Back

I'm still trying to get back into rhythm after a short trip to Madrid last week. It will be a while before I get all the photos I took organised and post a proper entry, but here are a couple of pics to whet your appetites.

Changing of the guards at Palacio Real, Madrid

Miniatures at the Military Museum in Toledo

Dux Britaniarum Game 2: Raiding a Wagon Train

After his initial setback some of the goblins deserted, but Badzur managed to convince a band of Dunlending to join him, and in the month of April he once again launched a raid into Enedwaith.

His scouts brought him the news of a small convoy of supplies coming from the north, and he planned an ambush at a river crossing...

Ruk springs the surprise on the allies!

Belegon orders his men to form a shieldwall while Thorgaut guards his flank. While Ruk demonstrates against the shieldwall, Badzur leads a furious charge against the levy guarding the mule train, routing them from the field.

The Allies are bested in the first clash of battlelines, and Belegon orders the men to retreat towards the crossing, where they are joined by levies sallying forth from the border fort. The orcs capture the mule train!

Separated from the men of Gondor, the dwarves fend off the orc assault and eventually rejoin their allies.

As it turned out the random terrain movement and scenario generation favoured the orcs this game: we rolled a river with a single crossing and the orcs enter the tabletop right where the convoy was.

In my first attack I played all five cards in my hand: Carpe Diem, Strong Arm, Bounding Move, Aggressive Charge, and Fear, which routed the levy guarding the mules and making possible their subsequent capture.

The first clash between the two battlelines went in my favour, and the Allies withdrew to reform. After that we spent two turns staring at each other while I moved the mules off the table.

The raid saw moderate losses on both sides: the orcs lost 11 men and the allies 16. More Dunlending joined Badzur, and in the month of May he once again launched a raid into Enedwaith, but was unopposed as Belegon chose to rebuild his strength over confronting them in his weakened state.

As this was our second game, things played faster. We hope to get the third game of the campaign in soon.

Swordsmen

I find myself losing impetus as I try to paint another 40 or so figures to complete my Warhammer (The) Empire army. Times like these it helps to have "unique" figures to paint.

The first one comes from Mirliton's Halberdier Command Group.

I really like the character of this figure. The original figure cradled its helm in its left arm, but the helm, while magnificent, was out of period for my army. I hacked the whole left arm off, and glued a matching left arm from the Perry plastic set holding a poignard in its place. This figure will join my swordsmen unit; the unit is armed with sword and shield, and the poignard in the off hand has a similar function, giving the figure a "parry save".

The second figure (the one on the right) comes from Mirliton's Swordsmen Command Group.

Again, I hacked off the arm below the elbow to swap the shield for a more period one, and embedded arrows in the shield and the ground to add even more dynamism to the figure. I like how the figure echoes the unit standard bearer which I painted before I even bought the Mirliton figures.

And here are the first two ranks of the swordsmen unit:

The flocking and shields have yet to be added. I've given the figures red pants to set them apart from the other foot units - swordsmen have a higher WS in Warhammer and are I suppose "semi-elite", and I am using red pants as a mark for "professional" troops as opposed to militia in this army.

These are the last figures I will be painting for the next couple of weeks. I'm off to Madrid next week and plan to drop by Atlantica. Hope I don't overbuy...

Greatswords

With the Picts done, I turn my attention to my WOTR/Warhammer (The) Empire army. The first to get painted are these seven fully-armoured men-at-arms with two-handed weapons from Mirliton.

As you can see, they look just about historical enough to blend in with the rest of my figures. They will be fielded as Greatswords, the elite foot units of (The) Empire. I like the look of a fully-plate-armoured figure, so this is one unit I will add to if I find suitable figures - perhaps Perry may decide to release a plastic men-at-arms set at Salute this year...

Olde Towne

With fg investing in one of the upcoming VSF Kickstarters, we decided to get down to he business of recreating the Victorian urbanscape on table.

After some discussion, we remembered that we have the Streets and Sewers of Malifuax sets, which provided a base for the tabletop. For the buildings themselves we are tending towards card buildings, not just due to costs reasons but also storage space. After experimenting with some of the fantasy buildings I have, I've streamlined by process to gluing just the four walls onto a mounting board, cutting them out, and then taping them together with masking tape, leaving the last joint free so the whole piece can be stored flat - assembly will be made with the aid of an L-clip from the Malifaux set.

