I am wondering what everyone has done for their goblin commands. Do any if you guys have advice for making a Goblin Banner? I am planning on making a mordor orc force and am struggling to find orcs or goblins with a flag or banner that fit the LoTR style.
Goblin Command Ideas
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@Robert Mastrud
Easy way, just assemble a lancer thanks to the Goblin Warband box, remove the lance and replace it with thin metal rods (that vid could be useful) to achieve that result:
Less easy way, convert an Orc Champion from Northstar Miniatures
Carefully remove the axehead, extend the handle with metal rod (using the video above or the picture), add a banner made of paper (here) et voilà
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@Steven StGeorges Thank you so much! The Great Eye will reside on a banner of your method of construction.
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Well, thats one way to do it. For a flag guy, I would just use an extra Warlord Ashigura command flag (from the spear box) and a warlord orc which mixes in pretty well with the WA goblians. Open handed minis are pretty useful for making command options, infact they are quite handy👐😉(okay got that bad pun out of my system😆)
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@Robert Mastrud
OR ... you could buy the LOTR Orc Banner bearer directly from Noble Knight.. HERE
25$US + shipping .. fair price to my mind.
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Pretty easy scratch build. Bamboo skewers are great for banners and general pole work. If you want one that's knarled and twisted, find a suitable twig. Pretty much any garden or park will provide.
The banner part is simply made from any flat material that will hold drapery. Heavy foil, greenstuff rolled thin, tissue paper that's been soaked in thinned down PVA glue. Or repurpose a plastic banner from the bitz box. I have plenty of unused GW Beastman, Orc and Ogre ones that would fit.
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There's plenty of this guy and his banner bits floating around right now. Is it a LOTRs style banner? I don't know. I think it looks cool.
If I ended up with the whole Murknob Banner miniature I would use the banner bits with one WGA goblin to make the standard bearer, use the head and weapon on another WGA goblin to make a champion, and maybe the ginormous body with WGA goblin head and arms to make another champion.....
Otherwise, Mark Dewis is right.... there's plenty of orc, ork, skaven, and goblin banner bits out there that would work nicely.
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@Steven StGeorges
Good video. Just saved that to Favorites.
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@JTam
Always a pleasure my dear JT.. but which one since I posted a couple? 😁
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@Steven StGeorges
The first one. The building of an entire banner from scratch was cool.
The second was informative as well. But I think I've mastered paper banners.
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@JTam
Indeed.. quite a lovely and simple DIY video.
Do you have, in your bookmarks, a video about banners made of aluminium can?
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@Steven StGeorges
I don't think I do. I must have a book with a section or a magazine article somewhere though....
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in the book, LOTR orcs/goblins seemed to use cloth banners like everyone else. just with their own iconography. (the red eye for Sauron/mordor, the white hand for Saruman/isengard, etc. the witchking of Minas Morgul seems to have used some sort of evil moon face) no mention is made of them being ragged, but it would fit with the aesthetics of their gear described in the book.
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I don't collect or game with Warhammer stuff, but I've bought the occasional box of them, and have somehow accumulated a handful of ragged banners from Warhammer and similar kits - it's one of those things I somehow accumulate in my bitz box without really trying, like spear arms and bows-and-arrows arms. I'm probably not the only one - you might be able to track down some spare Warhammer banners on whatever bitz sites are still out there.
About seven US bucks plus S&H can get you this plastic set of D&D style goblin command from Reaper - these goblins are a bit small compared to WGA's, but the plastic is super-easy to work with to trim it from the figures, and some creative kitbashing and a little green-stuff would yield you a great banner and large war-drum.
The Bones plastic bonds well to the plastic used in kits like Wargames Atlantic's goblins, so I think you could probably combine the banner and a pole-arm or whatever pretty easily.
