I ran this scenario for the first time at Britcon in August 2024 just as Midgard Heroic Battles was about to head to press for eventual release in November.

It was a big event, definitely one of the top Lardy Days on the UK circuit, and slightly nerve-wracking as I would be introducing some of the regular Lard gaming veterans to Midgard for the first time.

I needn’t have worried – it was a blast – and the response was excellent. However, on the eve of pulling the game out again for the Crackcon 6 event, I realised that I’d never shared most of these photos. So here you go!

With the death of Hector, many Trojans felt that their last hope had gone. The stone known as the Luck of Troy had been stolen away in the night by the cunning Odysseus of Ithaca.  What hope was left for the beleaguered golden city?

However, one morning, the sun burned brighter than usual; a column of armoured warriors arrived, guided by Paris himself.  These were no ordinary soldiers but Amazons, the famed warrior women who lived far away near the River Thermodon.  Bred for battle, they carried bronze spears and swords, but also shot arrows from both chariots and horseback. 

Welcomed through the gates, the Amazons were feasted and celebrated with the best provisions that Troy could muster.  Priam himself presented their Queen with a silver-hilted sword, and Penthesilea told her tale to the astonished Trojans. “We are here to aid you in your noble cause of driving off the Achaean locusts.  I, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, will use this sword to slay Achilles himself!  Since accidentally killing my beloved sister, Hippolyta, I have no wish to live in dishonour.  Let us take up arms and fight to free Troy and gain eternal glory!”

And so, the following morning, with a blast of bronze trumpets, the Scaean Gate opened and disgorged a horde of Amazons.  Sun glinting on their helms and arrow-tips, Penthesilea led her warriors to meet Diomedes of Argos, first out of the Greek camp.  A single combat was agreed between Podarces, brother of Prothesilaus (the first Achaean to be slain in the campaign) and the Amazon champion Bremusa as the others rushed to battle. 

The chariots of Achilles and Ajax the Great could be seen in the distance.  The women of Troy watched spellbound from the towers of Ilium: who would triumph?

Having tried out both Hairfoot and Wartnose Jousting, Mike B and I decided to get some all-goblin bouts in down at the club.

In case you’d missed it, Hairfoot Jousting is a fun little game from Joseph McCullough and Osprey Games. It’s a very low figure count game that plays in around an hour, so ideal for drop in/ drop out games at a show or a club night.

The first half of the book is about Hairfoot Jousting – a sport played for cheers and laughs by halflings riding twee oversized animals. However, turn into the second half and you find Wartnose Jousting – essentially the same set of rules, but re-skinned for goblins jousting each other for jeers and pain. Mike and I had both felt drawn towards the goblins so that’s what we were playing with.

Game 1 saw us taking on the challenge of the Spikefoot Run – a race/ combat event in which both sides take a three goblin team, designating two as the ‘runners’ (who have to complete laps of the arena) and one as the ‘blocker’ who has to, you know, whack the other team.

The main piece of scenery required for the scenarios is something to demarcate a 75 cm diameter arena. This doesn’t need to be anything special – Mike used a set of standard wargaming walls from Treefellas. Of course, being a goblin arena, there were also some unpleasant obstacles, including some spiked fences and pits that Mike had knocked up.

Hairfoot/Wartnose Jousting uses a very entertaining (if somewhat random) movement system. You begin your move by pointing your mount in the direction you want it to go, then roll a D6. There are six templates and you get one of these according to the number rolled! If you run into an opponent, you can whack them, hopefully causing Endurance loss, and if you run into an obstacle, you lose Endurance (though you gain a Jeering token as the crowd laugh at you. Get ten of these and you can trade them for a dice reroll).

Once you get into it, it’s not quite as mad as it sounds, as there are some special rules for each mount that can help you to plan your move. Frogs (being bouncy) can jump over obstacles in your path, avoiding damage in many situations. Cockroaches (being tough) ignore damage from running into obstacles. And several creatures have the ability to swap between different movement templates, giving you just a little bit more control. If you’re charging an enemy, because the templates are 60mm wide (the same width as the bases), you’re likely to hit them even if the direction wasn’t quite what you planned.

Anyway, back to the Spikefoot Run. My three challengers were Skulwig, riding a frog, Prince Charming (on a centipede) and Erbert on his trusty cockroach. Skulwig and Charming were sent to be the ‘runners’ (having some special rules giving me a bit more control over movement); Erbert was the ‘blocker’ as he could run into obstacles without damage.

