Xmas games 2025 - part one

The Saturday after Christmas saw a gathering at Stately Counterpane Manor to launch this year's planned Gangs of Rome campaign.

The plan is to have a setting in which we can play a series of games that gradually tell a story without needing to have the right players present for every future game. Any given player will always represent the same gang and players can slot in whenever they are available.
 

We started the session with a bit of a lesson on how the rules work and then created a few characters to illustrate how that works.  Some dice rolling told us a bit about the backgrounds of the two gangs' patrons.  We didn't create names for these bigwigs at the time but Gangs of Rome has some fancy tables to do this for us.

We'll begin with The Green Gang, whose patron is Spurius Verdius, a lanista (the manager of a stable of gladiators). Spurius is known for is love of horses. He maintains a stable of racehorses on an estate outside the city, bringing the fastest of them into Rome whenever the games include a particularly prestigious race.

The Green Gang players so far are Tom Z (whose player character is Aerugo), Jamie C (Pavimentarius, although this would be a short-lived association as we shall see later), Ron P (Junius), and Matt C (Scaevola). In addition, the Greens had non-player character gang-members in the form of Lucretius (who deserted from the legion for love) and Domitianus (a versatile chap who is said to paint his body with the blood of his fallen foes).

Some Roman streets before trouble starts

Moving on to the Blues, we find that they are under the direction of Tarquinius Caerulius whose business is importing beasts for the arena but who is not averse to importing slaves as well. Given that Tarquinius will doubtless employ venatores (hunters; specialist gladiators trained to fight wild beasts) there is clearly scope for the two patrons' business dealings to overlap and we can assume that their rivalry stems at least in part from this. Maybe we will find out more as the campaign progresses.

The current crop of Blue Gang players are Matt Z (Parum Icarus), Andy S (Rufinius), and Leo F ("Julius Caesar" - not his real name but he thinks so highly of himself that the nickname has stuck). They were backed up by NPCs Januarius the bowman, Molendinarius (an experienced brawler), and vengeful Musca. 

As with September's test game, the scenario for our first encounter was The Brawl. This is a stand up fight between the gangs with points awarded for knocking out enemy gang-members and double points for doing so in a suitably dramatic fashion.

Parum Icarus is attacked by an angry mob
(photo by Tom Zunder)

Street fighting outside the temple

Molendinarius launches an attack on seemingly
unarmed Domitianus...

...and puts him out of action

More fighting

The Greens contemplate impending defeat

As the umpire looks on in period-inappropriate T-shirt,
some of the Blues try to avoid smugness

When we decided enough was enough, the Green Gang had lost four members whilst failing to inflict any damage on their opponents. Most important of the losses was their leader Pavimentarius who was taken out in a particularly cinematic fashion.

Post-game dice rolling revealed the fates of the beaten characters. Junius the thief was dragged from the streets with severe lacerations. For the next five games he will be limited to 3 actions in any action stack.

Lucretius recovered with no more than a bruised ego, while Domitianus had only a sprained ankle - he won't be able to carry two pieces of equipment in either of the next two games. Pavimentarius, however, is dead having been, at various times, shot, stabbed and thrown off a roof. He was known to be bitter and twisted and out for revenge so maybe his shade will haunt the streets on dark nights?

I had deployed The Seer as an incola in the game. She didn't play a huge role (which is probably as it should be). I played the effect of her buttonholing characters as costing them one successful activation roll. I think next time I might increase that to two and see how that goes.

I've started a spreadsheet to track the characters through the forthcoming campaign. Look out for more reports as the year progresses.

Review - Rapid Fire! - Third Supplement

I thought it might be useful to produce some reviews of WW2 scenario books with particular reference to their usefulness for TacWWII players.  I propose to rate the books by scoring them from 1 to 5 in each of the following categories:

• Book Design - layout, illustrations, maps
• Historical Content - does the book provide useful background?
• Scenario Design - are they interesting, challenging?
• TacWWII Relevance - relevance and ease of conversion to TacWWII.

