Figure Box #1 Giant Cave/Rock Troll

I have a love/hate relationship with miniatures.  I love playing games with them, and I enjoy painting them, but the time I have available to paint them is very limited.

To combat this I've adopted a two pronged strategy.  Firstly, I look for clever ways to acheive reasonable painting results with minimal effort (using products like Army Painter's Quickshade for instance).  Secondly, if possible, I buy pre-painted miniatures on eBay.  However, whilst looking for figures on eBay, I often stumble across more than just piles of Warhammer regiments and WOTC D&D minis.  For a start, there's plenty of Old School lead miniatures from the 1980s.  Some of them are rare and expensive (Citadel AD&D, Grenadier Giants, etc.), but many are very reasonable.  With a bit more searching, you can also find miniatures that are not strictly intended for gaming but can still be used to great effect.

A good example is the Lord of the Rings Cave Troll from the Eaglemoss Collector's Range (in the UK they sold these in newsagents for £5.99, for a pre-painted, 60-70mm tall lead figure and magazine).  I think the Cave Troll must have been a special issue as he's 80mm tall.  Anyway, these things often pop up on eBay and many of them only reach a pound or two:

Completed eBay Auction 1
Completed eBay Auction 2

After reading Carter's Rock Troll in The Lands of Ara Compendium , I immediately thought of this figure.  Mine is shown below up against a small (soon to be even smaller) party of adventurers.  The second picture shows the troll in close-up with an Asgard Dwarf to demonstrate scale.

Does Fantasy Sound Better with a British Accent?

The BBC have got an interesting article up today discussing the fact that many characters in fantasy film and TV productions talk with British accents. They cite The Lord of the Rings films and TV adaptation Game of Thrones as examples where most, if not all the voices are British. Indeed in Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage is singled out as being the only US actor who, for the show, puts on a very convincing RP (Received Pronunciation) accent – very apt for a Lannister.

To my British ears, these shows would just sound wrong to me with US voices, and I say that as someone who generally prefers US TV shows to British ones. However, in using British accents all of these productions face another problem with the use of regional accents. In The Lord of the Rings the hobbits all have different accents, suggesting they are all from very different locales. In Game of Thrones the voices in Winterfell are all essentially from the North of England, but even amongst those there seems to be a mix of Yorkshire, Lancashire and a bit of Scottish. What's the US perspective on how they sound?

LOTR Lego Coming Summer 2012

In December, Lego announced that they had secured a licence to produce LOTR themed sets.  The first sets, due this summer, will feature characters and locations from the LOTR trilogy.  Later in the year, we'll also get hobbit-themed sets to coincide with the release of The Hobbit movie.

Here are the provisional details of the first sets:
•9469 Gandalf Arrives – Minifigures: Gandalf, Frodo
•9470 Shelob Attacks – Minifigures: Samwise, Frodo, Gollum
•9471 Uruk-hai Army – Minifigures: x4 Uruk-hai with a siege crossbow, x1 Rohirrim Soldier, x1 Rider Of Rohan with his horse
•9472 Attack On Weathertop- Minifigures: Samwise, Frodo, Aragon, x2 Ring Wraiths
•9473 Mines Of Moria – Minifigures: Frogo, Gimli, Legolas, Boromir, x2 Goblins, x2 Skeletons, Cave Troll
•9474 The Battle Of Helms Deep – Minifigures: Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, Theoden, x5 Uruk-hai

I think these sets could be very popular with collectors and investors - and a few may even actually get played with as toys by children.

The other 2012 Lego releases which caught my interest were a Star Wars Lego game (Battle for Hoth), and four (possibly 5) further Heroica sets.  All of these look like Autumn/Winter products, but there's a chance they might be earlier.

Aghast at Radagast

One of my players has a magic-user with a raven as a familiar.  We play with miniatures, and although I've got several wizard figures, I thought it would be cool to try and find one with a raven.  A few minutes on the internet turned up Radagast from Games Workshop's LOTR range.  If you'd asked me to guess the price of this single 28mm metal figure, I would have said £4, maybe £5.  The actual price is a shocking £7.70 or if you're in the US, that'll be $12.25 please.

I checked a couple of other places for prices of metal figures and, imported Reaper ones are £3.50 or £4.10 each, for most adventurers, and Otherworld Miniatures charge £10/£11 for 3 human-sized figures.  I then turned to ebay, and snagged a part-painted Games Workshop Radagast for £1.47 + postage.

Although I'm not a fan of Games Workshop, I might buy some figures and scenery pieces from them, but they seriously need to sort out their prices.