Hugh "the Hammer" Duggan, Pistolier Captain

I know I said that I would do the artillery first, but then I ordered another artillery piece and I thought I would do them together when it arrives.

So instead, I started work on the pistoliers. Here is the captain of the unit, Hugh "the Hammer" Duggan.

 There's a bit of a story behind this unit.

Now when I started this whole project, the idea was to take advantage of the relatively cheap Perry plastics to supply a human army for my Strandhogg games. I would have used a Dark Age army like the Saxons or Vikings also available, but I thought they were too similar to the dwarves I already own, and so I settled on the WOTR figures.

I had to choose a livery for the army, and instead of picking a historical heraldry I decided to use that of the name of an old friend.

As the force expanded I begin to imagine that I might be able to field a full Warhammer army. After some browsing, I decided to go for an Empire army instead of a Bretonnian one. Now one of the more exotic units in the Empire army is the pistoliers, which look like ECW cavalry, which are of course anachronistic - but hey, Warlord Games makes them in plastic, which suits me fine. I did feel a little guilty about painting them in the same livery as the rest of the troops though, so I decided I would paint them up as maybe a mercenary unit.

Once again, I turned to my friend to help pick a name, and I used the name of an old friend of his - Duggan. Rather happily, the Duggan coat of arms has the colours blue, white and yellow, which matches that of the Holmes (yellow and blue). This means the units will look distinct from each other, yet still be tied together by a common colour.

I am planning to create a unit of eight mounted figures, including the captain, a standard-bearer with the Duggan banner, a trumpeter, and five troopers armed with pistols or swords, as well as a dismounted version of each rider; this will allow me to use them in a dragoon or mounted infantry role for scenario games, with one figure in four being a horse-holder when the unit dismounts. But more on that later.

For the mounted version of the unit I will use the figures pretty much "as is", with the face guard clipped off to show the face better. The basic "uniform" will be a blue coat. The sash will be white. The saddle-clothe is likewise blue with a white border.

Hopefully I can get the dismounted version of "the Hammer" painted tomorrow and I will bore you with the story of that...

Out with the Old Guards?

These Rogue Trader era Imperial Guards are some of the oldest figures I own; I bought them some time after I got the plastic Space Marines box set (the ones with the beakies) with the intention of using them as "unarmoured infantry" to provide a contrast to the Space Marines.

I probably used them in a couple of games and then left them in a box all these years - several are not even assembled.

I've already given my beakies to a friend and I think it's also approriate that I let these go to a better home, to a wargamer who will give them a coat of paint and field them on a table (to die in hordes as IGs do...).

The four figures on the left of the top row are metal figures (3 guardsmen with injuries and one officer), while the other 16 are plastic. They are short of one head and there aren't enough lasguns to go round; still, I reckon they are worth more than US$50 on ebay.

I'm looking to trade them, specifically for 15 plastic Tactical Space Marines with bolters and 5 plastic Terminators with stormbolters and powerfists (preferably unpainted), but if you have something else you think I might be interested in we can discuss things.

Thank you.

Update: I've made a trade for them. Thanks for reading.

Feel like Sirs

I'm finishing a few foot command figures now, amongst which is the figure on the left.

I got the figure on the right first, which is "Sir John Savage" from Trent Miniatures. When I bought ome flags from Vexillia earlier, I decided to take the opportunity to get a few figures from their Mirliton/Grenadier range to save on postage. When I saw the similarities between the "Personality 3" figure and the Sir John Savage figure, I knew I had to get it.

The two have similar armour, almost identical pose, and even have the same sword. The Mirliton figure is a little shorter, but I think it will pass muster.

I suppose I should work on the Mirliton artillery piece and crew next.

I can't bear it anymore...

I've been keeping this little project a bit of a secret, but I was actually quite excited about it that when I have finished painting the mounted men-at-arms, I painted it up in just two evenings and am showing it off even as the glue on the flock is drying.

The idea was partly inspired by the regimental mascot unit from GW; but I've always wanted a bear in one of my armies, so when I found one that I liked, I decided to create a vignette.

The bear is (was) an unpainted plastic figure from the D&D Wrath of Ashardalon boardgame. The two figures are Perry plastics, and the chain a link of chain from a cheap necklace. The vignette is on a 60mm x 40mm base, which is the area covered by six 20mm square bases, so it can function as a unit filler too. The flag is something I made and printed myself - it isn't really "legit" since there is no reason why this unit should have a different flag from the rest of the army, or why it needs one to begin with... But I've got a colour laser printer, and one needs to run it once in a while to keep the moving parts moving...

