The Battle of the Five Armies™ is the epic confrontation that caps off The Hobbit™ trilogy – a conflict fought between five sides at the foot of the Lonely Mountain.
The Gundabad™ Catapult Trolls are probably the most fearsome combatants in the entire battle – giant walking weapons platforms loosing huge missiles at their beleaguered foes. To celebrate the arrival of such a monster, we spoke to the team who sculpted and wrote the rules for it
The rules
Jay: Coming in at 180 points (and on a whopping 160mm round base) the Gundabad Catapult Troll is an unusual Siege Engine that uses a combined profile with its crew. This has inherent benefits: the Goblins swarming its back cannot be picked off, which is a risk the likes of Gondor Avenger Bolt Throwers, Iron Hills Ballistae, and Mordor Siege Bows have to deal with, and models can’t simply disable it by spending a turn in base contact – there is a massive Troll to contend with after all!
The catapult itself is a real menace, with a range of 12” to 96”, a Strength of 10, and firing via an Arcing Shot meaning to bypass pesky In The Way Tests to splatter its target. Of course, being a Siege Engine, any battlefield target that suffers an unsaved Wound will be automatically slain – a giant boulder landing on top of you will do that!
The Gundabad Catapult Troll can also do all the same things other Monsters can. On top of this, the Goblins crewing this hulking beast can even make Strikes should the Troll win a Combat. Oh, and the whole model is Dominant (5), so it’s perfect for sitting by an Objective Marker at the back of the board and launching rocks all across the battlefield – safe in the knowledge that it won’t lose control!
Slotting into the Army of Gundabad army list, the Gundabad Catapult Troll is ideal if you want something that can provide ranged support and get stuck into the fight when needed. You will end up with a pretty small force as a result, but the damage such an imposing model can dish out will likely make up for it!
The design
Luke: This was a long project – the largest I have ever had to work on. It was certainly a challenge, which I broke down into three parts.
The first is the Troll itself, which is enormous, has a lot of texture, and a whole anatomy to consider. It’s the biggest Troll we’ve ever made – judging by the movie stills we had access to, I based its proportions on the Gundabad Ogres, which come up to its midriff. Standing up, it would actually be taller than a Mûmak! I put a lot of effort into the textures here, as we don’t often get to do something that warrants the attention! The toenails were especially enjoyable – they look quite manky and gnarled, which I like.
The second part was the catapult. We don’t see these Trolls on-screen for long, and so I had to think hard about how the catapults actually work. There seem to be two firing mechanisms – a trigger level, and a pressure plate that features in one scene in the extended version of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies™. Overall, the mechanism looks as close as possible to that in the film, but I embellished it to make it seem more like a functional weapon – there was a balance to strike between respecting what we see on screen and making a miniature that would receive a higher level of scrutiny. People will be painting and admiring it, so I wanted to make the catapult look as effective as possible, adding extra cogs and a Goblin to help fire the thing.
I ended up designing a load of wooden planks to try to give as much variety as possible to the wood grain – I’ve even eroded them in different ways according to which part of the machinery it’s from.
In one scene, Alfrid Lickspittle is hiding in an ammo sack and drops a coin onto what looks like a pressure plate, which seems to be a second firing mechanism – so I obviously wanted to add this element as well. I see it as a failsafe footplate that the Goblin must press before pulling the main trigger.
The third element was the Goblin crew. The captain at the front is taken as closely as possible from the films, but while the others are wearing the armour you see on screen, they’re not one-to-one representations of the rest of the crew – we just don’t see them closely enough to identify individual characters.
Thanks, both. The Gundabad Catapult Troll will be available to pre-order on Saturday. It’s made of Forge World resin.
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