Then yesterday, while browsing at the local art supplies store, I found a new material: 1mm PVC foam board. It has a non porous surface, cuts more easily than cardboard, and looks like it may be more durable. An A3 sized sheet costs only S$1.75 and is just enough for a building.

Today, acting on a tip-off from a TMP discussion thread, I bought the Olde Towne set from Stoelzel's Structures. It looked expensive at US$12, but the pdf is 461 pages long and the way the graphics are organised fit my mode of operation (even if it can be a bit hard to scroll through all those pages to find the page you want).

I printed out the required pages, glued them to the foam board, cut them out (some slips there - I'll be more careful in the future), disguised the edges with a brown marker, and made this:

Each of the graphics come in three shades: daylight, night-time, and monochrome night-time - a blue overcast look to simulate movie darkness. The one shown above is the night-time version, which is darker in real life but looked bright when I as viewing it off my monitor...

Sadly, I didn't have any of my VSF figures handy to pose next to it.

The ground is a tile from the streets of Malifaux set.

The building doesn't look much on its own, but I believe once we have the numbers we can have a rather nice stage for our VSF games.

Skirmish Tray

We had a bit of a family crisis this past week but it seems everything is getting back to normal again.

On the plus side, it meant I stayed at home if I wasn't working and I got quite a bit of painting done - kept me from bouncing off the walls.

Anyway, this is one of the things I managed to finish:

When I started the WOTR project, I intended to use the figures for my Strandhogg games. When the guys started going into Warhammer Fantasy, I had to make a choice between styling my army as a Bretonnian army, or an (The) Empire army. Eventually I decided to go with the handguns and cannons, and so went for a (The) Empire army.

The down side to this, however, was that I lost the longbow effect - (The) Empire archers are strictly skirmishers, which meant no deep ranks of archers.

Under the 8th edition, skirmishers have to be deployed in a rank-and-file formation and the end of their movement, but rather annoyingly, the figures have to be 1/2" apart. This created a market for "skirmish trays", which are specialised movement trays with slots for square bases at 1/2" apart.

I got mine from Back 2 Base-ix. These come in two pieces of 3mm MDF (the top one with the slots in them, and the bottom as a base) and all the little slots that were cut out, which you can use as bases.

I didn't want my figures to look like they are standing on a platform, so I replaced the bottom with a paper-thin sheet of plastic - the top piece provides enough strength to the whole construct. To make the formation look less sparse, I added a couple of stakes and bundles of arrows from the Bretonnian archers set. It was when I was going to glue the stakes into position when I realised I don't actually know where to put them, or to put it in another way, where the archers stood in relation to the stakes. Behind? In front until they are charged? Beside? In the end practicalities prevailed and I placed the stakes so that they don't jut out off the base.

I also found out that the bases I based my archers on were a little bigger than the slots - I ended up filing the slots AND the bases to make them fit.

I'm quite happy with the outcome.

Two versions

One of the things that got me started on refurbishing and expanding my Space Marines force was the Duke Gerard figure from Reaper.

I use him as a Space Marine Captain, armed (after much deliberation) with a Relic Blade and Storm Shield. The sheathed sword is hidden behind the shield, so I removed the hand holding the bolter I originally equipped him with and gave him an empty hand instead.

A while later, I thought it would be good if I could field a figure with the Captain Sicarius stats, so I decided to buy another figure. However, I wanted it to represent the same person, the idea being that it was the same captain of the company, but equipped differently. Fortunately, the new figure I got had similar hair to the Duke Gerard figure, and to further the mimicry I ripped the wings off the original figure and magnetised it so it can be used on either figure.

So here they are.

Painted Picts

Here are the Picts I promised.

They are from Tanatus Miniatures, a small range of figures which I did not know of until fg showed me the site.