Both pairs of runners set off, ricocheting off walls and obstacles as they progressed. Erbert had some success as a blocker, taking out one of Mike’s runners, and both sides progressed to rack up two laps apiece. Whoever could take the third lap would win it. Unfortunately, my runners had taken so much damage from their inept navigation of the course, Skulwig soon dropped out. Charming was limping towards the line when he was felled by a random event – a hail of pine cones from the spectators which did for his final point of Endurance! This left Mike with one runner in the race and he was ruled the winner.

Game 2 involved a more formal joust with the Boneyard Arena scenario. This involved a bit of a tourney spiced up with five skulls on sticks; there were bonuses for hooking the skulls with your lance, and if a single jouster managed to hook three skulls, they were the winner and the game was over. This sounded like a big ask but I thought I’d give it a go.

For this game, I fielded my complete team of frog-mounted riders (inspired by the art of Brian Froud – you can see a short video about making them here) converted from the official Northstar Miniatures for the game. These were Skulwig (yellow pennon), Kashan the Mighty (white pennon) and Sir Orrid (red pennon). Mike put out three unpleasant types wearing/ wielding different kitchen utensils – Pothead, Bellend and Axeman.

The game got off to an exciting start as both Skulwig and Axeman managed to hook skulls but started to settle down as we then kept missing (you need quite a high dice roll to pull it off – I think we’d both got lucky at the start). Attrition was lower in this game than usual as we were mostly focused on trying to hook skulls, though Mike’s goblins seemed to be hitting the wall an awful lot. I eventually figured out that this was down to Mike trying to gain ten Jeering tokens to be able to get a re-roll in order to hook more skulls! Typical goblin tactics :-).

Once Skulwig had hooked the first skull, I’d decided that he’d go for all the others, while his team mates concentrated on blocking the opposition. This soon paid off as Skulwig got his second skull.

However, by now Mike had got his ten Jeering tokens for a re-roll and just beat Skulwig to the skull by virtue of his initiative roll. However, even with the re-roll, he just failed to do it and Skulwig pulled it off, winning the match. At which point the goblin and frog-men supporters invaded the pitch.

This was a lot of fun and a great diversion from the more serious projects that I’d been working on. It’s not a hard game to learn and, if you can cope with the lack of total control over your mounts, is a brilliant choice for a club night when everyone needs something lighter. We will definitely play again!

I’m not generally given to nostalgia, and I’ve tried to avoid the Oldhammer tendency of gamers of my age to go and re-buy their teenage collections of Citadel Miniatures from Ebay, but I crumbled when I saw these! In two separate lots in 2023/4, I picked up the original models for Grom and 15 of his goblin guard, one of the very first Regiments of Renown (RR3) issued in 1984.

In 1984, I was a whole 12 years old. Having just started playing Warhammer with the first edition boxed set (when it was billed as ‘the mass fantasy battle roleplaying game’!) and being a big fan of goblins, I had to get these. Over a couple of years, I managed to get hold of the whole regiment (4 boxes with the different command models) and painted them in glorious Humbrol enamels.

They saw action in numerous games of Warhammer 1st and 2nd edition on the family table tennis table (fortunately a useful dark green colour) and saw action in the Blood Bath at Rorke’s Drift campaign and our own version of the siege of Middenheim before being sold off during a house move in adult life.

Nevertheless, these little chaps had made an impact. The monopose Perry-sculpted models were nothing compared to what was to follow but if there was a set that encapsulated the best bits of my early gaming days, this was probably it.

Hard as it is to believe in these days of Games Workshop PLC, when Citadel released new models back in the 80s, they didn’t all have rules, and codexes were in the distant future. Some models were released for non-Warhammer systems (e.g. the fab Dungeons and Dragons range) or without a games system at all (such as the much-loved Lord of the Rings models, or the Michael Moorcock minis). Absolute anarchy!

If I recall correctly (and I may be wrong), they were introduced with a little black and white booklet which came with the ‘Forces of Fantasy’ supplement for 1st edition, and then received updated statlines for the 2nd edition in the Spring 1985 Citadel Journal. I loved the little back stories that the studio writers had put together for each regiment and this was definitely an influence on my early creativity.

