Tome of Minis

I'm a big fan of Middle Earth, so it should come as no surprise that every release that Games Workshop have done for its Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game is one that interests me greatly. At Ardacon 2021, they have announced a number of new miniatures, and a couple of new books, but what really catches my eye are the two new pieces of terrain. It feels like these are almost celebrating the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of Fellowship of the Ring, and the release of the first Lord of the Rings strategy game from them.

Amon Hen was the site of Boromir's death when he tried to take the ring from Frodo, and then fought an Uruk-hai attack to allow Frodo to escape. In the reveal it looks that good, it looks exactly how I'd want it to be, though knowing that I don't yet have the skills to make it look like that.

We've been able to re-enact the scene from the book/movie with miniatures they released in March 2002, but this is the first time we've seen terrain for this. The metal miniature set however is now out of production, but did have a Made-To-Order release fairly recently. With this new piece it would make sense for us to see plastic versions of these miniatures in the near future, like they did for the original Fellowship set. This new piece is made from resin, so the expectation is that this will be a ForgeWorld release in a similar vein to the ruined Watchtower of Amon Sûl at Weathertop. It being the same material, and it looks to be the same sort of size, it seems probable that this will be around the region of £200 also; though no price has yet been published.

On what I expect will be the much cheaper side, is a plastic modular kit of Dol Guldur - Sauron's fortress during his time as The Necromancer (see The Hobbit movies for details). Looking at the small details there's a lot of iron work keeping the stone bricks in place, suggesting an ancient look. Whilst I do like the terrain piece over all, I think there's a little too much of the iron work. The kit looks to be a reasonable size, but feels like it will work much better when buying multiple kits to create a sizeable piece of terrain. My hope for this is that it would be around the £60-75 region so it's in the same price bracket as the Lake Town house multipack. We shall see though! If it's cheaper it will certainly be more palatable for making larger structures.

Outside of Middle Earth, I can see this being a handy conversion piece for use in the mortal realms of Age of Sigmar, and the grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000. I think Dol Guldur would work for either more or less as-is, but with a bit of kit-bashing could make for some interesting terrain pieces for those boxed games also. I could almost imagine using a couple of these sets as a surround for a Shattered Temple.

Joining these scenery pieces is the 'Fall of the Necromancer' supplement, followed by the 'Defence of the North' afterwards. Joining these is a new Witch-king of Angmar miniature which features the character on horseback, and on foot, with different war gear options for assembly such as with or without his Morgul Crown. Although we won't know what all the options are until we've seen the sprues, it seems the head at least probably won't be easy to make swappable using magnets.

These are ones I'm very much looking forward to!