These won't necessarily be newly published books. If you're interested you may have to search some of them out via eBay or your local convention's bring and buy stalls.

First up is Richard Marsh's Third Supplement published by Stratagem for the Rapid Fire! rules. 

The 56-page, softbound A4 book contains 14 scenarios covering the Great Patriotic War. These range in space and time from the crossing of the Bug in June 1941 to street fighting in Budapest in January 1945. The contents are mostly in black and white including maps apparently designed with Microsoft Word back in the distant past. The maps are rather stylised and do little more that show the relative locations of significant battlefield features.

However, the front and rear cover (inside and out) and the centre eight pages feature colour photographs of 20mm scale models on terrain appropriate to the scenarios. While these are clearly posed shots, they are consistent in style with actually gaming the scenarios. These are inspiring, albeit most TacWWII players would need to think in terms of building their battlefields in smaller scales.

For Design of the book I rate this offering at a slightly generous 4/5.

In terms of history, the book contains a potted description of each battle. The background is given as is a brief outline of the historical result and often some notes on scenario design choices made by the author. In addition, a couple of dozen sources are mentioned at the start of the book. 

At the back of the book we get some optional additions to Rapid Fire to capture specific aspects of war on the Russian Front. Obviously these are not directly relevant to the TacWWII player but they do serve to highlight issues the designer thinks are particularly important.   

From a Historical Content point of view the book's perfectly adequate to the task. It does give context to our games - 4/5 points.

The scenarios are generally a little bit same-y in that they tend to be attacker-vs-defender games played along the long axis of the table. However, there are some interesting factors such as "Your ammunition is limited and you can't resupply until you've captured location X" or "You need to rescue a besieged force and then get them back out the way you came".

On the whole I think the scenarios will give reasonable games and a fairly decent impression of the historical situation. I'm going to go with 3/5 points for Scenario Design.

I've spoken previously about adapting scenarios from this book to TacWWII. The conversion of orders of battle from Rapid Fire format is fairly straightforward bearing in mind the slightly idiosyncratic model ratios (1:5 for vehicles, 1:15 for men).

Slightly less easy is the widely varying ground scale used in the mapping of battlefields. Basically you're going to have to do your own research to establish the size and layout of your TacWWII battlefield. For this reason I can't give this book a Usability score any better than 3/5 points.

Overall, then, the third Rapid Fire supplement scores 14/20 as a resource for TacWWII players. If you can find a hard copy and you're into wargaming the Eastern Front, I'd certainly recommend giving this a try. Alternatively you can purchase a pdf copy of the supplement from the Rapid Fire website.

Fresh off the workbench

Regulars at The Land of Counterpane will know that I always try to run couple of games here at Stately Counterpane Manor over the Xmas holiday period. This year it's Gangs of Rome and a version of What A Cowboy based on the Traveller RPG. I've been working on models for these two games.

I designed my own Roman roof tiles after our visit to Arbeia and I've recently re-roofed the home-made foricae... 

...and the horreum from Warbases. 

I wanted to add a couple of additional gang members for GoR so that the players in the Christmas game could see how the character creation process works and hopefully have more personal engagement with their gang. A couple of German slave-bodyguards have already appeared here and the last couple of bodies from the Wargames Atlantic pack gave me these two:

For the Traveller game I've 3D printed a couple of cargo modules from Thingiverse.  They'll play a significant role in the scenario. This first one's been painted in Vallejo Medium Blue with a couple of decals from the spares box (I suspect from a 1/48th scale Israeli Sherman tank kit I owned about fifty years ago).

I've painted a couple of Pulp figures (Bob Murch designs) that might find a role in the Traveller game. The particular setting has a Firefly TV series feel so they wouldn't be too out of place.

Finally for now, and not destined for use in either game is this person:

They are another of the Gamma World RPG models that I've had for decades. I suspect I bought them at either Games of Liverpool or Games Workshop in Sheffield in the 1980s. If I'd kept the original Grenadier Miniatures packaging they'd probably be worth a fortune now!

A first go at airbrushing

I've been meaning for some time to add airbrushing to my arsenal of modelling techniques. It seems particularly necessary as I go further into building model aircraft.

