A Rohan Stronghold (building the houses)

Last year I treated myself to an early Christmas present and picked up the Rohan Stronghold boxset. I spent part of the Christmas break building up the Rohan House kits and I have finally finished making my buildings so I thought I would share the raw pictures before I paint them.

I borrowed heavily from the internet for inspiration, so if anyone else is looking for ideas here are some sources:

• Zorpazorp's Stable, Blacksmith & Complex Houses - I didn't actually make any of these as I felt they were a bit kit-hungry (most use at least 2 kits for 1 building), but there's some great footage of how the kits were modded which was very helpful
• GW "How to Build" Video - This was the first video I watched and has useful tips for building, plus a few examples. Again, I didn't actually build any of their variants as they used multiple kits per building, but if you wanted to make the 4-kit Great Hall, then this has the details.
• Chaos Bunker's 'Ideas' Post - Some great pics of the Warhammer World exhibition showing various variants they made.
• Paintbrush Pirate's Assembly Guide - I built the simple farmhouse from this guide
• More example houses - I can't find the source for this, but I borrowed the idea of using porches to make stables from this Imgur post
• Paints on a 4 up's Inn & Stables - This was posted after I finished building my houses, but I would be very tempted to make this 2-kit Inn if I ever got more kits.

1 - Standard House

This house was made pretty much exactly per the GW instructions - the only variance is that I centered the front door rather than offsetting it to one side.

2 - Great Hall

This was my first modified building, and is a Great Hall, made out of 2 House kits. The idea from this one was lifted straight from a post on the GBHL group on Facebook so I take no credit for the design, but it came together beautifully. I really like the big hall that GW made, but 4 kits was a bit too pricey for my liking, and when I discovered you could make one with just 2 kits that was an automatic "yes"! 

The side walls are standard (1 wall + 1 extension) and the back/front is easily assembled (the base layer is one wall + 2 extensions, or 2 full walls if you prefer, the second layer is one wall + 2 roof infills and the top is a standard 2 roof infills). The only fiddly part was the porch at the front - I used the standard porch side walls and one of the standard triangular top pieces, but the porch thatching isn't made to be doubled-up in the same way that the main roofing is. The fix was easy enough - I fitted the bottom thatch pieces as normal using the guides and then cut away the bottom part of each of the top thatch pieces until it fit in the gap. The main entrance door is the standard porch door, but just glued straight onto the front of the building to give it a bit of grandeur.

3 - Blacksmith

This is my blacksmith, with a forge, largely inspired by the GW conversion featured in the War In Rohan supplement. The forge itself is from Mantic. I was in two minds how to do this, and in the end settled for the representation of a blacksmith's, rather than a realistic working environment - my blacksmith has an anvil I will add when I paint everything up, but lacks key equipment such as tools, but the space was too small to really build a proper forge set up and I decided it looked better as a fairly clean area. 

The main conversion was made by simply omitting the side wall extensions and building a square 'house' then I paired up a couple of horses head pillars for each corner and used them to support the roof, and used the window triangle to keep it all square. This building also has a shorter entry porch than normal (I used the porch roofing for house #5), so I just used the triangular pieces of thatch and the standard front door and then filled in the gaps along the side with a couple of the pieces that are designed to join two walls together. It worked quite nicely and helps give this building a long, thin profile on the table.

4 - Farmhouse

This is my farmhouse build,  a simpler building for a rural Rohirrim with a covered outside area, maybe for storing grain or over-wintering a few animals. 

The basic building structure is the same as for the blacksmith above, but I left the endwalls open and cut down a couple of walls to make half-height surrounds for the area to show it's a permanent set up (the walls are left-overs from building the Great Hall, you could also use fences instead). I used a couple of fence pieces to indicate the yard area, but wanted to make it so a model could actually get through the opening by the main door, so I extended them with a few bits of balsa wood.

5 - Stables 

I think of this as a house for a richer Rohirrim, who likes to keep their horses close to home - there is a stable for 2 horses attached to the main house, and they have a good sized yard to turn them out into during the day.

The house is built as normal, but the door is glued directly to the end of the building, rather than being attached by a porch. I then used two porches (one borrowed from the blacksmith - #3 above) to build out the stable attachment (the roofs glue together very nicely for this). The backwalls are the standard porch walls, but I had to double-up on the joining pieces to get the length right for the roof. The end piece is a spare side-wall extension (also from the blacksmith). The front walls are the other two porch walls, but cut in half to make gates for the fronts of the stables, and I put a horses-head pillar in the middle to add a bit of support for the roof, and to make it look like there are two stalls. It's surprising how much difference doubling-up the porches makes to the footprint of the building and it adds a nice bit of variety to the layout.