I absolutely love these figures. I especially like the way the sculptor modelled the hair - it is like a Dark Age chart for grading of male pattern baldness - even if the leader does look like one of the Bee Gees, and the standard bearer Ron Jeremy (I was tempted to change the motif on the banner from a boar to a hedgehog...).

They are a perfect match for my Perry plastics, and thus also GW's LOTR range. In fact, I think they have more realistic proportions than Perrys. I replaced the soft metal spears that came with the packs with steel spears left over from my 15mm Attalid Pergamenes.

I painted them using my standard block-and-wash method, which makes them very dull - they look depressing if not for the addition of green flock. They can be used in three capacities: as Dunlending allies for my orcs in our Dux Britanniarum campaign, as peasants in my Strandhogg games, or in the front ranks with my armed peasants in Warhammer, where they will count as Spearmen. The "movement tray" they are on is actually a lipped chariot base, which I bought as artillery bases for my WOTR guns and crew.

I painted them all with black hair because they were described as swarthy and dark-haired by Tolkien - the professor was obliviously and unapologetically racist the way some old British gentlemen are, I suppose. Tolkien didn't tell us a lot about the Dunlending, but it is believed that they are based on the Celts (as the Rohirrim are based on Germanic invaders). While googling, I read that a computer game assigns them clans named after animals, and decided to give them a banner featuring a Celtic-styled boar.

Lacking the skills to make a "proper" banner, I simply found a "parchment" pattern I liked, printed that on a piece of paper, then found a boar motif, resized it to fit, and then printed that on the same piece of paper. This gave me a "pre-painted" banner which I simply cut and glued to the spear. I then painted the exposed edge of the paper with some Devlan Mud, which "sealed" the edge and added some staining.

I really like the way this unit turned out - let's hope I don't fail them in the next DB game...

Squad 7

Here they are: the seventh complete squad in my Space Marines force. While they are the fourth tactical squad in my force, they are designated as the seventh squad as, rather annoyingly, there seems to be no decals for the numerals 5 and 6.

They are not done from scratch, but bought off ebay - someone painted them in the base colour and did the weapons in silver, but probably decided he didn't want them anymore afterwards. I had to shave some mould lines off, but instead of having to assemble them from parts and priming them myself, I merely had to had prime some parts in black. Given the unpredictable performance of my spray primer these days, this is much more how I prefer to work.

A fourth tactical squad gives me more options for configuring my force. With the exception of another Space Marine captain figure (to give my captain an alternative weapons load-out) and perhaps a few scouts figures to round up the squad (hopefully the Raging Heroes kickstarter provides the necessary figures), this is probably as far as will go with this force.

Over the next few days I hope to paint up a small unit of Picts - very nice figures, those - for our Dux Britanniarum campaign.

Accessories sold separately

One of the fun thing about 40K is that you have weapon options for some of the figures/models. This allows you to optimise a force for a mission (which frankly, is what you expect a 'modern' force like the Space Marines to do), and is frankly fun from a modelling point of view. With the aid of rare-earth magnets, one can expand the number of options one can field without having to paint a separate figure for each option.

A Cyclone Missile-launcher made from a Sentinel Missile-launcher.

My Dreadnought fitted as a Hellfire-pattern Dreadnought with twin-linked lascannons and missile-launcher. The lascannon arm was made using the armature from the AT-43 Kolossus and the cannons from a Leman Russ bits and some plasticard. The missile-launcher is from a Stormraven.

The Dreadnought with (count-as) twin-linked autocannon and (count-as) twin-linked heavy-flamer.

Dux Britanniarum Game 1: Farm Raid

It's been a while in planning, but fg and I played the first game of our Dux Britanniarum campaign this evening.

We set our campaign in Middle Earth, sometime after the fall of Sauron, when bands of orcs still troubled the lands.

My Orc (Saxon) Warlord, by the name of Badzur the Tall, gathered about him a rag-tag band of orcs and goblins, along with a troll champion, and set about to raid the settlements of Gondor; unfortunately, young Lord Belegon and his trusted lieutenant Beren and Dwarven ally Thorgaut caught wind of his nefarious plan...

The orcs rush towards the farm, hoping to catch its inhabitants by surprise... but are surprised to find the soldiers of Gondor already there!

