Cheap Trolls

The armies of the Necromancer have been lacking heavy hitters and every self-respecting evil warlord needs trolls. Big, tough, scary, handy for smashing things or pulling siege engines. The Games Workshop trolls fit my aesthetics but not my budget, being ridiculously over priced.

However, the very talented Simon on his Iron Mitten blog used some very economical plastic "1/72nd" scale "Battle Trolls" made by a Ukrainian company called Dark Alliance. They aren't that much smaller than the GW trolls and 1/20th the price! I found a box on eBay for £10 with only £1 shipping. So that came to Cdn$18.80-something for 8 figures, which is a lot better than other options.

So a couple of weeks later, these show up:

Two each of four different sculpt. Lots of nice details with the straps and buckles keeping the armour on including cloth under the arm pieces to prevent chaffing. The skin is nicely done and made me think of scaly elephants or rhinos. Sadly there was a lot of flash which even with a sharp blade was hard to remove, so I'll be avoiding close-ups on these.

Of course, now that I've finished I had the thought of using a pair of fine, slightly curved scissors that I have from a job I had 15 years ago trimming flash from rubber auto parts.

After gluing to washers and priming, I painted them the same way as my Vendel trolls: brown base coat, Vallejo khaki grey skin, and other colours blocked in then a wash with brown ink.

Because their bases are bigger, and to disguise the steep break between the figure base and the washer I added some tufts of dead grass.

I'm going to initially try these as two figure units of bellicose foot with shiny armour. Maybe give them a cause fear too? Or I could have a lot of lesser warbeasts!

But here they are in a photoshoot trampling my new grain fields.

Can't wait to get these in a game.