Battered GNW Russians

My progress on gradually painting up odds and sods of previously unused 6mm stuff has now reached the Great Northern War.  I had a small number of Baccus 6mm Russian infantry left over and I thought I'd have a go at producing a unit that's been under fire for some time.

Using the Shot, Steel and Stone rules it's unlikely that a unit will ever get down to a single 30mm square base before routing off the table so I decided to make a two-base (60x30mm) base that could be used as a unit in its own right or swapped in for a particular three-base unit after it has taken a base's worth of casualties. Alternatively, if I go back to Black Powder, it'll serve a small unit.

I'd normally use four strips of musketeers, one of pike and a command strip for a unit of this size but while I had loads of command strips going spare I was down to three of musketeers and no spare pikes.

I decided to sculpt on the base a couple of casualties (from Green Stuff) and I found a spare dismounted dragoon who could be added as a straggler.

Green Stuff also allowed me to create a couple of spent cannon balls that have ploughed themselves to the soft ground on which these Russians stand. The flag is by Baccus.

I'm now down to just a few generals and infantry command elements. I'm tempted to have a go at producing a selection of Russian and Swedish generals. 

On characters and campaigns

I just thought I’d set down how I created the characters for Zheltarus and Yeșilkara in my previous post and say a little about how I intend to use them.

The first step was to roll up a character for each of the command elements in my collection.
I started with a system straight out of Black Powder.  The Personal Qualities of Commanders rating in that rule set is rolled on a d6 but only the extreme values (one for “low”, six for “high”) are taken account of.  Three dimensions are considered - Aggression, Decisiveness and Independence.  Any resulting characteristics on this scale and their impact in the game are shown in italics below the narrative descriptions.

Those narrative descriptions are all my own work (modestly examines fingernails after polishing them on the front of his crimson velvet smoking jacket) but built upon a framework provided by Henry Hyde.    Following Henry’s The Wargaming Compendium, I created random values (from 1 to 100) in Intelligence, Initiative, Courage, Charisma, Strength and Health.

Occasionally there would appear to be a clash between the two systems.  For example, if the Black Powder Personal Quality was low decisiveness (Hesitant) but the character came up with Initiative in the 90s under Henry’s system, I gave precedence to the Black Powder rating.  In such cases I would swap the offending percentage rating with the value at the opposite extreme in the character’s profile.  Thus a Hesitant commander with Initiative 91 and Charisma 10 would become Initiative 10, Charisma 91 before the narrative was constructed.

The final numerical value I allotted was Social Status.  In line with the Maurice rules, this is on a one to four scale with four being the highest.  My commanders in chief (Mikhail II and Murad the Vicious) automatically got four.  The rest were rolled randomly on a d4 (actually using the Dice Bag app on my iPhone).  I plan to restrict the allocation of generals to commands in a true-to-period way.  Higher status officers will lead the cavalry regardless of their capacity to do so effectively!

Interestingly all of the Yeșilkaran generals so far have come out with Social Status 3 quite by accident.  I must consider what this says about the hierarchy within the Emir’s inner circle.

Meanwhile, I’ve neglected to do the command element for my Janissaries.  So let’s do him now.

The Dice Bag app rolls 2, 3 and 5 so there are no Black Powder Personal Qualities and we can go straight to Henry’s attributes.  I fire up the percentage dice function and get:  Intelligence 92, Initiative 15, Courage 66, Charisma 92, Strength 63 and Health 10.  Finally, rolling a virtual d4 his Social Status is 1.  This last value is interesting.  Clearly the Janissaries have a significantly lower status than the Sipahi in the Emir’s court.

Hall Inalcik’s book The Ottoman Empire is a good source of Turkish names.  In this case I choose Ishâk Pasha for our Janissary commander.

Now we need to consider the extreme values above.  Ishâk Pasha is very bright and will be popular with the men, all the more so because he won’t be prone to get them killed in rash advances.  He’s not a particularly well man, though.  So all in all we end up with:

Ishâk Pasha, commander of the Janissaries
Social Status 1
The Emir values his devoted slave Ishâk for his steadiness in battle.  The Pasha is a skilled but cautious political operator and has built his power on the unwavering support of the Janissary corps despite his lack of status within the Emir’s court.  Ishâk is a eunuch by conventional designation only. He is accompanied on his campaigns by a physic who supplies him with powders and ointments to mitigate the effects of regular “conversation” with foreign women.