Still hoping to see off his challengers, Badzur ordered his men to form into lines of battle as Men and Dwarves formed a shieldwall atop a hill overlooking their approach.

The elite soldiers of Gondor take Badzur's orcs in the flank!

Men and Dwarves charge down the hill! The orcs flee after losing several killed.

We are quite sure we didn't get all the rules right, this being the first time we played them, but already I can tell they give a good narrative game.

In game terms, I was really rather unfortunate when it came to rolling for objective and entry - my objective (the farm) was far away from my starting point, and fg's troops entered the table on the same sector as the farm! Even though the orcs got a good head start, by the time they were close to the farm the allies have already formed up.

The terrain also funnelled my troops into a narrow frontage, which prevented me from getting all my troops engaged.

After a short sharp fight, the orcs were thrown back and Badzur decided to call it a day. Fortunately for him, the allies decided against pursuing them.

The losses suffered by the orcs were still considered "light" and Badzur will return to avenge his insult at the hands of Men and Dwarves the following month. Belegon was rewarded with treasures from his lord, and word of his victory draws new warriors to his banner.

I guess the way the scenarios are generated will give "unbalanced" scenarios once in a while, but then on a campaign time scale a player must know when to fight and when to cut his losses and leave the field, as Badzur did only too late this day.

Last figure of the year

I guess my feelings for Space Marine Librarians as pretty much the same as those the Space Marines themselves have of their Librarians: while I don't really think the use of psychic powers (magic) is honourable, the fact that my enemies use them compels me to adopt them myself. Having a psyker allows me a chance to negate the psychic powers of enemy psykers, and with Adrian and Thomas both fielding psykers... let's just say I didn't start this arms race.

Anyway, once I decided to paint a Librarian figure, the next question was what wargear to field him with, and after that which exact figure to use.

While the Turmiel figure would have been an obvious choice, I wanted my Librarian to be in Terminator armour but I didn't like the ones available. The figure I eventually chose was this one of a Space Marine captain in Terminator armour. The figure came with a storm bolter in the right hand, but as the Librarian has a psychic shooting attack, I didn't want him armed with a shooting weapon he wasn't going to use; instead, I wanted him to have an open right hand like the Turmiel figure, as if he was casting a spell. So after all that, I ended up buying a Turmiel figure just to cut his right hand off to graft onto my Librarian's wrist - the Turmiel figure then had its Dark Angels insignia removed and a hand holding a plasma pistol glued on to its wrist, and will become a Librarian for Adrian's Ultramarines...

Anyway, here's my Librarian.

"I find your lack of faith in the Dewey Decimal System disturbing..."

I painted him blue instead of dark green as the rest of my marines, because of this article. I think he turned out fine, and the blue does set him apart from my other Terminators.

With him painted, I now have three options for my HQ choices.

The Chaplain, the Captain, and the Librarian.

2012 in Review

It's still a few days till the end of the year but as I will be busy with non-gaming matters this weekend I thought I might as well do this post today.

We played a total of 12 games this year, which isn't as many as I have hope for, but at least we now have more players and armies compared to a year ago.

We didn't play all the games we wanted to for one reason or another though: the Dystopian Wars project is delayed as Spartan Games decided to work on their Dystopian Legions line instead of the promised Ottoman forces, and we never got round to doing the Warring States China campaign.

On the plus side we now have a few games of Age of Eagles under our belts, and three armies too. On the Games Workshop side we are gaining momentum with both 40K and Fantasy Battles. Other than these two games we hope to get the figures and rules sorted for the Macedonian War project, but as hundreds of figures are yet to be painted, this may take a while... Also in the pipeline is a Dux Britanniarum campaign between fg and myself, using mainly LOTR figures. Strandhogg, my previous 28mm skirmish favourite has seen less action in the past few months, so hopefully DB will give the boys a chance to get some fresh air.

That's the hope-to-do; now on to the to-not-do...

Now I am not one for New Year resolutions, but I do plan to buy and paint the minimal of figures in the upcoming year. I still have around 60 28mm figures on the painting list, but that's all - after that, I will have enough (haha) for 2000 pts GW games. The only thing I see myself buying in 2013 in a big way is an Ottoman fleet if Spartan Games decide finally release them.