I love bears. My Chinese name is homophonic with the Chinese word for "bear", and I consider it my totem beast (my totem bird is the white-throated kingfisher, in case you are wondering...). In my home there is an articulated wooden bear toy, a leather bear toy, coasters in the shape of bearskin rugs, and I have a few teddy bears on my bedside tables. My first soft toy was a teddy bear called Ben which I had in my bed until I was twenty-something. In my travels and soldiering I have eaten many unusual foods, but I refused to eat a bear's paw once offered to me. You get the idea.

Bear-baiting distresses me (and unfortunately that practice still exists in some countries today), so when I had the idea of this vignette I wanted to make it look like the bear was a member of the unit rather than a victim - I'm not sure I achieved that. In any case, using animals for war is a form of cruelty. While a war-bear unit is fantasy, bear-baiting was popular in medieval England, so it is also somewhat historical.

Enough moralising - here are a few more pics of the unit from different angles.

More knights

Here's the second unit of knights, this time on unbarded horses.

The musician and standard bearers are Perry metals, while the rest of Perry plastics. Without their barding, the horses look more animated.

Of course, I couldn't resist a shot of all 15 of the knights I have painted together.

I'm planing on working on a few foot figures before starting on the pistoliers. Stay tuned.

Half way there

Well, that's half of my heavy cavalry done.

This is the command unit of my "army", with the army general on a wingless hippogriff, his personal standard, a musician, and his household knights.

The knights and the general are all Perry plastics, the hippogriff a repainted D&D prepainted mini, and the trumpeter a Perry metal. The annoying thing about the metal figures is that, despite being from the same range, the riders have the "seat-back" of the saddle sculpted on them, as opposed to the plastic ones, which do not; this means that unless one was prepared to so do minor cut-and-sculpt, the riders (and mounts) are not interchangeable.

That aside, I am pretty pleased with the result. A full unit of armoured knights with a banner is always a sight to see. Another seven (unarmoured) horses to go then...

Fence-y that

I was looking to do something with the Renendra tombstones that fg gave me and decided I would make a "Gothic Graveyard" to go with his zombies and planned undead army.

After some googling, I decided to go for the wrought iron fence look over the stonewall look, and a little more googling found this:

I got mine off ebay, but you can find it in a number of online stores. Mine arrived in less than a week, in a huge cardboard box packed with those air-bags, because while thin and light, the package is long ("That's what she said.").

Anyway, this is what you get:

Two shorter sections, one of which has the gate, and two long sections. The "obverse" side of the sections show "relief", while the "reverse" side is flat.

Put together, you get a rectangle measuring 28.5cm x 39.5cm.

I will probably cut the long section to make an enclosure measuring 28.5cm x 26.5cm, and use the off-cuts for "damaged sections".

The gate is just the right size for 28mm, but does not open.

The details aren't exactly fantastic, and they have stupidly design the mould such that the vents are on the "obverse" side - you can probaby see them in the last photo above.

All in all I'm not disappointed; it is, after all, a cheap plastic toy from China. With a coat of primer, some black paint and some suitable weathering, it should do for the wargaming table.

Now to start planning the magnetic joinery and interior...

Knights

It took a while to restart the engine again, but I managed to get three of the horses painted.

They are not that hard to paint, especially since much of the surface is covered with plate. Hopefully I can get all 15 done this month and move on to the rest of the pile...

Army General on Hippogriff

Well, a wingless one, to be precise...

I pulled the wings off the D&D prepainted mini, filled up the gaps with putty, and added a saddle-cloth and strap made with some foil.

I like the way the eyes were painted on the original mini, so I placed blobs of blu-tac over them before priming the mini so I could preserve them.

The hippogriff fits squarely on a standard cavalry base (without its wings), and I plan to field it as a warhorse. The rider doesn't really fit onto the back - there's a little gap -but that is probably as well since he would otherwise sit a bit lower than a moutned figure on a horse.

The figure on foot is the dismounted version of the same character. Neither one is particularly flamboyant compared to the Warhammer figures, but I guess that's what you get when you use historical figures. The general will be fielded in a unit with other knights including the army standard an a musician, so hopefully as a unit they will look more impressive.

DIY Movement Trays

With a few dozen figures painted, I decided I would make myself a few movement trays. The many movement trays available on the market are good, but they can be expensive. After considering a few materials, I settled on styrene sheets and strips.

I chose the Sidewalk sheet because it comes pre-scored with grids. By scoring lightly along these gridlines, I could snap the pieces off and end up with a base with perfect straight lines and right angles. The rectangular cross-sectioned strips were chosen over the square ones because I wanted my trays to have a narrow and tall lip. Using a pair of clippers, it was easy to cut these at right angles.

As the material is styrene,they can be glued together using the same Tamiya glue that I used for the figures. I glued the strips to the reverse side of the base, which is smooth. And there you have it.

A coat of primer and paint and some flocking on the lips and we're ready.