Anyway, back to the plot! Having got hold of some original models, what was I going to do with them? There was a part of me that wanted to relive my Humbrol enamels days, basing on a 20mm square of mounting board with Tetrion filler and bright green paint, but I decided against it. Although my original orc and goblin army was sold off many years ago, I’ve more recently collected a more Tolkien-based orc force for my games of Midgard Heroic Battles set in Middle-earth, so I decided to go for a colour scheme to match. After trying out a test model, I got down to work on the whole unit.

After cleaning up the minimal flash on these ancient goblins, each one had a black undercoat which was followed by a dry brush of gunmetal for the armour base. I tidied this up with some black acrylic and painted the skin in traditional layers. Colours used included a variety of khaki tones – always good for orc flesh. I don’t usually bother with eyes, but these had quite bulbous ones which were’t too hard to pick out with a dark red and yellow highlight in the centre.

I tried to vary the skin tones, helmet colours and fur tunics as I went along to give some variety to the miniatures. Taking inspiration from Tony Ackland’s original artwork, I also added some shield designs to some but not all of the models.

I hadn’t been able to get hold of an original standard bearer model and decided that I didn’t really fancy selling a kidney some of the prices being asked on ebay, so I made a snap decision to do a conversion instead. This consisted of drilling out a trooper’s hand and adding a greenstuff standard.

To create the bones seen in the original Dave Andrews art and on the mini, I robbed a couple of femurs from a plastic skeleton kit by Wargames Atlantic. WA have also recently produced a werewolf kit which had a perfect clawed hand to place on the top of the pole, which gave me a nice chance to mix old and new in the same unit!

With all the models finished, I decided to base them as a single group on a 120 x 60 mm unit base (using my favourite 2mm MDF round cornered bases from Warbases, as usual). This would allow me to arrange them in a diorama fashion and offer them some protection from handling.

To add some undulation to the base, some of the back rankers were raised up on a piece of 5mm foamboard to give the impression of standing on higher ground.

With everyone glued down, I then used my usual basing paste (see my Wargames Atlantic orcs article for details) before dry brushing and adding tufts, static grass and some grit.

The final touch was an original Citadel plastic shield, painted up as one belonging to Bugman’s Dwarf Rangers, another Regiment of Renown who had history with Grom and his friends!

Photos have been taken using Jon Hodgson Backdrops. I’m not sure which is my favourite, but it’s great to have some 1980s goblins back on the table!

Now, back to the present…

Bit of a brief update on another eventful week!

The Midgard Heroic Battles page on the website has undergone some reorganisation this week, collecting all of the videos, Force lists etc and placing them onto their own pages. Hopefully this has reduced the clutter a bit! It’s not quite finished yet and I have plans to streamline the rest of the site, but it’s a start.

I’ve just finished some rather nice Wargames Atlantic orcs – my first 3D prints from this company. See the full article here: https://mogsymakes.net/wargames-atlantic-digital-orcs/

Midgard Moot tickets went on sale last weekend and now around 2/3 have gone, though there’s still spaces in all three events. Full details here: https://mogsymakes.net/midgard-moot-26th-april-2025/

The biggest news of the week, however, was the announcement that Midgard had won Best New Wargames Rules 2024 in the Wargames Illustrated Awards! Delighted and slightly stunned, especially looking at some of the competition! Thanks to everyone who voted and has supported the game.

These marvellous little minis came to my attention last year when Oz sculptor Mathias started posting works in progress on his Instagram account (@macefaceminiatures). 15mm isn’t my main scale, but I’d enjoyed putting together some Wiglaf and Forged in Battle minis for a recent project and was willing to have a look. Nick at Northstar passed on some samples which, I regret to say, sat on the painting table half finished as I got distracted with real life and other such stuff.

The Christmas holidays were a chance to get these finished off and based, and I’m glad I did. The sculpts have more than a nod of Copplestone about them and match well with his work on the Barbarica and Wiglaf ranges.

I confess that I was slightly intimidated by Steve Dean’s superb paint jobs on these exact minis and decided to focus on what I do, which is putting together units to get onto the gaming table. I opted to go for something along the lines of a ‘slap chop’ approach – using Contrasts/ Speedpaints to add colour over a pre-shaded base layer.

