Haul from the Fleamarket at the local Wargames Club

Fleamarket at the local Wargames Club in November. I always find some nice old stuff. (Yes, late, but at least I took photos.)

I had seen these Warhammer Wood Elf Warhawk Riders before but really believed they were from the early nineties because the riders are very small. My memory deceived me, they are old but not that old. I finally found them in a Games Workshop catalog from 1997 (but not in earlier catalogues). The horses below them are from Minifigs, Aureola Rococo Series, (ARH4 Knights Silver Rose Horse). Sadly no riders. And a cave troll from Lord of the Rings (GW).

These unicorns and riders are also from Minifigs, Aureola Rococo,  Mortals & Male Warriors (ARXC1, the horse ARH5). All a little bit damaged but nothing that can't be fixed. I think they make good companions to Brandor the Avenger, they look very similar. Unicorns where a thing back then. Two ogre spearmen without weapons from Ral Partha (02-149) and some Chainmail Gnolls.

Plastic Undead Chariots (Warhammer?) bought from someone who had about 20 pieces of them on his table. Or more.

And a sci-fi bridge from Mutant Chronicles for my invisible and still "undefined" sci-fi project. 

Brandors Archers are ready

With the news on here the whole day, it's gotten really hard to focus on anything else. Programming is also very difficult for me at the moment because all the time I have the feeling that I am missing something. I really have to force myself to stop constantly following the news. Seems that I'm still hoping for a spontaneous change in the situation that will end the madness.

However, one thing is clear. After what has happened during the last days we will probably not be able to find our way back to that (relative) calm in which we made ourselves so comfortable. (Here in Europe) We must not again succumb to the illusion that our old enemy, the Soviet Union, is really gone. It was only sleeping. And so were we.

Well, besides that, by working a little bit on miniatures every evening, I still managed to get something done. Brandor's archers are ready, 31 men in all.

Next come these figures, which need a repaint and repair. They also will be part of Brandors Avengers. Most of the minis are so called 'Forest Warriors' from the World of Greyhawk series made by Minifigs. Meant as a kind of wood elves I believe. Even though some of them look more like Aztecs don't they? But I think in the 70's an 'exotic look' was enough to be seen as a fantasy figure.  Maybe also in real life.

These gentlemen are bandits who once followed a certain 'Robin Hood' on his crusade against the establishment. (Figures by Hinchcliffe). According to the Lost Minis Wiki, they were also sold as playing pieces for a boardgame.

I have not yet been able to identify these two guys. Any ideas?

The Great Reinforcement - Box 2 - Woodelves, Hobgoblins, pig-faced Orcs and Smurf-Elves

Here are the contents of the second box from my big figure purchase. With both boxes, my fantasy collection has grown by the enormous amount of 465 miniatures and the number of figures for the project has now exceeded the mark of 1000 pieces.

You could say "stop, that's enough". And that would be true. That was my first thought too. But then I decided that it would be foolish to say that because I wouldn't stick to it anyway (I know myself). And secondly, it's still possible to get old treasures at the moment for a reasonable price sometimes. That will become harder and harder. I've watched the prices for classic miniatures and other old Wargaming and RPG stuff rising like nothing else in the past few years. So I keep on looking.

The miniatures now have to be restored and partially repaired. I think I'll save myself the stripping of the old paint this time, it's just too much effort. I hope the existing paint layer turns out to be a usable foundation.

You could already see some of them in my blogpost from Monday. Maybe you remember the archers, which I was able to reinforce during my 'time travel experience'. They once were 3 miniatures hopeless alone and are now 30 pieces strong, a fairly large unit.

These hobgoblins complement the Black Baron miniatures I found last August. If you think that they look a little bit weird: the design is based on the illustration in the first D&D Monster Manual form 1977. So this is how D&D-Hobgoblins originally looked like...!

Ahh...pig-faced Orcs, also an early D&D design. Everybody should have some, no household is complete without them.