My mate Mark P has had a cheap airbrush and compressor set for some time and we've discussed having a session to play with it but we've never managed to get it scheduled. Recently he dropped it off at Stately Counterpane Manor and urged me to have a go myself.

I had a fourth Airfix Folland Gnat kit in the stash (having already built Red Arrows, Yellowjacks, and RAF Valley trainer versions) and was casting around for a suitable colour scheme for it. The scheme used on the aircraft in the film Hot Shots Part Deux was an option but I wanted something that would use one of the airbrush-specific paints I already own so an overall aluminium scheme was the best bet.

In the end I recycled to decals from an Airfix Vampire T.11 kit to produce a fictional Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft.

The model was rather rushed as I just wanted something I could apply paint to quickly. It was originally going to be modelled gear-down but unplanned violent contact with the workshop floor changed that!

For a first attempt I'm reasonably pleased with it. I haven't yet got the hang of mixing non-airbrush paint to the right consistency but I'm getting reasonable results with ready-mixed.

The compressor is a small, battery-powered job with only three pressure settings. I'm hoping to receive an airbrush of my own for Xmas at which point I may have a go with the one the Baroness uses to power her staple gun. It has a reservoir; usability will just come down to whether the pressure is sufficiently adjustable.

More terrain for Calais

I recently rediscovered some old maps that had emerged from the garage of my in-laws' house when it was being sold. It turned out that they were 1/100,000 scale British War Department maps dating back to 1915.  

The one covering the Calais area gives a pretty good idea of the terrain fought over by 10th Panzer Division and 3RTR on 23rd May 1940, which happens to be the subject of my game for Joy of Six next year.

Using a suitably sized paper mask to mark out the table area I came up with this.

I'll probably simplify the terrain somewhat but I did want to have a shot at modelling the area (top right) of fields divided by drainage ditches.

I started off with a suitably sized offcut of PVC board. I chamfered the edges and then painted on the field shapes in Modpodge before scattering on sand. When this was dried I sealed the sand in place with another layer of Modpodge.

When this had dried I painted the ditches black (and varnished them) and did
the fields in a couple of shades of brown.

The fields then got another coat of Modpodge onto which I scattered fine flock, a couple of shades of green on most of the fields but a coarser yellow material on one of them. The whole was then sealed in place by dripping on watered down Modpodge and allowing capillary action to carry it through the flock.

Finally the fields received a fifth and final coat of Modpodge (slightly watered down this time) onto which static grass was added using an applicator. I worked one field at a time so the glue was still wet when the static grass was applied.

And I used two shades of static grass for a bit of variety.

The two brighter green fields are the same static grass on different shades of underlying flock. There's actually a very subtle difference in colour at the end of the process but it's not obvious in the photo.

I have some stand-alone ditches made from strips of Poundland floor tile but I think this integrated module gives a better look.

Chi-Ha

The latest model built from the kits my mate Mark bought for me last Xmas is the Airfix Type 97 Chi-Ha tank.

It's an easy kit to build. It goes together nicely; in my case I just needed a little filling at the rear of the turret roof.

The kit instructions have the frame radio aerial on the turret painted in the same orange colour as the exhaust components. I'm sure the latter will be rusty as a result of the paint having burned off. This didn't seem likely for the aerial so I did a bit of research.

It looks like the frame aerial was actually build from copper rod or tubing. In addition it seems there was copper wire wrapped around the uprights connecting the aerial to the turret. I decided to base coat the whole frame in Castellax Bronze, a lovely deep bronze colour from GW's airbrush range, and then apply a highlight in Vallejo Copper. I also added diagonal lines of copper on the uprights to suggest the wound wires. These aren't visible in the photos.

Sadly I've spotted one glaring error in the picture above. I'll leave it to you to spot while I contemplate whether I can be bothered to fix it!

The Iron Hand of Mars

So my current plan is that next year I will run an Infamy Infamy game at Lard events. The working title is "The Iron Hand of Mars" and the game will (as currently envisaged) be loosely based on Lindsey Davis's novel of the same name.

