Thorin's Company: A much delayed party

My Thorin's company

 

I eluded to the 12 years of stop-start hobbying in the blog introduction, and this is the subject of today's post. Last week (April, 2025), I finally finished the Thorin's Company which I'm embarassed to say I started back in 2013! This post will be the story of how we got here and why it took so long.

Ancient history

As a teenager I was into Warhammer - both the fantasy and 40k varieties - and played both with friends, and down at the local GW store's "battle bunker" (what happeneed to those?). But then life moved on, I went to university, and the wargames stayed at home, forgotten about.

In the early 2010s, I felt like scratching that itch again. I listened to some wargaming podcasts and heard that Lord of the Rings SBG might be games workshop's most compelling game. I've always loved the Lord of the Rings, so this was interesting. Then the Hobbit films were released and with them a refresh of SBG, and I thought maybe now was the time to jump in. The "escape from goblin town" (EFGT) boxed set looked really cool, so I grabbed it and started re-discovering my old excitement for miniatures as an adult.

 

Did the "exclusivity" of that Radagast sculpt ever count for anything?

 

2013: Baby steps

Things started off great, I painted up some goblins (a subject for a future post), and then got on with a few of the company. Balin and Dori were up first, they ended up with rather flat faces, but I learned a lot about red!

Some very similar hair and cloaks on these two...

Fili and Kili came next and posed some new challenges, with some different colours. Of the whole company, I think I'm least happy with these two now - they'll be first in line if I decide to refresh any of them.

Not sure what happened to fili's face, and kili lost his bow somewhere along the way.

 

All the while I was also getting on with the goblins and terrain in the box, and posting my progress on various SBG community forums like The Last Alliance, and one-ring. But slowly my hobby excitement diminished, and my progress stalled...

 

2016: A second false-start 

For unknown reasons a couple of years later I got my hobby mojo back! I moved on from the dwarfs and painted Gandalf and Bilbo instead. I was quite happy with how these came out, especially given how tiny Bilbo is. Getting annoyed with metallic paints I even tried to create a sort of blue-glowing effect on Sting. If I were to try again today, I'd attempt some reflection of the glow on Bilbo's clothing, but that was a step too far at the time.

The tallest and shortest of the group.

Gaining confidence, I moved on to the more fighty dwarfs, and Gloin, Thorin and Dwalin followed in quick succession. There was a definite improvement in faces here, and I'm particularly happy with how Gloin came out.

 

Additional tufts on the bases are to fit in with a new project...

I was on a roll now, gaining confidence and trying to improve my techniques. Next up was the most ambitious painting project yet - Bofur. I really tried to go all-out here and add extra detail beyond what I'd done previously, with lots of patterning all over his coat. I'm still really pleased with how he looks, it was worth the extra effort I think.

 

From here, I don't really know what happened, but this was the last of the company I painted. Perhaps it was lack of knowing how to find a local SBG community to be a part of that diminished my interest. Perhaps it was living in a flat with no real dedicated painting space, so having to box up and unbox everything each time.

Whatever the reason, some things that should not have been forgotten were lost (in a box on a shelf). History became legend. Legend became myth. And for seven years, the hobby passed out of all knowledge...

2024: a new dawn 

Post-pandemic we moved into a new house, now I had the luxury of a home office, and some space to dedicate to a hobby area. Eventually the hobby-bug bit me again, and I launched back into it full-throttle. I found a local wargaming club which has an active group of SBGers and targetted finishing an army as quickly as possible to start playing some games!

This actually meant that I focused on finishing the other half of my EFGT set - the Goblin Town force - as a more "normal" army to learn the game with, rather than the all-hero Thorin's Company. This was a very successful endeavour, I finished up loads of goblins, played some games at the club, and even attended a GBHL event with them (taking home the much-coveted best army plus wooden spoon combo!). All the while, I kept painting another Thorin's company member every now and then, until come the end of 2024, only two were remaining.

 

Dead-eye Ori looks a more like cross-eyed Ori here.

Finally, in between other projects (working on a new army for 2025!), I finished off the final two. I maybe even saved the best until last, because Bombur was a really fun miniature to paint.

 

Still don't quite have the hang of these checked patterns.

So that's how I got to a finished Thorin's company, having owned the set for ~12 years! I'm glad to have finally gotten more into the hobby and started to attend some events, though I'm kicking myself a bit for missing what seems like a golden age of the GBHL over the last few years. Better late than never though, and with a new edition recently released, maybe I can ride a new wave of excitement in the game! A few of the company made it to their first event of the new edition last weekend as part of a new army I'm bulding, so it was great to get them on the table at last.

Thorin's company - complete at last!

 

This was a very self-indulgent post in the end. I think the future of this blog will be a continuation of charting my progress as a newer player engaging with the hobby, probably a mixture of painting updates and event reports, but we'll see where it goes.

I'll finish by linking to Tale of Painters whose tutorials I followed for most of these miniatures: https://taleofpainters.com/2013/12/tutorials-how-to-paint-hobbit/

And a few pictures from my company went into a Herald of Woe episode all about Thorin's Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcxqHSEVl_o