The sheet costs about US$8 and the strips about US$5, and will give two 5 x 4 infantry trays and two 5 x 1 cavalry trays. I'll probably need another sheet for the whole army, but the numbers seem good.

Mounted and dismounted

It's been a while since I posted - I've been busy with the Perry mounted men-at-arms.

Now one of the fun things about Strandhogg is when a mounted figure is hit, you roll to see if he was hit or if it was his mounted that was hit; if his mount was hit and killed then he can try to jump clear and continue the battle on foot. This means you sort of need a dismounted version of each of your mounted figures.

For the goblin warg riders I simply substituted a goblin warrior with the appropriate weapon; for the mounted men-at-arms I thought we can do better.

The Perry plastic men-at-arms come "multi-pose", which meant I could choose heads and torsos to match those of the (non-multi-pose) metal dismounted men-at-arms I already own.

They are not perfect matches, but I think the idea is there.

I hope to have all the riders completed this week and start work on their mounts next week. This will take a while...

Casualty!

We just conducted the annual mock exam for a post-graduate diploma that my company offers this afternoon, and I was looking like one of the figures in the picture above until a long hot bath.

Reinvigorated, I managed to finish painting the remainder of the figures in the Perry WOTR 'Dead and Wounded' pack.

I think casualty figures are the wargaming equivalent of peacock feathers - they give the message: I am so resource-ful as a wargamer, I have the money and time to buy and paint non-essential figures.

But mostly they just look cool.

With fg starting work on more zombies for Strandhogg, we are discussing special rules for Undead, which of course must provide for raising dead enemies as zombies. Some of these casualty figures will serve as markers for the positions of fallen combatants, while the wounded ones will probably come in useful for some sort of POW or rescue scenario.

Wood Elf base

I hate elves.

I think they are gay.

But that was before I met Prince Nuada.

I have a soft spot for the underdog, and in terms of the story and the visuals I think the movie-makers managed to create an anti-hero one can root for. The story of course parallels the fluff for my beastmen, and putting the two together will give me the excuse to mix all sorts of Celtic-themed mythological creatures into my force. Joy.

After an extensive search with fg, I think I've got my Prince Nuada figure - but we weren't able to find the exact base I wanted. Then last weekend fg brought over his bits box, and inside it I found a bit from the GW Dryad box that looked the part. Gluing it to a corner of one of the resin bases I have (gotta love those stuff), I got this:

We have those flowing mystical symbols which look vaguely Celtic, and vines which remind one of the plant elemental unleashed by the prince in the movie. It sets the tone for the whole base, but at the same time should not take the focus from the figure itself, which I will paint in a rather low key black colour.

Should be fun, this.

The Games that Define Us

There's a meme going around wargaming blogs that asks the questions: Could I define the wargamer I am today, by the games I've played and indeed the games I didn't play? Could I pick out ten examples and show where it all went so horribly wrong... or depending on your viewpoint, so gloriously right?

I can think of a ton of games that I *didn't* play, but I would much rather bore you with the story of the games I *did* play.

Now kids, in the summer of 1984 your Uncle Don and I went to a bookstore...

1. Grailquest

It was 1984 and I was eleven. My brother and I came across Books 1 and 2 of the Grailquest while at a departmental store (I think it was) and we each got one copy. He didn't really take to the game, but I got hooked by the whole concept of an interactive adventure book. I introduced it to my best friend at school then, who asked his mother to get him a copy. She didn't find a copy, but she got something she thought was similar - Book 5 of the Fighting Fantasy Series, City of Thieves. The two of us went on to buy and play all of the first seven or so books. I also went on to collect all the books in the Grailquest series, which I still own.

2. Fighting Fantasy Role-playing Game

Sometime afterwards Fighting Fantasy came up with their multi-player RPG system. Unlike a solo gamebook, this was a "traditional" RPG with a Gamemaster. I managed to convince my siblings to play through the adventures in the book (the only time I think they played an RPG), and went on to write several adventures of my own. The system is of course primitive and the stories Gygaxian, but it fired my imagination and started me on a life-long career of GMing.

3. Fighting Fantasy Miniatures

Moving forward to 1985... I was at the usual shelf of the bookstore where I got my gamebooks when I saw something shiny and new: plastic miniatures of wizards, barbarians, and monsters, plus some curiously shaped dice. I bought a couple packs of the figures and the dice (thinking back I guess my parents were rather indulgent...) and once again roped my siblings in for a few games. This is perhaps the first miniature wargame I played. Sadly I no longer own the figures, but I still have a couple of the soft plastic dice - my first polyhedrals.

4. Knights at War

Somewhere around this time I came across this large, colourful book with 4 games inside. I bought it, cut the pieces out, learnt the rules, and played a few games with my brothers. This book arguably taught me the concept of military history, of the extent of history and how warfare changed throughout time. I still have it in my cupboard.