Those are the plans. Let's see how they survive contact with 2013 then...

15mm Attalid Pergamene completed

Painted, based and flocked.

These four Impetus units represent my contribution to our planned Macedonian War campaign; they can also double as the Attalid Pergamene under DBA, being 1 x Kn, 1 x Cv, 1 x LH, 7 x Ax, and 2 x Ps. I never play DBA these days, but somehow the vestigial Barkerist inside me compelled me to make sure my little contingent would be DBAble.

With these figures done, my painting commitment is much reduced - but more on that in my next post, I think...

Battle of Busaco

With Martin free to play a game on Sunday, I decided to do another Peninsular War scenario.

Problem with most Peninsular battles is that even with the scale of age of Eagles, we still don't have enough figures and tabletop area for a full battle. After some reading, I decided to depict only the southern half (or two-thirds) of the battlefield, pitting the French II and VIII Corps against the Allied 2nd, 3rd and 5th Divisions.

I gave Martin the option of deploying hidden behind the crest of Busaco ridge, which would oblige the French players (Thomas and Gerard) to approach the ridge blind. Martin chose to deploy at the crest of the ridge, and the French decided to attack the the two ends of his line...

The Allies deploy along the length of the ridge. The cork and bits of turf mark the rough ground.

The French approach, pushing their guns forward.

Line vs. column... well, supported lines, actually.

Panorama of the battlefield, showing the French attacks at both ends of the Allied lines.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, the French managed to occupy the highest points on both ends of the table, and even managed to haul their guns up to the crest on the southern end.

In its basic form, AoE doesn't really confer a "historical" advantage to the British Line vs. French Column match-up. The various scenarios that I looked at had different ways of dealing with this, but all seemed to give too much advantage to the British. I guess I will have to study this aspect again before our next game.

Second Game of 40K

After reading through the rulebook several times, I felt confident enough to play a larger game of 40K with Thomas, this time with walkers and vehicles.

We played a 1765 pts game, with the "capture the flag" scenario: my forces have to capture the bottle of green paint on Thomas' side of the table, while he has to capture the bottle of red paint on my side (yes, we are working on making some proper objective markers...).

Thomas' Rhino lights the way. My Thunderfire cannon sits comfortably in a piece of ruins.

Squad mates cheering Brother Lucius on as he took aim at the enemy dreadnought. He missed.

A meeting of dreads.

Assault troopers face off.

The command squads from both sides face off as the battle reaches its climax.

We still made some minor rule errors, mostly due to unfamiliarity with the stats and some special rules for the weapons, but I think we've got it down more or less.

40K is rather unforgiving in a rock-paper-scissors way - if you haven't got something that can defeat vehicles, you are pretty much toast if the enemy brought some.

Now that we have got a tournament style game done, I am hoping to try some scenarios and see how that works out. Meanwhile, I am slowly painting up new recruits for my force...

WOTR Artillery

"Espy thou yonder Elven Mage? Confound him and everyone near him!"

While I wait for figures and bits to complete my Attalids and round up my Space Marines forces (it's a never ending process, isn't it?) I decided to get back into the saddle up painting the stuff I already on hand.

With the four figures from Front Rank painted, my artillery corps is now complete: two guns (counts as great cannons under Warhammer rules) and a volleygun (counts as Helblaster), all that I plan to field in my WOTR/Empire army.

The crew come from three different companies: Perry, Mirliton, and of Front Rank, who provided the Master Engineer. The guns come from Perry, Mirliton, and Artizan.

I know artillery crew were "civilians" during the WOTR period, but I have chosen to depict them as a "professional" body, with more a more uniformed look than my other units.

Let's see how they perform then...

Vexillia does it again!

Allow me to go in a roundabout, rambling fashion as I did last time...

After last weekend's game of Warhammer Fantasy I decided to read more about my army... and I realised that I have completely missed the fact that The Empire has a new army book/codex. That's right, despite the new griffon models the size of a real pigeon and the ridiculous telescope and planetarium on wheels, my mind did not make the connection that: hey! new models = new rules = new codex!

