Ok, I know that the rules don't need miniatures to play, but I love miniature figures so I will be using them with TOR.

I created a "battle mat" by creating a a field divided up into zones (think of a football filed with the yard lines). Each zone is for one of the stances. On the sheet I put each stance's TN as well as notes for the special actions that can be performed from that stance.

Anyway, I thought that I would give a shout-out to a couple of good sources of Middle-Earthy figures.

Of course there is the LotR line from Games Workshop. They are nice but pricey.

Games Factory. I recently discovered this company and purchased a couple of boxes of figures. They are very nice and relatively cheap. $20 gets you around 30 figures. They are plastic so not as good as metal but they are very customizeable with lots of options.

The Viking Bondi and Viking Huscarls would make good bardings.

The Saxon figures would make good Woodmen.

They also have some nice looking Orc Warband figures.

Any other lovers of minis out there?

Damn! I had this exact same idea yesterday. Started working on layout and artwork on it today....

Great minds... eh?

/wolf

Definetly! I have tons!

Unfortunately (some might say) most of what I use now are pre-painted DnD Miniatures. Because ever since my first kid I have not had time to sit down and paint anymore, nor space to leave a painting station standing for more than 5 minutes...

But they are getting older now, more sensible, maybe I can.... *longing grin spreads* Yeeeeessss....

/wolf

Turns out that Mithril Miniatures is still in business and still producing LotR figures. They are a bit on the large size (32mm) but they look to have excellent sculpts and details.

Wow! That was a blast from the past. I actually have a couple of their Minis at home.

Yes there is definitely a problem of scale here. Since most of what I now use are true 25mm.

I think I'll just go with GW's LotR minis and crack open the pain!

ADDED: .... I mean Paint... I said Pain, but I meant Paint... honest...

/wolf

If you have a local game shop check them out. Games Workshop recently converted entirely to plastic and resin figures. So my local store put all their metal figures, including the few LotR figures they had, on sale for 40% off.

I stocked up!

I liked Mithril minis because they had realistically proportioned weapons and the figures came pre-primed.

Agreed, but I think GW's MiddleEarth range is quite sensible as well. not the exaggerated humongous weaponry and armour you see in their other lines.... or maybe it just feels realistic by contrast?

Besides, I like plastic. :-)

/wolf

I've got a rather huge collection of GW miniatures, but most of them are of the Gondor and Isengard factions, so not terribly suitable at this stage. Besides, I'm not really a fan of using miniatures in role playing, as strange as that may be to hear from a player of GW games.

Handily I got a goodly collection of GW's LoTR minis (And some Foundry historicals to fill in any gaps), because we use them in our MERP game. So I am all set in that regard.

I never liked the sculpting on the Mithril minis, to be honest. They're not bad, but the style just doesn't appeal to me. Not then (in the 1980's), and not now.

And in the smaller scale, I got Battle of Five Armies box and rules, plus loads and loads of other unpainted 10mm minis (for example Copplestone) to make pretty much any army of the Western ME, so epic battles are no problem, provided I get the buggers painted some day...

I wonder if GW is gonna re-release BOFA when that the movie is coming out? Probably some new 28mm minis are in the offing as well?

Yep. GW's Middle Earth range is quite good in general, mostly being the brainchilds of the Perry brothers and Alessio Cavatore (hm... another italian. Seems like a pattern ).

The minis are smaller than GW's other ranges, the plastics are great and not too expensive, and the proportions of most are good. Plus are easily avaliable .

I love the Mithril figs (and have a bunch from back in the day), but I'm not up to painting minis these days.

If you don't mind the look of things from the movies, there is the pre-painted plastic tradeable LOTR minis game, the ones with the big clunky hex shaped bases. I have a ton of these and have cut the figures off the bases and glued them to coins. You can still find them on ebay, and the common figs are not too expensive.

I actually like the fact that TOR doesn't use any kind of map/grid for combat. I plan to just use the minis for character representation, and for very, very vague positioning at the table.

John

Many years ago I picked up two sets of miniatures: Fellowship of the Ring and Sauron's Dark Ones by Grenadier and of course, I still have them!

Sadly, not sure a party in The One Ring will survive an encounter with the Balrog, or a Wraith, but the Orc Captain, Troll, Warg, Wight and Vampire may be of use.

And when book three of the game is released in 2013 (can I preorder that yet?), I have Gollum and Saruman waiting!

Lots more miniatures including some mounted Fellowship members, but don't recall the maker.

I feel the urge to visit eBay....

You'd probably want two range band sheets, one for heroes and one for adversaries. A single sheet takes up less space, but I think it would be confusing to have, say, hero archers and orc archers in the same stance band.

I had a similar idea, but was going to make one A5 sheet per hero.

They would be small enough to go on the table and could be overlapped if need be. The intent being to place the monsters they are fighting on the heroes own sheet.

Want cheap miniatures ?

Check out Ebay... LOTS and I do mean LOTS and v.reasonable (and better) prices.

I ended up with 200 minis - many painted for less than 30 quid that will do for PC's and goblins/orcs/guards/etc

I too have lots of Mithril minis plus a few GW ones. As for the Mithril minis, I like the way they look very realistic, well-proportioned and seldomly "high-fantasy"-like. For example, they (the men and mostly elves) would also work well in a historical miniature setting. Since Tolkien's descriptions of humans and elves (and their gear) is IMO evocative of such "realistic" representations, I love Mithril for this aspect (with a few grudging concessions to artistic license).
IMO Mithril's minis are a bit lacking in the "fantastic" creatures. Trolls for example simply look like big, heavily muscled humans (apart from their more hideous faces). Mithril's Mûmak is almost only an ordinary elephant of a smaller species and hardly a giant one like in the books. I think the GW minis (and their movie representation) have a clear advantage here.

I am fully aware though that some of these problems are due to the license of Mithril (though for others no one is to blame but themselves), but in the end the minis still have the problems, regardless of the causes.

Even though I mostly like the movies, I don't like the GW movie-versions of the human, elven etc. minis (e.g. the "human" races in a wider sense). As already said, their "creatures" are mostly more fitting IMO though. Even though GW LotR minis are much better (and more realistically) proportioned than the rest of GW stuff, they are still much less "accurate" in this respect than Mithril.

In the end, I like to combine Mithril's men (e.g. the "humans" in the wider sense) with GW's creatures (e.g. Trolls) to get the - for me - best representation of Tolkien's books and stories in miniature terms.

Best
Tolwen

Anyone care to share their "battle mat"? Sounds cool.

I'm actually pondering a series of concentric circles with forward stance in the center and rearward stance on the outside. Put a dotted line down the middle so that the adversaries in the center circle (foreward stance) are on one side and the heroes on the other, and you have a graphic that shows immediately who's in what stance but also separates the sides.

I would love to see that! I did one for an early playtest, but I can't find the file now. I guess that I was so sad that nobody liked the idea in that playtest phase that I just deleted the entire file...

Francesco

Oh, Francesco, from one writer to another, never delete anything! You never know when it may spark. With that said, I have Hope--in fact I'm spending some now--that you will find the file.

If all else fails, you can make a new one!