The Conversion Corner: Black Númenóreans

One the most interesting troop types available to Mordor is Black Númenóreans. Terror causing, F4, D6 troops? Yes please! Unfortunately the models produced by Games Workshop are showing their age and are quite expensive so I had a look at making some conversions from easily available bits to cut costs and make something a little different.

The main components for the conversion are Army of the Dead troops (usually cheap as chips on eBay or trade pages due to their presence in the starter set) and Morgul Knights. The Morgul Knights contain two key bits to give the AotD models some Mordor flavour; the shields, and more importantly, the crowns.

You could go the whole hog and take the head off the knight, attach the face, and then chop it off and attach to the undead. I'd quite like to keep the Morgul Knights as intact as possible for using them later and to keep the conversion simple so I'll just stick the face directly onto the warriors. This way also looks pretty good! First step is to clip the mask from the sprue and trim the nub on the inside so it doesn't get in the way.

 Next take the warrior and use a knife to trim back its head so the mask fits nicely. Then bung the shield on the arm and you have one Black Númenórean!

To keep costs down there are a few extra steps to take to maximise the efficiency of your kits. The Knights kit has six masks and 5 shields, which doesn't go very far! This is where I'd recommend any hobbyist picks up some blue stuff so that they can make casts of key bits they need. See the shield below for an example. It's very simple to use, but small and fiddly bits like the masks take some patience and a very sharp knife to trim the flash from. There are also not enough sword wielding warriors on the sprue for all you might want, but taking the swords from Morannon Orcs or the single sword from the Knight kit helps to get around this with some simple hand exchange. The picture below shows the swords that work best in my experience.

Here are the 6 I prepared for this article to complement the half dozen I already have. I got all twelve of these guys from a set of AoTD and one box of Morgul Knights (and one or two spare swords) and I'm very happy with how they turned out..

I still have the Morgul Knights completely on sprue apart from their masks so a little bit of creativity will let me get all five knights out of this kit as well as the bits for the Black Númenórean. I also made myself a Witch King on armoured horse by sticking the Witch King from the Felbeast kit on one of the Morgul Knight horses. They're a really great kit for bits and kitbashing stuff together.