Rohan at War – New Models!

While I’ve had a productive week, I don’t have tons to show off so for this week, I think I’ll just share some exciting news from Games Workshop instead.  If you’re a fan of the Horse Lords, you’ve probably already been looking forward to the release of Rohan At War but the amount of stuff up for pre-order today is really crazy.  Not only is the fantastic looking set of Saruman and Wormtongue up for grabs, but also the new Rohan terrain kits are nearly out.

As someone whose focus within the hobby is painting, these new sculpts certainly catch my eye.  The level of detail and the likeness to Christopher Lee on Saruman are top notch.  GW’s painting team might be making that mini look a bit easy and I don’t know how many people can achieve the similar results as I suspect they used extensive stippling to achieve such a realistic cloth look.  The palisades look like they could be a pretty nice “drybrush special” where you can get a lot of the fencing done quickly and nicely just by drybrushing.  The Rohan House looks a bit tougher to me as the wood doesn’t look like it has much detail except for the pieces that have horses on them.  With that said, Games Workshop needed to put out terrain like this as many other companies offer MDF terrain that were a perfect fit with Rohan.  GW’s plastic will almost definitely be better looking and higher quality than MDF and will hopefully be easier to assemble as well.

While all of this is coming out soon, GW/Forge World also teased new sculpts for Rohan’s enemy, Dunland!  While the brief depictions of Dunland in the Two Towers was well done, they’ve never been a faction in Lord of the Rings that I cared much about.  With that said, I’m glad GW is bringing them back and expanding their range.  As you can see below, Dunland looks like it will have enough kinds of minis for a full-fledged army in the near future!

One nice thing I can see about the new Dunlending sculpts is that they should be fairly quick and easy to paint up because of the large amounts of mail.  Slap on your metal basecoat, shade it down, and then edge highlight and that’s most of the model done!  The new heroes may not be so easy to paint but they have nice details and should be good fun to paint as well.  All in all, nice work by GW on the new sculpts.  Some of their earlier plastic MESBG sculpts had some flaws to them but these newer ones seem to be of a higher quality.

If that isn’t enough good news, there are tons of returning Rohan and Isengard minis available for pre-order too.  Way too many for me to list but I encourage you to check out the preorders on Games Workshop’s site to get all of the details.

One thing I did want to mention is that GW is retiring some minis from the store (at least for a while) which is a bit disappointing even if I understand why they’re doing it.  Here are the minis that are going to be disappearing soon:

• Wood Elf Command
• Wood Elf Sentinels
• Arnor Command
• Warriors of Arnor
• King Arvedui & Malbeth the Seer
• Mahud King
• Mahud Raiders
• Mahud Warriors
• Mahud Warriors with Blowpipes
• Barrow Wights
• Gulahvar, the Terror of Arnor
• Dead Marsh Spectres
• Shade

It is pretty clear that the Mahud are going away and so are Arnor as armies that GW will sell in their store.  Both of those are more of GW’s creation than they are fleshed out in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work so that makes a lot of sense for them to fade away at least for a while.  The Barrow Wights is a bummer for me as those actually are used in a Fellowship of the Ring scenarios as well as one in the old Scouring of the Shire.  While they’re not hard to find on eBay, I still will try to pick them up in the near future so I can play Fog on the Barrow Downs one of these days.  All in all, I’m sure some people will be bummed about this news but hopefully more people are excited for the new models than sad for the ones leaving.  GW may release these old models again as a Made to Order too so I don’t know if this will necessarily be the last time we see them.

With all of these releases coming out in 2019 from Gondor At War to Scouring of the Shire to Rohan At War, are you feeling a little overwhelmed and spoiled for choice?  It is great for the game to see MESBG so well supported but I’m not sure anyone (who didn’t already have a huge model collection) can keep up and play all of these scenarios or even buy all of these new minis!  I’d love to play Gondor At War or Rohan At War but between An Unexpected Journey scenarios and Scouring of the Shire, there’s just no way I’ll be able to anytime soon.  Not that I’m complaining of course, it is great to be spoiled for choice and I think it will keep me going in the hobby for quite some time.

What are your thoughts on all of this news?  Any models catch your fancy?  Any Rohan, Isengard, or other related factions that you’re disappointed we haven’t seen yet?  I’m still waiting and hoping that we’ll see at least one new Ent sculpt as they are one faction I’d love to collect even if there aren’t many narrative scenarios to use them in.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts down below! 🙂