After a quick clean up, mine were sprayed black and then dry-brushed with mid grey and white acrylics to provide a graduated base. This didn’t work quite as well as when I’ve used it on 28mm minis, as some areas (especially faces) were so small that they didn’t pick up much of the grey/ white paint. This resulted in a bit of fixing up later on, where I did some manual highlights onto these areas with traditional acrylics.

I failed to take step by step photos, but the sequence was:

1. Black undercoat followed by grey and white dry brush.
2. ‘Colouring in’ main areas with GW Contrasts/ Army Painter Sppedpaints: Skin (AP Crusader Skin); Hair (GW Nazdreg Yellow); Leather/ Boots (GW Snakebite Leather, GW Gore Grunta Fur, GW Gagarak’s Sewer); Horns (GW Skeleton Horde); Spears/ Bows (GW Snakebite Leather); Helmets/ Armour/ Blades (AP Broadsword Silver).
3. Clothing – blue was the theme here! (All GW Contrasts: I used a whole mixture of Talassar Blue, Ultramarines Blue, Celestium Blue, Gryph Charger Grey, with a few leaders with Luxion Purple).
4. This was followed by some light dry brushing with Vallejo Iraqi Sand to bring up detail and touching up darker areas with various acrylics as described above. It wasn’t an exact science! Some clothing had trimmings painted on, and I highlighted and added some runic designs to the banners.
5. Shields were painted acrylic black – I wanted a contrast with the bold blue clothing.
6. Following a coat of spray varnish (Winsor and Newton Professional Matt), I added the metallic highlights. Army Painter Shining Silver was used to dot in rivets on the shields, as well as to highlight all the iron and steel. The few areas of bronze/ gold were done with my usual technique: Vallejo Brass base, wash of brown ink, highlight with Vallejo Gold.

I’m planning to use these for Midgard Heroic Battles; 80mm x 40mm bases worked very well indeed for my 15mm early medieval collection, and has become a common standard amongst 15mm players, so I went the same way with these.

The bases are 2mm round-cornered MDF from Warbases, with the heroes being based on a 20mm and 25mm circles. Frosty bases were the order of the day using Gamer’s Grass winter and beige tufts and some Woodland Scenics snow scatter.

This also gave me the excuse to use the new Winter Book from Jon Hodgson Backdrops for the photo shoot! These are the A3 versions which gave me more options on the wide shots. I’m absolutely thrilled with how good these are (though I need to raise my photography game this year!)

Having got these finished, I can now work on the next project, though I hear that some Shield Maiden cavalry are just around the corner, so there may be more to come very soon!

You can find the Hornblower 15mm range at Northstar, along with the Gamer’s Grass tufts.

I was a bit young, only 11, but this game looked pretty good (we’d seen the adverts in White Dwarf), and I think I received it for Christmas. There wasn’t a wargames club anywhere in the town where I lived, so I got together a small group of like-minded friends and we did the best we could on my parents’ table tennis table (which, at least, was green). Having played D & D, we saw all the figures as individuals rather than units, and anyway, the initial tagline of this game was ‘the mass combat fantasy roleplaying game’, so it was all a bit confusing. And brilliant fun.

Fast forward forty-ish years, and I’m sat at a gaming table with one of the original authors of Warhammer, about to demonstrate my own ‘mass battle’ game to him. I’m not sure that twelve-year old me would have believed it, but there you go.

I got to know Rick during the heyday of Warhammer Ancient Battles, the historical game produced through Games Workshop in the early noughties.

I was fortunate enough to write two supplements for WAB (El Cid and Age of Arthur, the latter with Steve Jones) which Rick maintained an involvement in before the project’s end.

Having run into Rick behind Mount Erebor at a recent show, he kindly expressed an interest in Midgard Heroic Battles, so I agreed to pop over to demonstrate the game at some point in the future. Arthurian Britain was picked as the theme, we agreed a date, and it was game on. Having survived a savaging (well, licking) from his ferocious cockapoo as I entered his house, we carried the boxes through and set up on a portion of the mighty wargames table.

I brought a couple of Forces over, the same ones that have been appearing in our official videos with Richard Clarke – Artos and the Britons and Aelle’s Saxon Raiders. These were slightly different versions of the 300-400 point sample lists that appear in the rulebook.

The scenario was to be The Red Ford – a new one currently undergoing play testing that is likely to appear in a future Midgard supplement. Rick had set out some of his terrain tiles in a 6 x 4′, to which I added my ‘drop on’ river terrain piece. The lush green banks of mine didn’t quite fit the traditional green flock of Rick’s boards, but so what?

