frodo's mithril-coat. The parley is unsuccesful, but Pippin comes away from it believing everything is lost, and feeling a sudden sympathy for Denethor. Sauron's armies attack, and in the mêlée, Pippin stabs a troll, but is crushed underneath it.

**

So, the climax of Book Five could hardly be more dramatic!

I talked about the, in my mind, anachronistic industrial wasteland outside the Black Gate when Frodo passed through it, but I'll also repeat another observation: Tolkien is remarkably uninterested in the geography of Gondor. Aragorn's army passes through Osgiliath, the former capital of Gondor, and its heartlands - and pretty much the only thing we hear about is the king's head at the crossroads. We're just about done with Gondor, and I still have no real idea what it's like there.

At the Black Gate, the captains meet the Mouth of Sauron. In Chapter 1, Book III, when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are examining the remains of some Uruk-hai, they have this conversation about the S-rune on their helmets:

"S is for Sauron," said Gimli.
"That is easy to read."
"Nay!" said Legolas. "Sauron does not use the Elf-runes."
"Neither does he use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken," said Aragorn.

Yet the Mouth of Sauron freely invokes his master's name. Maybe Aragorn was wrong, or the Mouth had a special privilege in this. Either way, the inconsistency isn't explained.

I wondered earlier if Gandalf's and Denethor's contrasting leadership styles weren't a commentary on British generalship in the First World War. I'm almost sure that Aragorn's humane treatment of his wavering troops, and especially their positive response to it, is a commentary on British military discipline in the same war. The British army initially dealt with PTSD and other psychiatric problems as cowardice and handed out death sentences very liberally, although not nearly all of them were carried out. Later - I suspect because they realized they couldn't shoot so many thousands of men! - the diagnosis of "shell shock" was invented, and both traumatized soldiers and conscientious objectors like Siegfried Sassoon were put in what passed for psychiatric care at the time. It would have been extraordinary if Tolkien had had no idea of the brutality of British military discipline, and the ferocious hatred of "cowardice"; Aragorn's conduct in this chapter is so diametrically opposed to it that I don't think it's an accident.

**

That was Book Five! It's certainly the most action-packed of the six, with climactic battles, a role reversal where a hobbit stabs a ghost, and a shameless cliffhanger. For all we talk about Tolkien's scholarship, he knows how to pace a story with the best pulp authors.

Thematically and, in a sense, theologically, the main point of Book Five is to showcase Tolkien's idea of "northern courage". I've talked about it before, but briefly, it's the idea that you do the right thing, whether you think it's going to work out or not. Théoden goes to war; Éowyn stands up to the Witch-King; Aragorn leads his army to certain defeat to buy time for the Ring-bearer. The point is made several times that this isn't a courage people should or even can be coerced into, although we retain some doubts about whether anyone really asked all six thousand soldiers who ended up at the Morannon. It is emphatically not the kind of fascism Tolkien gets accused of, where very important men decide what's best for the people, and force them there at gunpoint - a theme we'll be returning to in the next book.

Finally, for all the valor and martial heroism of Book Five, it does need to be remembered that it's all in the service of Frodo's errand. There's been great and glorious battle, the sagas winning out over Christianity completely there, but at the end of the day, theology prevails: brute force can't defeat the Dark Lord. This isn't Harry Potter and the Ring of Power.

Next time: the last book of the Lord of the Rings.