Painting - GW Mordor Orcs

  This week's entry is twenty five GW Mordor orcs. They are a combination of plastic and metal and include two of the ooooold metal orc models from when the line was first started, now re-purposed as captains. 

First up, painted as Isengard orcs.

In the movies Saruman has normal orcs in his army as well. They do the grunt work around Isengard, hatching new Uruk Hai, cutting down trees, a little light gardening. Since you can take orcs in the list (at least in the old rules) I am painting up some of my orcs as Isengard. For this lot it's mostly the flag and the shield on the captain, though the two archers with helmets have an S rune on them.

You can see the shield symbol on the captain. This is how they are described in the book, a black circle with a white hand in it.

The captain is one of the two old metal sculpts. They are soooooo much better than these crappy plastics.

This guy is just prime LotR sculpting from back in the day.

Next up are the "heroes" for the Mordor orcs. These are three metals and a plastic Gothmog.

The third guy from the left is another ancient metal orc re-purposed as a captain.

The three metals are some of my favorite GW sculpts. They are just clean, interesting and well detailed. Gothmog is a great example of the current plastic state of the art; very good considering the medium.

I don't usually run the drummer or the whip dude, but you never know what the new rules will lead to.

The last group is 13 archers. These guys are the same as the Isengard ones above, there are only two poses, and they're really the same dolly with a different head. The main difference is that my Isengard army, painted years ago, has brown bases with grass on them and Mordor have grey bases with a single brown tuft.

These are pretty good for plastics of this stage of LotR development, but still not great.

The archers will fill in Mordor, Minas Morgul and Moranon lists and will provide the fire support for the Moranon orcs I painted last year.

These will also serve in other fantasy games like D&D, Pathfinder, Five Leagues from the Borderlands, Rangers of Shadowdeep and Oathmark.

This group means I have enough painted orcs for almost all of my needs, barring Oathmark. So, naturally, I'll be painting up a bunch more of the non-archer ones soon.