So how will I use these ratings?  The initial inspiration to create them came out of my limited feel for the period.  I’ve read so much about twentieth century warfare that I find it easy to come up with interesting scenarios for games.  In the 18th century I don’t have that instinctive understanding and wanted a bit of game mechanism to help me.  By populating the region with defined characters I’m hoping plots will emerge naturally.

What I don’t plan on doing is running a full campaign on the Hyboria model.  Zheltarus and Yeșilkara will simply provide a framework for the narrative around occasional battles using Great Northern War-period toys.  I also don’t plan to give the numeric stats (other than Social Standing) to the players.  They will remain in reserve in case I want the dice to reveal whether an officer, not currently under the control of a player, behaves in a particular way.

That’ll do for now but I’ll also want to add equivalent characters for my Poles, who are planned to appear in fictionalised form as the Kingdom of Tszervonsk.  More on these later.

Personalities of Zheltarus and Yesilkara

I decided to have a go at populating my early 18th century imagi-nations using the "Personal Qualities of Commanders" rules from Black Powder combined with some of the ideas in Henry Hyde's The Wargaming Compendium and from Maurice. I could have equally well have pinched ideas  Tony Bath's Setting Up a Wargames Campaign.  All fine source material.  So here are some of the key personalities.  The sections in italics are specific to Black Powder.

Mikhail III, Grand Duke of Zheltarus
Social Status 4
Clever, resourceful and courageous, Mikhail is loved by his men.  His health is poor, though. He is said to cough blood into a silk handkerchief.

General Ostrovski, commander of the Zheltarussian Frontier Corps
Social Status 3
A man of immense ability to quickly assess a situation and act accordingly. Somehow he tends to manage personally to steer clear of the thickest fighting and, perhaps as a result, he is unpopular with the men.
Decisive - can always re-roll a failed Command check but if the re-roll fails it is automatically a blunder.

General Prince Mamurov
Social Status 3
A bull of a man, Mamurov is said to juggle cannonballs in the mess as a party trick.  Though no great thinker, he is popular with the junior officers and rankers.
Headstrong - +1 Staff Rating if he issues orders first in any turn but always blunders on an 11 or 12.

General Robert McCrumb, Scots mercenary officer
Social Status 2
An experienced commander but something of a cold fish, McCrumb has built a reputation for steadiness in defence.  Some say his cold demeanour hides a razor-sharp mind. Others say he keeps quiet to avoid being known for the fool he is.
Hesitant - if he successfully gives an order that results in three moves he must reroll and abide by the second result.

General Willem Fronkensteen, Dutch mercenary officer
Social Status 1
Perhaps the cleverest man Zheltarus, Fronkensteen is a keen student of microscopy.  He is popular with his soldiers who sympathise when he is, all too often, prostrated with severe dysentery.
Decisive - can always re-roll a failed Command check but if the re-roll fails it is automatically a blunder.

Murad the Vicious, Emir of Yesilkara
Social Status 4
Murad is perhaps the perfect eastern potentate; immensely strong, courageous, sharp-witted and loved by all his followers.  His only known weakness is almost terminal maladie imaginaire, which often keeps him confined to his gilded divan.

Harkan Bey, the Vizier
Social Status 3
With his flashing dark eyes and magnificent waxed moustaches, Harken Bey is loved by men and women alike.  With the Emir prostrate, the Vizier charges around Yesilkara keeping the an assortment of governors and tribal leaders in check.

Roustam Bey, Cavalry Commander
Social Status 3
Roustam is in his late eighties and, to be honest, barely has the strength to retain his seat on a horse and sometimes has to be reminded what day it is.  The Sipahis love him, though, for the many victories he has brought them over the years.
Senile - if he successfully gives an order that results in three moves he must reroll and abide by the second result.

Karim Bey, Commander of the Light Horse
Social Status 3
Karim rose to his current status as a result of his long service as a wrestling partner of both the Emir and the Vizier.  He is said to have felled a camel with a single punch.  Sadly his intelligence is closer to that of the camel than it is to his old friends'.
Aggressive - plus 1 to his Staff Rating if giving an order to charge.
Unimaginative - minus 1 to his Staff Rating if giving an order before the Commander in Chief of the army. If he ever blunders, the player rolls twice and chooses one to apply.

There's a few characters to start with.  More will follow later when I get them photographed.

Pickett's Charge

This is a bit of a late report on last Sunday at Gauntlet.

Steve from the Deeside club brought along a large collection of, now out of production, Gordon and Hague 10mm plastic ACW figures and we played under the benevolent eye of Will McNally.

