Wargs and goblins sometimes get together to make trouble. Not only in the Lord of the Rings, wargs are used as goblin mounts – this fantasy trope is also used in Dungeons and Dragons. So naturally, if a goblin raiding party comes to pillage a village, they bring some wargs! I had one warg from the Reaper Bones Kickstarers, and bought a couple more for an exciting D&D encounter in Nightstone. I also had some old Ral Partha wolf miniatures that I also painted in parallel.

The Warg (77202) from Reaper Miniatures was sculpted by Jason Wiebe. It’s a really cool miniature of a huge, muscular wolf. They are as large as a pony and make great low-level opponents in D&D for a non-urban setting.

I bought three of these miniatures for the Storm King’s Tunder campaign.

Also, I had some old wolf miniatures from an old Ral Partha miniature set (Great Wolf CS-90) in a drawer somewhere, which I didn’t paint for a couple of years. Thanks to the Lost Minis Wiki, I found out that these miniatures were sculpted by Tom Meier in the 1980s.

So, if I am already going to paint three large wolves, why not add four normal sized ones as well.

Basing and Priming

I glued all three wargs on a 2-inch large plastic base and decorated the base with sand, pebbles, and small sticks.

Painting

After painting the bases, I gave each of the wolves and wargs an individual color for the base coat, so that each of the figures would have little differences in the fur colors. I looked at a lot of photos from real wolves and tried my best. The fur itself was painted via dry brushing after the basecoat.

I then used washes (brown and black) to give the furs a little tint for the shadows and then reapplied the highlights with another round of drybrushing.

In the last step, I decorated the bases with vegetation to make them look like forest bases.

Overall, each wolf or warg looks really a bit different – bases and fur colors. They make great companions, for example Tara for Baltor, the barbarian/ranger player character or for the goblins attacking Nightstone!