Ruffian Huts Rebuilt & Ruffians Mustered

 Where Have all the Ruffians Gone?

Obviously its too hot to paint indoors at the moment (in the south of the UK), so a quick relocation to the garden seemed like a great solution. And  a very pleasant afternoon was spent yesterday finishing off the rework of the ruffian's huts. Not surprisingly this also led me to dig out the out my finished and half finished band of Sharkey's rogues. From the previous Scouring of the Shire campaign. Anyway back to the buildings. 

'Wake Up!, Sharkey has work for you'

Added a bit to detail to all of the buildings including lock bars for the cells and door handles on the others. My reasoning is that the ruffians would have stolen as much as possible from the hobbit holes. So the blockhouse and guard house have nice brass door handles which haven't been looked after. 

Guardhouse

Poor State of repair, weeds on the roof

Blockhouse & Cells

After the walls were covered in filler and sanded. 

Basic white finish!

The walls were originally finished in a mid brown but the colour was just too damn close to the tarpaulin roofs and so had to be lightened up. 

Original wall colouring

Sharkey's Rogues

To be fair these were also painted very quickly to get ready for the Shire campaign, but definitely not my finest work.  I am generally not keen on doing paint stripping on miniatures (read any post where I have to do some paint stripping), but the one official GW ruffian did go into the paint stripper. The rest will be rebased and given a general tidy up. 

The Ruffians weren't any better than the huts!

Sharkey however, is the one figure from this lot which I do like and will not be changed, except to paint base back to black. Which is the correct colour for bases and not brown or bright  green as was the GW fashion back in the 90's and early 2000's. 

That looks much better!

Now I do really like the official Citadel Lord of the Rings miniatures, but at £8 per character figure (Not including postage).  I don't like them that much. Even the basic figures on eBay aren't cheap. Although I am tempted to get a couple of them.  

There are a number of half finished figures that never made to the campaign in time. So, I attempted to create my own versions of the characters (from the 2nd edition source book) with all the right equipment using Frostgrave sprues and stuff from the bits box. Here is the first one - Sid Briarthorn, ruffian leader. 

Sid, the ruffian leader

Rob