Saturday 8 December 2012

Alternate Uses for the Hobbit Goblins

As soon as I saw the goblins from the boxed Hobbit game, I thought "mmm, ghouls, or maybe plaguebearers". Now that my boxed set has arrived I can put my idea to the test. Here's a line-up, showing from left to right - plaguebearer 5th edition, plaguebearer 7th edition, goblin, mantic ghoul, goblin, GW ghoul, goblin. The last one is not really relevant to the comparison as he's a one-off tiny addition to the game, he's included in the photo because he is cute!

The Vampire Counts comparison works best, as this second photo shows. Body sizes, heads, weapons are all pretty well matched. I would happily include the goblins as ghouls in my army, it could even be possible to mix them in with the GW hunched over ghoul, though that might be pushing it a little far. The mantic ghoul in this picture I actually use as a zombie, just to complicate matters a little.

The comparison with the plaguebearers is less successful. My idea was to buy a box of the new plastic plaguebearers and mix in the goblins to double the unit size. The difference in height I don't mind too much, it's the scale difference in heads and weapons that are more jarring. Of course, these are old metal daemons, but I suspect the new plastic daemons are very similar in size. I won't discount the idea completely just yet, but it's a little disappointing.

Speaking of disappointment, I found out recently that The Hobbit film is to be split into three episodes. When it was first announced a couple of years ago there was talk of making two films, one to cover the contents of the Hobbit novel, and another to cover what happens between the end of that book and the start of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Very exciting stuff, I have been looking forward to the release all year. But now I find out that the first film covers the first few chapters of the Hobbit book, and the rest will be covered in two more films. What? The Hobbit with no Smaug? I was a little dubious when I saw the designs for the dwarfs, but this has convinced me that I will not enjoy the film, so I will be giving it a miss at the cinema. Shame. Shame on those involved for milking the franchise to the nth degree. Chopping a 200 page children's story into three films is too much. Rant over.

1 comment:

Laughing Ferret said...

Yeah, think they make good ghouls, but not goblins. I loved the look of the moria goblins, and not sure why the designers of the movie decided to make the misty mountain goblins 'gothmog-esque' instead of like the Moria goblins. wish it wasn't the way they decided.

I think the first movie will deal with dwarf history, like the first trilogy movie dealt with end of the 2nd age history. I was glad to hear they'd split the movie- at first I was thinking one movie wasn't enough, too many points of action: intro-troll glade-goblins-riddles in the dark-wolves-beorn-spiders-wood elf escape-intro to smaug-black arrow-battle of 5 armies. phew. that is a lot more than what happens in the first LotR book. The only reason Tolkien could squeeze it all in is that he wrote it as a children's book... a movie doesn't have that option- it takes time to deal with all of that, and more since they'll cover dwarf history, the council, and gandalf confronting sauron at dol gildur. I thought it would be 2 movies, but with the background, 3 seems right. Now if they'd go back and remake the other movies to be 2-3 each I'd be happy ;)

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