Now I've no interest at all in the American Civil War.  Pretty much by accident I've amassed a significant collection of 20mm plastic ACW figures but every time I look at them entirely zero enthusiasm for the period ignites in my brain.  However, even I have heard of the Battle of Gettysburg.  I know that Pickett's charge was part of the action and that it represented "the high watermark of the Confederacy".  And there my knowledge ends.

I was struggling to get to grips with how things were supposed to work, particularly as Will was using the recently published ACW supplement to the Black Powder  rules.  However, as a Union commander (no way was I, as a definite leftie, going to play a representative of the slave-holding South) all a had to do was stand there and wait.

And wait I did, on the extreme right of the Union line, with Jamie on my left and Gary to the left of him. We had lots of soldiers, but then so did the enemy.

Apparently "the angle" was an important landmark on the battlefield.  The two walls, below, are it.

Large numbers of Rebels approached...

And eventually crashed into our line...

At first we held them off...

But eventually they pushed us back.  I think the High water mark of the Confederacy might have been a bit higher in our case but because the Confederate attack off on my left had been so definitively defeated, the general view was that the Gauntlet version of history wasn't going to be so different from the real thing.

Overall I enjoyed the game - it was great to get to know some more of the Deeside lads.  I'd like to have a better idea of what was going on, though.

More GNW Russians

This is how I'm doing my 6mm horse and musket units at present.

I started of with one 60mmx30mm element per battalion for Polemos:GNW but found that I can't get on with the rules.  I'm now planning on using either Black Powder or Maurice.  The pseudo-four-element approach should work for both.  It also saves two strips of figures per 120mm wide unit!

I've yet to attach flags but the front rank unit is the Semionovski Guards whilst the second is Sweden's Regiment.

On the workbench - Saxon Dragoons

In the early 18th century the thrones of Saxony and Poland were united in the person of Augustus the Strong.  That's my excuse for adding a unit of Saxon Leibregiment Dragoons to my 6mm scale Polish army.  That and the fact that again had a few figures that needed using up.

Again I've had to sculpt a couple of casualty figures to bring the unit up to strength with the Dragoons in my Russian army.

As usual, the four 30x30mm bases will form a unit for Maurice or Black Powder.  More pics when I get the groundwork done.

Polish Army Completed

Having taken a much-needed week off work, I've managed to make considerable progress on a number of projects, al in 6mm scale.  In particular, I've finished my late 16th/early 17th century Poles.

The army consists of two units of Valack light horse (front row), one unit of winged hussars and six of pancerny (second and third rows), and two of infantry (rear row).

One potential commander for the army is King Jan Sobieski (below).  He's a conversion of a Baccus Cossack.

The figures represent most of a Baccus Great Northern War Polish Army Pack.  The exceptions are the blue-coated drabant infantry (rear rank in the photo above) and Jan Sobieski's janissary guard (in the rear rank in the photo below).  The drabants are repurposed Russian streltsy (Baccus) while the jannisaries are from the Irregular Miniatures Ottoman Turks range.

These four-base units (the hussars and drabants are actually based as two small bases and a double-width centre) are ideal for Maurice or as standard-sized units for Black Powder.

More Black Powder

Our biggest Black Powder game yet on the 28th saw a combined Ottoman Turk / Polish army attacking Russians in a game set in about 1711.  This was a the first chance to get all of my 18th Century 6mm scale collection on the table at once and I'm quite pleased with how spectacular it looked.

The battlefield - along the river is the Russian army.  The Turks are in the
background whilst the Poles are clustered around the woods on
the extreme left of the picture. 

Jamie took on the role of Peter the Great, trapped in a bend of an impassible river (a situation reminiscent of that on the Pruth in 1711 but this wasn't a historical scenario).  Andy ran the large and unwieldy Turkish army, whilst George ran the small but powerful Polish brigade.

For speed I set the armies up in their starting positions but allowed the players to fill with the detail before we got started.  Both Russians and Turks had the classic two cavalry wings and an infantry centre with artillery.  The Poles formed a far right wing for the Turkish army whilst a couple of gunboats on the river formed their far left.

The whole front of the Turkish army was covered by clouds of musket-armed skirmishers.  These would prove very handy in using up the Russians' "First Fire" bonus.

The action opened with clashes between Turkish and Cossack light horse.  At the same time the Poles advanced rapidly on the right and the whole Turkish army moved forward at a somewhat more sedate pace.

In the centre the swarms of Ottoman skirmishers approached the Russian main infantry line.  The Russian infantry blazed away with muskets to little effect other than wasting their "First Fire".