We both had soothsayers in our ranks with the Omens Trait and elected to spend a Mighty Deed each to gut a goat (or similar oppressed small animal) and read its entrails to foretell the future. We each rolled a 5, with our prophets each reporting that it was a good day to fight, my lord, and that surely we would win the victory! (Someone must have been fibbing, but we both added two Reputation tokens to our goblets). We were therefore much amused to find this porter on in the pub at lunchtime!

Anyway, back to the plot. Artos (Rick), determined to hold up the horde of West Saxons (me) about to pour into Dumnonia, sent Gwalchmai (AKA Gawain) down to the ford. He issued a challenge to single combat which Wiglaf (and his hound) was glad to take up, as turning it down would have meant a loss of Reputation.

With both Heroes succeeding at keeping their footing in the water, the combat went back and forth as Wiglaf first wounded Gwalchmai, then was wounded back in return. In the third and final round, however, my dice came up trumps and Gwalchmai ended up in the ford, ruining his day, his trousers and his fancy shield. The Saxon Force gave a great roar of victory and surged forwards towards the crossing.

Unfortunately for Aelle, while the front of the Saxon line surged forwards, the back ranks were clearly feeling a bit reluctant and refused to obey orders despite repeated yelling and bawling from the Heroes!

A round of dreadful Command Tests – and failed rerolls using the Heroes’ Mighty Deeds – left Aelle’s front line unsupported. The Britons, in contrast, had managed an orderly advance!

Seeing Hussa and his Saxons taking the left side of the ford, Rick did what any good Arthurian hero would have done and sent Artos’s warleader Bedwyr and his heavy cavalry smashing into the Saxon lines, hoping to break them before Aelle and the rest of the Saxons got their house in order. Reputation was duly gained (+1 for a Hero leading a charge and +1 for the first charge of the game – hurrah!), helping to make up for the loss of Gwalchmai in the single combat at the start.

I’d like to say that the battle for the ford was hard-fought, but Hussa and his Saxons turned in a desultory performance, inflicting no Stamina damage on the Britons while losing half of their own. Some superb ‘support saves’ from Rick meant that the cavalry Unit shrugged off a number of blows from the Saxons.

Worse, Saxon thegn Hussa was hit by a javelin in the melee and took a wound (this was me rolling 1 on my raven dice and sadly not for the last time in this game!)

With the combat won, Bedyr’s mounted comitatus pushed the Saxons out of the river. Using the momentum of their win in combat, the supporting Unit (with the red banner) swung round to cover off Aelle’s Saxon hearthguard who would otherwise have threatened the flank of Bedwyr’s men.

Reeling from the defeat on their left, it was time for Aelle to commit everything to battle. Along the length of the river, he issued the order to charge, and an enormous melee broke out in the knee-deep water. Many Reputation tokens were earned for this glorious deed, giving the Saxons a slight edge at this point in the battle.

On the Saxons’ left, Bedwyr’s gamble of an early charge was paying off. As the fighting continued, he broke Hussa’s Unit and forced the Saxon leader to choose discretion over valour as his men fell around him; Hussa chose to retire to the rear, but at the loss of a Reputation token as Bedwyr’s riders jeered him!

Bedwyr’s supporting Unit was now fully engaged with Aelle’s Saxon hearthguard who – with indifferent dice rolling – had to settle for pushing the British cavalry up the bank and on to Artos’ side of the river. This had almost immediate consequences as Rick had held back a third Unit of mounted companions as a rearguard. Seeing the potential crisis, they hurled their javelins and plunged in to join the melee.

Now it was action all along the ford, with Artos himself riding in and joining in the melee. Despite being in the thick of it, with both sides taking damage, Artos couldn’t roll a raven to save his life, passing all his Risk to Heroes tests. What a Hero!

In sharp contrast, Osric, another of the Saxon champions fighting in the ford, promptly rolled a 1 and found himself with a sword in his head. Ouch.

On the Saxon right, Artos’s foster brother Kai found himself face to face with his opposite number, Eanfrith. It would have been rude not to issue a challenge and Kai duly did so, dispatching the Saxon in two rounds.

