These are great miniatures for those looking for something different and a fitting prelude to the arrival of the eagerly anticipated rules system. You could use the same Captain stats for their commanders as a Goblin Captain or Champion. Their Terrain would be a Halfling Village. CONCLUSIONS As you can see, Morgoth’s armies improved over time, and – with each ‘advance’– they slowly took the initiative until they defeated even the might of the Noldo: try to reflect that in an army you wish to field.

I have found that creating the lists for the evil side in Beleriand is rather harder than creating lists for the good side. The reason are that there are very few actual options: Morgoth always used the Orcs as his soldiery and attempting to make these armies ‘fun’ or ‘interesting’ can be a challenge, but – as you can see above – I have attempted to do that.We'll start with the plastic miniatures. A brand new plastic kit is on the way that will feature plenty of different options for kitting out your Orc warriors. They are clad in a mix of different leather and chainmail alongside weapons like swords, axes and big nasty axes. Orcs also roamed around Beleriand in the later years as forces without specific character commanders, and the make up of these forces can contain any combination of Orcs or Goblins you may chose with the addition of Trolls, with an Orc general in Command. The pseudo-historical era at which Oathmark is pitched seems to be, loosely speaking, Dark Age, although the currency of that idea is probably more to do with the illustrations in the rulebook than the rules themselves, which do not specify what “heavy armour” or “hand weapons” mean, for example. Some gamers talk of it as “a return to authentic Tolkien fantasy”, i.e. a world largely of spears, swords and shields, where magic exists, but has only minor influence (I’d include myself in that category! Ed .). As such, I didn’t find it difficult to choose unit specs which suited relatively simple armies. Here, for example, is a basic Saracen Army, the kind of army the rules readily allow, where all the units are taken from the Human list: If you buy this boxed set in retail, it costs 25 GBP for 30 Goblin infantry and includes a sprue of square bases as well. Morgoth’s forces for this stage of the war should be at least 75% from the Orc list rather than from the Goblin list, with a possibility of using any of the known characters. In addition, in the list for this battle there is an option to use a unit Humans: men of the East – or Easterlings. For their stats see the first article in the last issue.

These seems to be confirmed by fresh news on Wargameterrain: "We will have a regular release schedule for plastic Oathmark figures this year, including: Human Cavalry, Dwarf Light Infantry, Revenants, Orcs and Goblin Lt Infantry." I’m also not that interested in so-called “balanced” games. I find asymmetric and scenario-driven games much more rewarding and more realistic. Oathmark unit specs can be treated as “hypothetical” historical units, and pitted against each other on that basis, (e.g. a large army of units with poor activation faces a small army with good activation: Persians against Macedonians, say) whilst several of the scenarios also offer plausible historical possibilities. I think this is a great mechanism for historical gaming, and one well worth adopting/adapting and, moreover, fun to experiment with, though it’s probably unlikely to lead to real historical insight...Human heavy cavalry: will be included in the Human Cavalry box (although I dont see any heavy cavalry on the possible box art), or will it became a separate set? If a separate set, will it be the same size as the former ones, or its time for smaller boxes (because 15 Human Heavy Cavalry is a really huge and expensive force)? Or maybe some metal/resin casts with separate horses and riders, maybe separate hands+weapons to combine? Oathbreakers has s urprisingly nothing, not even the box art of the already available Skeleton Infantry... Faction of Nature with fauns,dryads, centaurs, unicorns, giant eagles, treants (because it would fit the folklore of the Marches, I already made some house rules for some of them, and more is on the way)