Workbench Update: What Do You Do With 60 Morannons?

Good morning gamers,

Today we're answering that age old sailor's shanty:

What do you do with 60 Morannons?

What do you do with 60 Morannons?

What do you do with 60 Morannons early in the morning?

When the Pelennor Fields box set dropped, Centaur got a copy and sold me his Morannons (36 in total). I went in with him last December on the new Battle of Osgiliath box set and picked up 24 more. With a whopping 60 Morannon Orcs at my command . . . what do I do with them all? In most Matched Play games, you'll never have this many - with over 500pts of warriors that require 4-5 heroes to field, you'd need to be playing at the 750-800 point level at a minimum. So what do you do? Well, you get your conversion hat on and try to (at least temporarily) save yourself some money. Let's see what we're doing!

Level 1: 48 Morannon Orcs

This part is easy - and by "easy," I mean you have to batch paint 48 Orcs (in my case, 2-5 of each sculpt). This can be really monotonous, so it's "easy" from a conversion point of view (read, you don't need to convert anything), but drudging up the will to do it is hard. Because I need 12 of each type of Morannon for Fantasy Fellowships (no gear, shield only, spear only, spear and shield), I need to keep 48 Morannons as-is - you could probably get by with less if scenarios aren't your thing (but if you plan to run the Army of Gothmog or the Black Gate Opens, you should at least consider keeping 48 of them as-is).

These guys are very much still in progress . . . but they're pretty impressive, huh? My daughter painted the wildly colorful one . . .

Level 2: 2 Morannon Orcs with banners

This bit is pretty easy too - Centaur 3D printed a banner for me from one of the Loot Studios deliveries and I hacked it off its stand and glued it to the hand of a spearman. That spear haft was then used to make another banner (along with another spear haft) which I gave to someone else - thanks to some other spear-hacking, I have two Morannon Orcs with banners and shields (one also has a spear):

Also very rough and ready - and both banners need a lot of love . . .

50 down, 10 to go, so we might as well turn to . . .

Level 3: 3 Morannon Orc Captains with shields (and one with two-handed hammer)

Captains can be easily designated by different color schemes or adding odd bits, so I chose to make mine different by raiding a Mordor Troll sprue and adding heads:

There are tons of these little heads in the each blister - and it's an easy way to make your heroes stand out! The hammer guy is going to get a different hammer head, but more on that in a later post . . .

For some added bling, these guys got Moria Goblin bow bits added to their heads or a gorget around the neck to make them stand out a bit more from the rank and file (you know . . . because the heads aren't going to do that for me). :)

Level 4: Converting Zagdush and Gothmog's Enforcer

So far all we've done is painted guys up or added a few things to them. Now we're moving into some pretty light modifications of models. Zagdush's claim to fame is the base 3 Attacks (with the ability to be S5/D4 or S4/D5, depending on which one is more advantageous for him) and while he's an Orc Warrior hero, having a little extra armor isn't a big deal. I chose one of the sculpts of the Morannon Orcs that mirrored the pose of Zagdush and have a spare sword for him - but that helmeted head needs to be changed out. For Zagdush, I picked another spearman (one of three bare-headed models) and did the tried and true easiest conversion method ever . . . I head-swapped with the spearman:

Uh, what's happening?

Add on the spare sword and switch the heads and everything is awesome:

Dude, we need to be painted, man!

While I like Zagdush as a model and profile, my desire to own the actual Gothmog's Enforcer model is . . . pretty low. I mean, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind owning one eventually, but paying more than $15 for THAT particular model is just not a high priority right now (it's very much a back-burner priority). Guritz is great, but the Enforcer just isn't (at least in my opinion). That said, he's needed for a Fantasy Fellowship mission - so I need a model to stand in for him. To get that easily, I just did a head swap.

Our two unsuspecting victims: one is about to get a hero promotion and the other is about to get a distinctive look from his brothers.

The Morannon Orcs, like their Orc Warrior brethren, are surprisingly modular - many of their necks are exposed, making head swaps a pretty simple job across the lot. A few have furs or just armor that covers their necks entirely (like these two guys), but even when this is the case, their hair falls in about the same way so if you cut a neat line along where the chin is, you should get a minor putty job to clean everything up.