I rolled on the Hero Death in Combat table, hoping for at least a glorious death, but found that Eanfrith had ended up as no more than ‘food for ravens’. Which is why he doesn’t get a mention in the Arthurian legends, I guess.

The fighting on the Saxon left continued, with the wounded Hussa and Wiglaf trying to shore up their flank. A change in fortunes finally saw the lead two British cavalry Units broken, but Bedwyr survived (albeit at the cost of a Reputation token) and Artos’s rearguard had held the line.

Unfortunately for him, Aelle paid the price for pushing so deep into the British lines. Having little support, he was wounded and then killed by Artos’s cavalry, leading to a catastrophic loss of Reputation (four tokens out of the goblet). The battery on my iphone took a sudden nose dive at this point as well, so I’m afraid our chronicler was forced to use stock pictures to illustrate the rest of the report.

Although the Britons had been damaged by the loss of two of the noble cavalry Units (three Reputation points apiece), the gains resulting from Kai and Artos’s heroics managed to shore up the Reputation of the Britons. The Saxons were now almost leaderless; although they were inflicting casualties upon the British Units, several of which were on the verge of breaking, the momentum was with Artos and his warriors.

The final turn saw the critical damage done, with the Saxons losing the wounded Hussa and another Unit, emptying their goblet of Reputation. With no Heroes left in position to lead a charge, the Saxons were broken and fled, leaving the Red Ford filled with their dead. Artos and his Heroes had defended Dumnonia once again, the great warleader having an apparently charmed life in the midst of battle. The bards would sing of this for a long time.

It had been a thoroughly enjoyable game, with Rick being ever the genial host and gaining the favour of the Gods in his dice rolling as a result! (Apparently this is not a normal occurrence – the dice rolling, not the geniality). It was a massive privilege to be able to demonstrate my game to someone who has been a major influence on the wargames scene and my gaming in particular.

I was especially pleased that Rick enjoyed the game and commented favourably on the rules, in particular the ‘support saves’ mechanism. We had a chuckle about nothing really being original in wargames rules, but I hope that Midgard Heroic Battles manages to assemble them to create something new. Unsurprisingly for someone who read The Iliad in his youth, Rick picked up the heroic ethos very quickly and got stuck straight into the game with a winning combination of single combats, heroic charges and sound tactics.

My thanks again to Rick for his hospitality and hosting the game. Anyone seen that soothsayer though? The Saxons would like a word!

UK/ USA/ Rest of World (non EU) customers can order from Reisswitz Press here.

EU customers can order from Karwansary Publishers here.

The rules will be released on November 18th 2024.

There are two official sets of Rulers & Tokens, detailed in the images below. First is a set of 3mm MDF measuring sticks and tokens which will be available from Reisswitz Press and are also included in bundles in the advance orders. These are only available in the one size (12 cm Spear Throw) as shown below. The outstanding art on these is by Handiwork Games, who also designed and illustrated the rulebook for that proper heroic battle feeling!

There are also STL files for 3D printing your own measuring sticks and tokens. These will be available from Reisswitz Press as STLs only from 18th November 2024. Being print files, they can be scaled up or down for different sized games. There will be an option to purchase the STLs for both personal and commercial use.

These were designed by me and then turned into STLs by the 3D wizard behind Reconquer Designs, whose superb miniatures also feature prominently in the rulebook!

Not only that, but the first official video has been released on the Too Fat Lardies YouTube channel. It’s already garnered 2.5k views in less than 24 hours, quite an achievement! Watch it here:

That’s all for now, but we’re expecting the next official video to drop tomorrow! All the best, James

On the cover, we see Raedwald, King of the East Angles in the first quarter of the 7th century, (representing the ‘Historical’ element) and Celtic Goddess Morrigan (pushing ‘Legend’ and ‘Fantasy’) – these two act as guides within the rulebook, offering advice to the would-be warrior and hero throughout its pages.

Behind them, the ‘Battle’ element is fully in progress in a mountain valley, with warriors facing off, a challenge to single combat being issued, and some fearsome beasts pushing their way out of the tales of myth and legend onto the battlefield.

Of course, in addition to Jon’s outstanding art, the whole thing is topped off by the awesome logo by Paul Bourne of Handiwork Games. Gentlemen, a heartfelt thank you to you both.

Midgard Heroic Battles is due to be published by Reisswitz Press in November 2024, with pre-orders going live soon.

