William Hupp of Thistle & Rose Figures, which now makes the Vendel fantasy miniatures that I like so much, contacted me about sponsoring the ancients tournament at Hot Lead this year. He had also seen my previous queries on the Wargaming in Middle Earth Facebook group about hobbits and asked if I would like some samples of his.

Of course I would, expecting a half dozen or so.

Nope, he’s sent me a dozen each of rock thowers, archers, hobbits with spears and angry villagers with improvised weapons! Plus the original Vendel pack of the 4 hobbits from Lord of the Rings with swords and cloaks plus a charming vignette of Sam preparing a brace of rabbits by a camp fire while  Frodo sleeps.

This will make a nice objective, deployment point, camp marker or just a piece of scatter terrain. 

Original Colin Patten hobbits. Going to mix these in the other groups as leaders

The T&R figures come in packs of 6. The spear, archer and villager packs have separate weapons with cast on hands. This allows for some variation in pose, but the spears are quite delicate and you have to be alert to gluing the wrong hand on an arm. I did some creative arm bending to relieve the flatness of some of the poses.

Archers

Rock Throwers

Light spears

Angry villagers

Angry villagers part 2

The Thistle & Rose hobbits scale nicely with the Airfix HO figures and my Games Workshop Merry figure. The Airfix box should generate another unit of light foot, a unit of archers and a unit of skirmishers, giving me an Order of Battle looking somewhat like:

• 2x light missiles with sharpshooter 
• 4x scouts (I may house rule sharpshooter for them too)
• 3x light foot possibly with offensive upgrade, and/or short range missiles 

So not a massive force, but easily enough for a ~30 point game. Very fragile, with no one wearing over armour 2, but fast moving and quite shooty.