Jamie decided to position a couple of his Russian artillery batteries in the
castle on the far side of the river.  This looked ace but did his
available firepower no good at all.

One the Russian right one and a half regiments of dragoons lined up to face the oncoming Sipahi.

But the climax of the battle came on the left.  A regiment of Polsh winged hussars charged into the dismounted Moskovski Dragoons, routing them completely.  The resulting sweeping advance saw them impact the (mounted) Viatski Dragoons who were also routed.  A poor roll on the break test for "friends routed" also saw an adjacent infantry battalion rout.  

In the background the winged hussars, with supporting Pancerny,
have just routed three units in one turn!

Not surprisingly, Jamie decided at this point that the battle was lost and offered his surrender to the Turks.  Thus the result, if not the events, of the Pruth action was repeated.

In general, Black Powder was well-received.  Andy enjoyed it despite the horrible command and control limitations of the Ottoman army and Jamie expressed himself happy to play again.  I always think that if you're happy to play a set of rules again when your first experience was of defeat, then they must be OK.

Game Number Three

Our lesson today is taken from Donald Featherstone's Battles With Model Soldiers.  I yield to no man in my admiration for Featherstone as the father of hobby wargaming in the UK but I have to say that this book has something of the feel of a man scraping the bottom of the barrel to meet his publisher's demands.

However, I wanted a quickly set up solo game so I could refresh my memory of how Black Powder works so I decided to refight the rather uninspiringly named "Game Number Three".

Lacking suitably based Federals and Confederates I swapped to Russians and Turks respectively.

The game started badly for the Turks.  A Command Blunder (double sixes) on their first roll of the game!  This saw the right flank Sipahi haring off towards the Russians.  Then I rolled again and got another double six which would have led to the rest of the army retreating off the table.  Fortunately I remembered that the first blunder ended the Turks' Command Phase so this blunder didn't happen.

Things were little better for the Russians.  Deveson's regiment marched off towards the Turkish cavalry while the rest of the Russian Army stayed in place.

On Game Turn 2 the Sipahi charged Deveson's Regiment.  The Russians stood firm and poured closing fire into the Turkish horse.  The melee was drawn and the Sipahi withdrew in disorder to dress their ranks and rest their winded horses.

The rest of the Turkish army failed to move at all because of another roll of double six!  Likewise the Russians seemed content to let one infantry unit do all the fighting.

On Game Turn 3 the rest of the Turkish army advanced.  The Russian infantry and artillery formed a slightly bent line but the cavalry still refused to move.

A firefight now developed between the Janissaries and the Russian infantry backed up by artillery.  Both Deveson's Regiment and the blue Janissaries were Shaken as a result of casualties taken in the musketry duel.  Meanwhile, the Turkish commander moved to rally his Sipahi.

On Game Turn 6 the Turkish commander tried but failed to issue a 'Follow Me!' order to the Sipahi.  However, the would-be target of their charge, Deveson's Regiment, was routed later in the same turn by the fire of the red Janissaries:

Over the other side of the battlefield, meanwhile, the Russian General had finally got his cavalry moving by virtue of another 'Follow Me!' order.  The swept forward intending to pass behind the woods and take the Turks in the rear.

On Game Turn 7 the Sipahi moved into a position from which they could charge at the left of the Russian line but the shooting of the Janissaries was ineffective.

In the Russian turn, the Dragoons failed to respond to the urgings of their commander but fine shooting did see the left flank Janissary orta routed.

Game Turn 8 was frustrating for the Turks.  With the Russian artillery at their mercy, the Sipahi refused to charge!  The Russian cavalry, meanwhile, moved into a position from which they could charge into the rear of the Red Janissary orta.

The following turn the Siahi again failed to receive the order to charge but the Russian Dragoons didn't.  With their commander at their head, they careered into the rear of the Red Janissaries.

Surely the Turks would lose the melee and be routed?  Well, yes and no.... With a score of 10 on 2d6 the Turks managed to pass their break test and keep fighting.

Meanwhile the Sipahi finally managed to charge. they swept away the Russian guns and followed up smack into Gulitz's Regiment.

Shaken by closing fire, the Sipahi break after the ensuing melee.

After a second round of melee, the red Janissaries again passed a break test by throwing a ten but retreated and found themselves between Gulitz's grey-coated infantry and the carbine armed dragoons.  When the smoke cleared at the end of Game Turn 12 it was all over as the Janissaries rolled snake-eyes on the resulting break test.

All-in-all an enjoyable little game over and done with in a couple of hours including set-up time.