Of course I'll need to include Marcus Didius Falco, the Roman informer (detective to you) and reluctant emissary of the Emperor. Here he is, put together from the Wargames Atlantic Citizens of Rome pack.

He'll be accompanied by the Centurion Helvetius, who will be acting as optio to  the tribune Camillus Justinus (not pictured here).

Falco and Justinus will be escorted by a small party of legionary recruits (all Victrix models).

At present I have some interesting ideas as to how I will run the game but I need to get a good handle on conventional Infamy Infamy play before I can confirm that they'll work. More on this to follow.

Basing miniatures - how I do it

Having settled on a method for basing miniatures that seems to work for me, I thought it might be helpful to share the 'recipe'. My aim is to produce a style of basing that's reasonably unobtrusive and that I can easily reproduce to give elements a consistent look even though they were completed months apart.

First we need basing material. Depending on the rules, the size of the figure(s), and sometimes the role of the figure in my chosen rules, I use 1p or 2p coins, pre-cut MDF or plastic bases or element bases cut from artists' mounting board. 

I generally attach the painted miniatures to these using clear adhesive such as Uhu, Evostick or, currently, Gorilla Contact Adhesive. 

Next, I build up the base with filler to blend in the figure's base. I've used Tetrion or tile grout in the past and I'm now using the Bartoline Wood Filler seen above. It's a good idea, if you can, to get coloured filler, ideally brown, such that if the base gets chipped you won't see brilliant white showing through. If your only available filler is white, you can probably colour it with cheap acrylic paint.

At this stage we don't particularly need to disguise all signs of the miniature's base - that'll be taken care of later. Also we don't need a completely smooth finish; a bit of texture is a positive thing.

My next step is to paint the base. I use Miniature Paints Earth Brown and then dry brush with Vallejo Iraqi Sand.

I sometimes use patches of other shades of brown but to be honest it rarely makes an appreciable difference.

The result is a base that would work if your miniature is operating in the desert but now it's time to add some greenery.

I now apply patches of undiluted matt Modpodge. This is a resin-enriched PVA-like product that dries somewhat more securely than plain PVA (but you could use the latter if it's all you've got). 

The amount you apply (and the amount of bare earth you leave between patches) should be determined by two factors. Firstly, this is where you get the final chance to disguise the outline of the miniature's base. Secondly, you may want less vegetation on miniatures for the Punic War in the Mediterranean than you do for Boudicca's revolt in Britannia.

Having applied the glue I now dip the base into fine flock. The colour isn't too critical but at present I'm using Woodland Scenics Grass Green Fine Flock.

This gets left to dry, ideally overnight but at least for a couple of hours. The excess flock is then shaken off and retained for future use.

The next stage may seem excessive but I've found it helps. The whole flocked area gets another coating of Modpodge. This is heavily watered down such that capillary action allows it to permeate the flock.

Once more a drying period follows, overnight again if you can, before you paint the whole of the flocked area with a third coating of Modpodge. This time I dilute it only slightly.

While this last Modpodge layer is wet, the model goes onto the static grassing tray. 

This is an old, steel baking tray to which the crocodile clip of my static grass applicator can be attached.

I then sprinkle over static grass using the applicator. At present I'm using '2mm Wild Autumn' from PG Studio.

I've found it best to 'flood' the base with static grass and then, while the Modpodge is still wet, invert the miniature and shake off the excess. If you decide too much Modpodge is visible, repeat the apply and shake approach. The idea is to avoid leaving on so much static grass that the glued-down fibres are squashed flat by those on top of them.

 

You could just apply the static grass straight onto the painted base but I've found that way the static grass looks like, well, static grass with a painted surface underneath. With the layer of flock, the result is lush ground cover and the static grass fibres seem to stand up more reliably. 

If you want to go further, now would be the time to add commercially-made tufts of longer grass but to be honest I rarely bother.

So there you have it. A little long-winded perhaps but I'm happy at last with my basing. Now do I go back and rebase all of the earlier models in the collection?