Painting Project - 15mm Dwarven HOTT Army - Part 1

CHOOSING THE ARMY

In my opinion, Hordes of the Things (HOTT) is an excellent set of rules for fighting fantasy battles with miniatures. It doesn't require many miniatures, you can use any minatures you want, the rules are clear with a lot of supporting illustrations, and best of all it plays in under an hour. I've read the rules front to back numerous times, have visited just about every HOTT site on the internet, viewed scores of galleries of painted armies, devoured countless battle reports, subscribed to the HOTT mailing list, and spent many an hour just thinking about the rules. And you know what? I'll let you in on a little secret - I've never even played a game! Well, that's all going to change this year. My goal is that I'm going to paint myself a couple of armies and I'm going to play HOTT in 2007!

For me, I have to be in the right mood to paint miniatures. There must be an availability of time for me to sit down and actually paint and there must also be an enthusiasm for what I'm doing. Having just finished reading The Hobbit and now reading the Lord of the Rings, my enthusiasm for painting a fantasy army is at an all time high. Combine that with currently being on two weeks holidays means the time is right to start this project.

Some time last year I bought a bunch of 15mm dwarves on eBay. They appear to be a mixture of Grenadier, Ral Partha and perhaps some other company I'm not sure of. If anyone can identify them please let me know.

The first step for me was to think about the design of my dwarven HOTT army. The HOTT rules have an army list for a generic dwarf army. It consists of a Hero General (Dwarf King), 9 x Blades (dwarves with axe or warhammer) and 1 x Shooters (dwarves with bow or crossbow). I felt this was a fairly good representation of what I imagined a Tolkien or Dungeons & Dragons-inspired dwarven army would look like. I decided to go with this list but to add an extra Shooters element as an alternative for one of the Blade elements. I also decided to make one of the Blade elements an alternate general element. Here is the army all laid out into its various elements. You can click on the image for a closer view.

Here are some close up images of the actual elements. If anyone can tell me what company made the individual miniatures I'd really appreciate it.