Saturday, March 21, 2009

Orcs & Goblins for WHFB and LOTR

Ever since I started using magnets myself I'm always looking for good ideas. One that originally inspired ideas was posted on santa cruz warhammer about switching fantasy and 40K bases for daemons. I loved the idea but am not the biggest daemon fan so it kinda sat on the back burner.

After enjoying myself so much in a local tale of four gamers competition for 40K - I wanted to enter the fantasy event when it ran. Problem was I was kinda stuck in fantasy, all I had left was some chaos bits of the last army I was building when I lost interest (I sold my previous Skaven army I built for a GW staff tournament to finance the new stuff), and no army was really grabbing my attention.

It took a while, but it came to me - I've always liked the randomness of playing with orcs/goblins - but never really fell in love with the models. That's when the idea came to use LOTR orcs, goblins, uruk-hai and trolls, but mount them with magnets for both games.

I just got my shipment of magnets from K&J (HIGHLY recommended) last week, and today I got a chance to sit down and get some gobbos ready. I've got some pics and some tips for magnets I've learned today.

  1. Always mark polarity of magnets (I do this as I take one off, mark the next)
  2. While John @ scwarhammer drilled nice neat holes leaving some of the base as seperator, I didn't have time for that, so I did it the dirty way. I drilled holes easily large enough for my magnets to pass through, and then taped the top of the base. It only took me about an hour to drill & prep 60 bases.
  3. Magnets can be pesky to get into place, so where possible - use them to your advantage. For me this meant I would put a magnet down on the table, and then hold the stack of magnets on top of the base, above the hole - so the magnet on the table would just zip up and into place in the superglue. I'm sure anyone whose used magnets a lot knows this - but I sure felt smart when I figured it out so figured I'd share.
and finally here are some pics
magnets under tape
gave some hand magnets to attach standards or nets
gave ALL magnets under quiver to attach shields
here's my goblin captain on the round base

5 comments:

Peter said...

problem with LotR models for warhammer is that because they are quite dynamicly posed they don't rank up very well. Great Idea though

Tristan M said...

actually with the way the washers & magnets work, I can adjust any model to any direction (pointed out by John @ scwarhammer) - they rank up great. :)

Cannonfodder said...

Great build und very good point here: Always mark polarity of magnets

I didnt do this by now but should have.

Tristan M said...

Thanks! I find it invaluable to have polarity marked. It's allowed me to plan out the magnets so they work as planned (eg. Any shield will stick to any guy), multiple magnets on models won't interact (eg. the guys with hand magnets can't get stuck in a ^5 pose), and keeps everything neat (eg. bases easily stack, shields won't accidentally stick in the wrong location).

Admiral Drax said...

Mate,

For some obscure reason you weren't on my blogroll. Apologies, and please consider it rectified.

- Drax.

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