Grim Champs: What Do You Do With 13 Broken Dwarves?

Good morning gamers,

If you've followed the last two posts in this conversion miniseries (here and here), you know that I have spent some time this year converting up some Champions of Erebor from a Thorin's Company blister and some Grim Hammers. With the converted models done, I found myself with a pile of headless, mangled bodies:

What does one do with all these? Why, we get our conversion hat out and we turn them into something useful: "bag" tokens for the Three Trolls! Let's get to work!

"Paint" 'Em!

The only visible part of the model is going to be the feet (book-accurate, not film accurate), so I painted their boots. I also painted a little bit of their pants just in case it was seen - the rest of each body stayed black:

With these done, I painted the bases green and prepared for the hardest part of this endeavor: sewing.

Bag 'Em!

Okay, so sewing isn't that hard, but it required a lot of measuring. Some of the models had at least one arm above their head, but most didn't - which meant if I just left enough room for the shoulders, the model inside the bag would look too short. As such, I measured out material a little longer than I needed:

I tried three different iterations of bags - the first just stitched the sides together with what looks like a tying chord around the opening (left), the middle was a "book-fold" that could be tightened over the legs (middle), and the final turned the bag inside-out to hide the seam (right):

I decided I liked Mark-III better than the others and started converting some of the Mark-II designs into Mark-IIIs - the Mark-Is need to be completely redone to be like either of the others, so I'll update those later.

Conclusion 

And with that, we have thirteen markers for the poor unfortunate souls that get caught by the Trolls. :-) Of course, I could always use them as objective markers for up to two boards as well, so even if the Trolls aren't in use, we can still get some value out of them. Oh, and I took a swing at getting hair for Oin and Kili - complements of some Dwarf heads I had lying around:

Hopefully you enjoyed this series - while the actual champs are excellent models, I personally found this conversion journey to be very enjoyable and rewarding. Our next post will focus on what I've done with the remaining Warriors of Erebor, as well as some updates to the champs to make their gear more accurate. Until next time, happy hobbying!