Orcs in the background but what's that in the foreground? Smurf-Elves?

I went down the rabbit hole almost to the beginning with this purchase. You can hardly go much further back in time. In this post here on the blog 'Where the sea pours out' we can see that the the hobgoblins were already available in June 1977 when Minifigs announced them in the Battle for Wargamers magazine. The pig-faced orcs were available in 1978. 

Perfect timing, it seems the TSR and Minifigs worked hand in hand. The D&D Monster Handbook was released in 1977 and miniatures based on drawings in that book are produced and sold in June of the same year. In those days Minifigs had the sole rights to produce figures under the D&D label and at that moment in time they were somehow at the forefront of the fantasy hype to come...

(By the way, has anyone seen miniatures from this collection in action anywhere, does anyone know who the previous owner was? From the rest I've seen during the sales, the owner was a very busy wargamer. He had big armies for the ECW,  7YW, Romans, Greeks, Persians, also medieval knights and armies for the Malburian age. Old school miniatures, armies for both or more sides or nations. What was sold must have been about 10-15.000 miniatures, if not more. Nearly everything painted, the pike & shot minis often based in groups of 4. I don't believe that nobody has ever seen them.)

A REAL time travel experience: Going back to 1987 simply by car (no DeLorean involved...)

One afternoon last November (2019) I got in the car and drove back to the year 1986 with no problems. Or was it 1987? I made a little trip and visited the shop where I bought my very first fantasy miniatures. The shop has a different name today and also has moved, but it's still the same company. And although they now actually operate a different business, there are still remnants of the no longer actively operated gaming and miniature business to be found in a corner of the shop. (Yes, strange but true...)

What I found was a big surprise: I found the matching figures for the wood elves from Essex Miniatures of which I only bought a few pieces in 1986/87 in the same shop. Packed in the same blue blisters as I used to know them.

 

When I told the shop assistant (not the owner but also an expert in the hobby) that I had bought figures from that series from them decades ago, he told me straight away that these blisters had been lying around since that time. And the blisters did look old, the outside was crushed and the foam inside had seen to much sunlight.

Back home and back in 2019 and I did a little research. Company reports published on the Internet showed me that the address on the back of the blisters was only used by the manufacturer (Essex) until 1995. After that they moved. And the shop I'm talking about also had a kind of 'business interruption' between 1989 and 1995. They did not run a retail shop during that period. (They came back as a producer of their own line of miniatures, but thats a different story.)

So it is very likely that the photos above actually show exactly the blisters that were hanging on the hook right next to my first fantasy miniatures when I bought them.

Seriously, I have absolutely no doubt: These minis were waiting for me for over thirty years! I am sure, I will never get that close to the feeling of real time travel again. A year later and I am still extremely happy that I made the trip.

The old group of wood elfs was always much too small to form a real unit and therefore didn't really fit in anywhere. Thats over now.  They will be part of a small army of brigands : Brandors Avengers.

This block of lead, that I also found, is of course not a wood elf but what was a "giant" back then. It is the Essex figure Q83 "Giant", modeled by Bob Olley. With its rather low height of just 50mm probably too small to be a giant in a modern game. But nice, a bit weird and I really like it. Very 'old school'.

 

Above's another look into the past: In the "Agamemnon" magazine No. 2 from 1986 I found the announcement of the wood elves shown above (FN103-FN107). Also look out at the masterpieces of modeling art from Citadel on the right. Even big ones start out small.

This is how some hobby magazines used to look like. You didn't had photos of everything and if you weren't buying in a store, you often would order the 'Dwarf with sword', 'Three different wood elf archers' and the 'Adventurer number five with a dagger' from a simple list and then you were really curious to see what you would get. Back then, people still had the courage to take little 'risks', don't they? 

By the way: As I wrote in a previous post, Essex has stayed true to itself and is still producing its old fantasy miniatures.

And now : Guess where I will go 'shopping', when the Corona-Lockdown is over...