Somehow the second Partizan show of the year has snuck up on us, so it’s time to show what I’ve been quietly working away on over the last six weeks. This is the biggest game that I think Morris & Chums have ever put on, with around 1500 28mm miniatures on a 12′ x 8′ L-shaped table. It’s part wargame, part art project, and I hope you enjoy it!

I reckon the project started when I was around 15, creating a large sculpture of the Battle of Five Armies at school, having been inspired by reading The Hobbit and playing Warhammer.

Sadly this clay artefact has been lost to the mists of time, but the idea remained, and was poked back into life by two things: reading The Hobbit graphic novel to my son (a joy) and then watching the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies with him (some fun bits but largely a travesty of JRRT, especially the Battle of Five Armies).

While browsing pics of Historicon 2021, I also came across a lovely game of the Battle of Five Armies by David Kujit. What struck me about this was the painted backdrop, immediately setting the scene for the battle, which planted the seed for our game.

The plan then went a step further as Middle-earth games became very popular within the Midgard Heroic Battles play test group and Dave Hunter – a bit of a Tolkien fan – joined and got involved with running games. We’re going to be playing the Midgard rules on a grand scale at the show, hopefully their final appearance before expected release by Reisswitz Press in November 2024.

From there. it was perhaps a slippery slope. I can’t remember what finally pushed the button, but it may have been James Deering from the play test group suggesting he come up to Nottingham and we put on a big Middle-earth game. Anyway, one day I woke up, and told myself that’s what we were going to put on at Partizan in October. And here we are.

I dropped a line to Simon Toey, well-known on the Facebook Wargaming in Middle-earth group for his cracking Tolkien miniature projects. I’m a huge fan of Simon’s style, where he combines classic metal and newer miniatures onto diorama-style bases with some conversion and stunning basing.

Not only did Simon agree to get involved, but he also added additional pieces to the collection to bring units up to size.

Simon’s dedication is demonstrated by his new Beorn model; we had a brief discussion about the original Reaper mini being a little small for the scale of battle that we had planned.

A few minutes later, he’d ordered up a new model and then set to work swapping heads and sculpting new fur as soon as it arrived. Following a quick suggesting from me about basing, and he was hard at work putting together Beorn’s goblin victims…

Other members of the group have also chipped in and we hope to have a veritable host of Goblins, Wolves, Dwarves, Elves and Lake Men to show you at the weekend!

An honourable mention needs to go to Sam Lancashire, who is pitching in with the hobbit himself, Mr Bilbo Baggins (wearing his magic ring, of course).

Dave Hunter and I sketched out the plan for the table with help from the Facebook group; I had an idea for an L-shaped table, leaving out the ruins of Dale but keeping in both spurs of the Lonely Mountain involved in the battle. With Dave’s expert Tolkien knowledge, we put together a possible battlefield that would also meet our gaming requirements and I built a maquette to test it out.

After several design changes, I got to work creating the battlefield. This is all work in progress at the moment – I’ll do a full photo game report once Partizan is over.

Colour schemes and designs were heavily influenced by Tolkien’s artwork for the book, as this was very much the inspiration for the game.

Anyway, I need to head off and finish the layout, so hope to see some of you at The Other Partizan on October 13th!

After many months of waiting, we’re delighted to be able to announce that Midgard Heroic Battles should be released in November 2024. Following several years of writing and play testing, we can’t wait to get it out to you.  Midgard Heroic Battles will be an all-in-one volume containing the rules (including flying creatures and sorcery), five scenarios, 12 sample Force lists and an appendix to allow you to create your own Heroes and Units.

Layout and art are currently being completed by the hugely talented Jon Hodgson (Beowulf Age of Heroes, The One Ring, Warhammer Ancient Battles, Dragon Warriors, Jon Hodgson Backdrops and many more) of Handiwork Games.  We are absolutely delighted to have Jon’s input on this project which has raised the presentation of Midgard Heroic Battles to another level and can’t wait to show it off nearer the time of release.   Stunning miniature photography by Pete Jenkins also accompanies Jon’s artwork.

Midgard Heroic Battles will be published by Reisswitz Press, who will be running pre-orders from their website in the run-up to release.  A dedicated Facebook group to support the game, administered by members of the playtest team, will be launched on Friday September 20^th 2024.

More details will follow as we have them. 

All the best

James Morris (mogsymakes.net)