Anyway, that made me decide to get a copy of the new army book (which Adrian got for me yesterday - thanks, bro).

Truth be told I don't actually like the list that much, since I model my army after the WOTR period, and all the shiny bits that make an Empire army powerful - the magic, the priests and fanatics, the monsters - don't really gel with my fluff. I am not even allowed to field massed ranks of longbowmen (although this has always been the case)!

I reckon to hit the points I need I will have to fill out the ranks with foot-sloggers, perhaps another box of Perry plastics, and to give my infantry more bite I will need to bulk out my unit of Greatsword - fully-armoured knights/men-at-arms with two-handed weapons. Now unfortunately the Perry plastic boxed sets only come with 4 of these per box (out of 40 torsos), and they only have 6 attack poses for the metal ones. After some browsing, I settled for the Mirliton figures, which I have used and which fit with the Perry figures, and sent an order off to Vexillia earlier this afternoon.

When I came home from work, I found an email acknowledging my order and telling me the figures have been dispatched, and another email from Paypal telling me that Vexillia has made a partial refund on my order as the actual postage is less than what their site calculated.

That's probably the first time I received a partial refund for postage.

Thanks, Martin.

First Game of Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition

Adrian and I managed to play a game of WHFB 8th Ed this afternoon.

He also brought over the X-frame which he made for our tray table.

Finally, we can reach our beers without getting up from our chairs!

The game itself was a small 600 points affair, with no magic, but it allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the turn sequence and the phases of combat and shooting. Adrian learnt that his cannon missed more often than it hit, and I learnt that the dwarves' Toughness of 4 makes them, well, tough.

The Empire battleline move towards the dwarven line.

Mostly though the afternoon was a chance for us to catch up over a few beers and get our figures out and place them on a terrain table, hence this last photo:

Dwarves sally forth from a Mage Knight tower.

15mm Attalid Pergamene WIP 2

Almost done.

I'm missing two elements worth of figures.

They are frankly not very well-painted as I wanted to turn them out during my leave this week, and because I knew much of the painting would be obscured by the large shields anyway; when I look at the unit from the front all I get is an impression of large white shields, bronze helmets with red crests, and thin wire spear-shafts, so perhaps it's not so unrealistic after all.

Liebster Blog Award

I am sure you have seen that picture of the shiny man around during the past few weeks.

Well, Dan at merseybooks has chosen to tag me with the award (thanks, Dan!). Dan is the author of Dux Bellorum and Song of Arthur and Merlin, and is currently working on another set of rules for the medieval period - I think I will do a playtest post here soon. Dan is also a contributor on Battlegames magazine, and his ladder campaign in one of the earlier issues is one of my favourite campaign formats.

Now the rules of the meme requires me to tag "five favourite blogs with less than 200 followers", but all the blogs I regularly read have more followers than that, and many have already received the award!

Well, all good things must come to an end, and perhaps that is my part in this. Thanks once again, Dan.

15mm Attalid Pergamene WIP 1

I finally got the 15mm Xyston figures primed yesterday, and made good progress on them today.

On the left are two of the three bases of cavalry I need, on a movement tray I made myself.

In the centre are the command bases of the two units of thureophoroi I am planning to paint, again on a movement tray. The iconography on the two flags and the letters on them are taken from Pergamene coins, representing Athena's bow and Asklepios' snake respectively. On the right is the single unit of skirmisher.

That's about one third of the force done in an afternoon. I hope to complete the whole DBA-sized force this week.

First Game of 40K 6th Edition

It's been a while since we managed to get a game in, but yesterday Thomas and I managed to play a small 1000 pts game of 40K.

The basic rules themselves are rather standard - we played without vehicles or artillery - but I suspect things are more complex once we add vehicles, artillery, and psychic powers,

What I found is that given the fast pace of the game, 40K is really rather unforgiving: if your troops are not shooting/assaulting, they are points you have wasted for that turn. Plasma weapons seem to be over-powered, which leads me to wonder if I should get more of them...

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the game.

The two sides face off along the length of the table.

Blood Angels charge into the the gun line.

My Assault Squad, led by the Chaplain, charge into close combat.