The model warrior

Step back in time to year 1984 and a computer game called,”The Lords of Midnight” was released on the ZX Spectrum written by Mike Singleton. The game is an epic fantasy wargame set in a frozen world, with the forces of good verus the forces of evil.

You start the game with our hero,”Luxor the Moonprince”,”Morkin the Free”,”Rorthron the Wise” and “Corleth of the Fey”. With these four followers you need to raise an army and defeat the forces of the witchking. The game itself was groundbreaking using a 3D landscaping effect for the first time and allowing a huge gaming area to be played on. The game would see another successful follow up in the title,”Doomdarks Revenge” and a 3rd instalment was planed but sadly never completed. Fast forward to today a writer called Drew Wagar has brought the game to life again in a series of books based on the Midnight world which are excellent. You can also still play the game for free on platforms like GOG.

One of my all time favourite plans was to wargame this scenario on a board and to be honest I have been thinking about it for the best part of five years. Its taken me that long to focus my ideas and actually create two seperate board games. The first will be 28mm figures fighting on battle boards similar to Warhammer Fantasy and the second will be 6mm armies allowing a greater scope of map.

If you take a look at some of the original screenshots from the game you can see a number of things. The figures are all semi familiar(the game has serious echoes of the Lord of the Rings),dwarfs,giants,dragons,trolls,wolves and mounted riders straight of of Rohan so plenty of figures on the market to adapt or reuse to my purpose. I decided to take characters from both games and also try and copy some of the landscape. I also decided to use some artistic licence with some characters as the 1984 block figures(see below) and colours leave something to be desired.

So my plan begins with creating individual figures for each race and some terrain to get the ball rolling so to speak.

Basic terrain using a board with caulking Woodland Scenics snow flake on it and some foam carved mountains in the backgroud. Blue trees as well as per the game.

The bottom photo is the first attempt at a 6mm army with scratch built movement marker coming up behind.