Well guess I will show off my armies (all sadly work in progress!). I bought all of this back when the games and films first came out and got round to basing and undercoating most of them and then left them. 10-15 years later I unearthed them as I was moving house and my partner got all excited about it (she loves board games of all kinds and thinks the miniatures are really cool) so I promised to teach her how to play (I will detail our ongoing battles in another thread) and that I would get this lot painted up...
First up are my Men of Gondor. This being my "main" Good force I have every single model ever released for them except the trebuchets and the newer mounted Faramir.
The infantry (I also have three unassembled boxes of Knights)
The colour scheme I initially chose... not so sure about it now. I might do them in lacquered armour instead.
Rohirrim. This was the first army I bought, right after I watched Return of the King. I had held off buying the miniatures for the game until that point but seeing the battle on the Pelennor, I HAD to try to recreate it! I basically tried to ensure I had enough Riders and Royal Guards to recreate every scenario in the various rulebooks (The Two Towers, Return of the King and all the ones after).
Various Heroes and Characters (from different game systems - many will be used as proxies).
An Aragorn conversion based on Turin Turambar with his black sword Gurthang. Will use the same rules as Aragorn but I like to be a little different
Giant Eagles. At the time I hated the Games Workshop versions so I found these from an Independent company I cannot for the life of me remember the name of and got one of each. I do like the new plastic eagles from The Hobbit so may buy a box of them before 2017 too.
Haradrim. My main "Evil" force (I love Easterlings too).
Mumak conversion (I also have a
T. rex that will use the Balrog rules...)
Easterlings (I have two boxes of Kataphracts waiting to be assembled too). I use them all as Black Dragons so they are an elite force and mainly to provide variety as almost all of my warriors, Good and Evil, have Fight, Strength and Courage 3 so it is nice to not have to keep rolling again on drawn Fights!
Corsairs of Umbar and Wargs (which will "count as" trained hunting beasts of some sort).
Stand-In for a Mordor Troll, mainly because I don't really like the troll miniatures much and wanted something just a tad different. I think this one is an old D&D miniature. Still needs to be based.
Various dragons. I have about a dozen of these from the old McFarlane's Dragons series, they make really cool battle game dragons. The problem is I have more than I will ever use but they look brilliant perched on top of the rack and I can vary them every so often.
This is Teronus the Ultimate Dragon from the Grenadier Miniatures range of the eighties. From the moment I saw him in a catalogue when I was a young child I wanted him; this model is probably the reason I got into miniature gaming. I will use him as Smaug.
This model gives me a struggle though, as the wings are too small for such a large body and I've always thought about converting it to use the much larger wings from a different model (maybe one of the ones pictured above - I have a spare). However due to the rarity of this model I am loathe to cut it apart and resculpt it just to give it bigger wings.
So that is basically what I am working on now... and also a set of modular terrain boards to play on. My partner and I have been using the unpainted models and terrain to learn the rules of the game (or re-learn in my case) and have been having great fun while doing it. Currently we are tied at two games each which is worrying as she had never played before...