5. WRG Ancients

Like many other wargamers of my age, I too tell the story of stumbling upon a book on wargaming at the local library that started one on a life-long addiction. In my case, it was a copy of WRG's 6th edition Ancients. At that time, with no one to guide me, I could not understand the rules, and only had an idea that here there were rules that serious grown-ups played. I later came across Donald Featherstone's War Games Through the Ages, which had formative effect on my hobby.

6. Dragon Warriors

In 1986 I went to secondary school, where some of the kids there were playing Dungeons & Dragons. Not being in the same class as them and unable to afford the rules, I was delighted when I saw Dragon Warriors at the gamebook shelf. For something like S$16 you got the first two books of the series. I recruited a few classmates, and very soon word spread and I had more people who wanted to join. At one point I had 13 players in the same game, and we had to split the group - in a fashion similar to popular sitcoms, some characters had spin-off campaigns of their own. I ended up GMing during recess, after school, and after extra-curricular activities on Saturday. I don't think I was a particularly good or sophisticated GM (I was thirteen!), but we had lots of fun.

When DW was re-released in 2008, I hooked up with a new group over an rpg forum and relived the good times.

7. Ogre and Battlesuit

One of my friends in secondary school introduced me and a few friends to this, and I guess we got into wargaming proper. We bought and played the subsequent supplements: GEV, Shockwave, and also bought  Battlesuit when it came out. Battlesuit would lead me to later purchase my first GW army in the form of plastic Space Marines (Mk VI beakies).

8. Napoleon's Battles

In 1990, now in junior college, my group of wargaming friends and I joined the school wargamer's club and became committee members. Wargames were still hard to come by, and the local hobby store stocked mainly boardgames and expensive Citadel miniatures. Then Avalon Hill released Napoleon's Battles. After some discussion I bought a copy, and our little group started painting some 20mm ESCI and other plastic figures to use with these rules. This would be our first historical miniatures wargame. We would go on to play these rules for many years.

9. DBA

In 1991 we all graduated from JC and enlisted. wahj got a scholarship to study in UK and I disrupted to go to medical school. When wahj came back on his first vacation, he brought with him a copy of DBA and a few 15mm DBA armies for us. It was a big deal at that time because now we were playing the same game and using the same metal miniatures as the wargamers in the big league were. I still have these poorly-painted figures in my collection.

So there you have it, kids. The story of how I became a Role-player and Wargamer. The details and dates may not be all that accurate, and I might have missed things out, but by and large that's how it happened.

Strandhogg Game 9: Heroic Stand

For our game this weekend I decided to utilise the Command Challenge scenario from the latest issue of Battlegame.

The original scenario has Spartans, abandoned by their Macedonian allies, having to make a fighting retreat in hostile territory under the attack by the Illyrian alliance. I substituted the slow-moving dwarves for the Spartans, and put together an alliance of Beastmen, Skavens and Goblins as their opponent.

As in the original scenario, I gave the players a choice of victory conditions. The dwarves could win by either exiting the table with 50% or more of their strength, or eliminating 75% of their enemy. The alliance could score a minor victory of eliminating 50% of the dwarves, or a major victory by eliminating 80% of the dwarves. If the Alliance player chose to go for the major victory, he could recycle on destroyed unit.

The dwarves start within 12" of the centre of the ruins, while the alliance enter via the far table edge. The ford at the middle of the table was the only crossable point of the river.

fg entered the able with all his forces on the right bank. While this allowed him to cut off Martin's escape, it also meant he had to fight the river crossing to get to the dwarves.

Martin formed up one unit in a shieldwall at the ford, while his archers shot at anyone who came close to the bank.

An initial charge by the warg riders was repelled...

As was one led by the Skaven Warlord.

Finally, the Beastlord himself led the charge. Meanwhile, having lost most of one beastmen unit to archery, fg voluntarily routed it off table and recycled it, this time on the left bank. Martin despatched his rangers to meet the threat, while his other warband rounded the ruins to support them.

The Alliance broke the shieldwall, killed the thane and gained a beach-head, forcing the Huscarls and the remainder of the warband to fall back inside the ruins, while the rangers take casualties from the flanking beastmen. But before the beastmen can exploit their success, Martin has killed enough enemies to hit his victory condition.

This is probably the most one-sided (pun unintended) Strandhogg game we've played. I had expected Martin to execute a fighting retreat, and fg to execute a two-prong attack, which would have prevented Martin from concentrating his missile power. fg also had the poor luck of losing his archers early, and rolling poorly for shooting.

This is an interesting scenario that perhaps deserves to be recycled too. Our next scenario may see the dwarves paying the humans a visit and asking some tough questions...

In the meantime, here's a shot of fg's Skavens, who gave a good account of themselves in their first outing.