Payment Clause Is Coming To Town

On the twenty-second day of Advent the WoffBoot brought to me ... a fat man with a white beard.

And he's ho-ho-homicidal!

An Easterling Parade

The Easterlings. Mortal men in the service of the Dark Lord Sauron, summoned from the evil kingdoms of the ... I'm going to guess 'the East'.

You might remember them from such memorable scenes as: the bit where Frodo and Sam disguise themselves as a rock.

"It was the Black Gate of Mordor! It was a pivotal point in the story!"

But the costume designer's work was not in vain, and from that humble beginning sprouted a subset kingdom of LotR miniatures. Fairly nice ones too, so when I was looking for halberdier models that didn't look ... well, bloody ridiculous (seriously, a barefoot Empire soldier?), I went back to the LotR range.

"Take it easy, Barry, it's just a rock. A rock with two sets of hobbit footprints leading up to it."

Gold and Glory

My armies have never had very good standards (boom-tisch!) but back when this was a Dogs of war army, it would be unthinkable not to have a Paymaster (who, in addition to holding the coffers, fights like a hero, carries a big flag and allows Break Tests to be re-rolled – so I think I can see the direction they were going with this one).

Guys Who Went Nuts Over The One Ring Society: founder members.

The original rules also allowed the Paymaster to be accompanied by an account-like figure called a Moneylender – his stats were poor, but he allowed some boosts to the Paymaster’s abilities.

My first thought (and I use the word ‘thought’ advisedly) was to place both Paymaster and Moneylender on the same 40mm base. I could create a nice little scene with a model paychest, and it would act as a unit filler for the Paymaster’s Bodyguard. There were a number of glaring obvious problems with this:

• Unit fillers are meant to linger at the back of the regiment, bulking them out and being easily removable when it takes a lot of casualties. Not with two distinct characters standing front n’ centre.
• What happens if they leave the unit? Or if only one of them wants to?
• What happens if one of them gets killed?
• How do you determine where attacks are directed?
• What, no Stomp attacks?