Like Mithril said, Tolkien really gave us some fine, simple orc iconography to decorate the flags with - white hands, red eyes, and all the rest. Great stuff for those of us who aren't good at painting, and pretty easy to duplicate onto an army's worth of shields! I rather like the "ghost-face" icon on the flag for this Reaper orc (the Bones version won't be available for a couple years, sadly - he looks like he'd fit in well with the WGA goblins!):
Reaper does sell some metal add-on banners through their online shop, if you don't mind mixing metal and plastic. Reaper's accessory bits are great for this sort of customization.
Wargames Atlantic might get some mileage from a banner accessory sprue, come to think of it!
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I'm not a fan of metal parts at the top of a miniature. Likely to be top heavy. Adding a plastic banner to a metal figure is more practical.
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@Yronimos Whateley
How small? As "Snotlings" ? I was looking around to find out some alternative to such a now OOP part of the former GW Orc & Goblin "race".
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@Steven StGeorges These, as well as most of Reaper's goblins, seem to be in the heroic D&D/Warhammer goblin ballpark. Really they are only small if you keep in mind that this is technically a LotR thread, where the terms orc and goblin refer to the same creature.
Have you considered 15mm gobbos though? RPE's Demonworld has various bags of 40+ gobbos for 16 pounds on their website (comes out to 30€ retail at my local store). Should get you roughly four bases each. They seem to be ~13mm tall, which would totally work for snotlings.
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@Blutze
I was inclined to buy the Goblin Honour Banner shown above as an addition to my Oldhammer Ork Raiders Boss Retinue since Snots are now OOP and almost impossible to find out around -excepted ebay. I think I am going to ask to one of my Ontarian retailers, the sole to offer Reaper minis actually.
But thanks for the advice mon cher Blutze.
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@Steven StGeorges - Sorry I didn't see this sooner, but yes, as Blutze says, these goblins are in the GW Goblin height range - smaller than WGA's goblins, but taller than Snotlings.
If it helps, Reaper used to include "M" or "B" cubes (short for "Metal" or "Bones" plastic, as shown) in the lower-left corner of the photo, to indicate size - the cubes are 1/4" (just a hair over 6mm).
Later, for a time, Reaper would use a scale to the right of the figures - I think the scale is in 1/2 inch (?) increments, as seen with these gremlins, which might be just about snotling-sized, IIRC:
(The scales were a great idea, but unfortunately I haven't been seeing them in photos of the newest figures!)
So, these gremlins might be close to what you're looking for - there's only four poses, but the plastic is easy to cut-and-paste and otherwise modify with reposing, weapons swaps, and the like. If nothing else, they might help fill in a mob led by more official snotlings.
Caesar miniatures - a China-based manufacturer of 1/72 soft plastic wargaming minis - for a time produced fantasy wargaming minis in that scale, with the result of orcs that were Goblin-sized, and goblins that were pretty darned tiny. Sadly, I don't think these are being manufactured anymore, but you might be lucky enough to spot some on an auction site or something. (Caesar wasn't the only company to do this, and you might find their competion's 1/72 plastic fantasy figures here and there, but I don't know a lot about those..) Caesar's figures, if you can find them, were interesting: they were produced in a nice old-school, retro '70s and '80s style of sculpting and design, of the sort you'd see in RPG illustrations before Warhammer, WotC, and Warcraft codified the modern "generic fantasy" style - I rather liked that retro aesthetic! (Plastic Soldier Review for pictures and other details.) In that scale, with a little creativity, you could get not just dirt-cheap snotlings, but also dirt-cheap elves to convert into sprites and fairies, dirt-cheap gnome/halfling/goblin-sized skeletons, and more.....
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@Yronimos Whateley
Reaper Gobs seem to be a good alternative to former Snots.. even if taller. Going to customise them nevertheless with greenstuff and various bits. I have seen some Snots on second-hand market but prices are over the top.
Caesar Miniatures seems to be available thru' a eponymous website, but most of references seems to be out of stock.
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If you can still track them down for a half-decent price, I think it's worth it - I thought they were a steal when they were still being sold for about US$10 for 36 figures for a little while several year ago, and regret not getting more than a box of each of them at that price at the time, when they were easy to find.
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