Look how natural that looks - it's like they were minted that way!

Having a different-looking spearman isn't a bad thing (he's one of my 12 shield-and-spear Morannons) and having a model that can be Gothmog's Enforcer is better than having nothing. With that, we have two hero proxies (both needed for Fantasy Fellowship missions) ready for action, and two head-swapped spearmen to change up the look of your ranks!

Level 5: Converting Guritz and Goroth

Now we're going to tackle something a bit different from head-swapping (though there will be some of that): model reposing. "Kit-bashing" is a common conversion technique, where you take bits and pieces of different models (or model kits) and slap them together to make a completely unique model. For my purposes today, I need two models who have two-handed weapons - one of which needs to be swinging a big mace (Goroth) and one who has a two-handed pick and a sword (Guritz). Both of these are amazing models - having the real ones would be awesome, but the cost of said models is currently more than I'm willing to pay for "just a few more Orc heroes." Time to get to converting proxies for the near-future.

For my Goroth conversion, I started with the spearman with his spear held over his head . . . and the mace that Gothmog could have attached to his Warg:

I then did a cut across his arms right under the scale mail pauldrons he's wearing, hacked the ends of the spear off from around his hands, and then cut down the mace to size, regluing everything with super glue at a more horizontal angle:

S5 with Burly can mean a few dead models a turn, or a very reliable way to Bash heroes off their horses . . .

I think that worked out pretty well. For Guritz, I wanted to do more than I did for the two-hander Captain. The helmet here isn't a bad one, but the Morannon Orc carrying a mace has a much closer helm to what Guritz has - so we'll need his head and the pick from one of our Mordor Orcs:

The head swap is pretty easy (and fixes the unnatural angle that the mace guy has his neck in), hacking the spear and pick are easy too:

Next we glue everything in place - I dug out a Moria Goblin sword blade and gave it to the Mordor Orc to make a pick:

Last bit: we need a head on Guritz's helm, and a spare head from the Mordor Troll kit does the job really well:

Pretty happy with how these guys turned out in the end - four great Morannon heroes to kill in Fantasy Fellowships (oh, and use for Matched Play too). ;-) Now I just have to muster the desire to paint them all . . . 

"Level 6": Give Two To Your Son

Perhaps the scariest thing you can do with two models in your collection is "see what your son does with them." Morannons, though, are perfect - there's tons more where they came from, and they're rich in details. My kids love to paint with me - I commission Centaur to 3D-print models for them to paint and own so they have their own things to paint, but occasionally my kids want to help me paint my models. I was working on the models you see above when my middle son (four years old at the time) asked if he could paint something. I asked what models he had that needed painting and he said he didn't have any. So I looked at a spearman and the guy who gave his sword to Zagdush and said, "Do you want to paint these guys?" He said, "Yes - I want to drybrush them!"

And so he did - this is his attempt at drybrushing (and frankly, he used far fewer colors than I thought he would):

Honesty time: sometime after taking this picture, my son wanted to paint them some more, so now they are quite colorful . . . #BackToNormal

Being a dad is hard sometimes - and having four kids just seems crazy all the time - but painting with my kids is a joy (and seeing them trying to do techniques besides "slap the paint on it" is a real blessing - albeit stressful as the first kid finishes with a paint color and needs a new one just as I've finished getting the last kid squared away). I love spending time with my kids while painting - chatting about what's important to them and going on in their lives alongside how to paint with different techniques. It's one of my favorite parts of my day when we can find the time for it (though I rarely get any painting done unless there's only one kid working with me).

Conclusion

If you find yourself with buckets of Morannon Orcs, let the juices flow and experiment with conversions - worst case scenario, you have some chopped up Morannon Orcs for base ornamentation, while some cool conversion work could turn into a neat Battle Company or Gothmog's special bodyguard retinue. These models will be painted up and displayed in a few months for our next Quest of the Ringbearer collection update - and you may see some of them in the posts up until then. If you enjoyed this, let us know in the comments below - until next time, happy hobbying!