More 15mm

The recycling of 15mm figures from the bag-of-white-metal-to-be-melted-down is mostly complete for now. 

I've painted these seventeenth century guys up as an approximation of Scottish troops in Swedish service during the Thirty Years War. They're based on what I could find about Mackay's regiment.

On Dex's advice I've put them on 40mm wide bases suitable for DBR and I suspect other popular sets for the period. In addition, being in sixes and twelves, they could potentially be used for The Pikeman's Lament. The singly based trumpeter in the rear would do well as a messenger needed for one of the Lion Rampant/TPL scenarios.

I'll get round to putting them on eBay shortly.

Fiasco purchases

Jamie and I went up to Leeds at the weekend to attend the Fiasco show. We try to get up there each year and it's become a tradition to visit the nearby Pizza Express at lunchtime.

In the past I've been to Fiasco and bought nothing at all, other times I've splurged heavily. This time I was relatively restrained. I bought some Dark Earth paint and self-adhesive steel paper from Magnetic Displays, some dead Mexican gunfighters and dead horses from Great Escape Games' Dead Man's Hand range and, perhaps most significantly, this:

As a fan of the Marcus Didius Falco books by Lindsey Davis, I really ought to have tried this earlier. I like the idea of translating the characters in the books into the games terms and sourcing suitable 28mm figures. In particular I'd love to find suitable figures for Lenia the laundress and Smaractus, Aventine gangster and Falco's landlord.

At first glance the rules look interesting. They are very clearly based on the assumption that the players will each be running a street gang trying to gain control of an area either for their own nefarious purposes or to promote the interests of some high-ranking citizen with designs on a senate seat.

Gangs of maybe three or four figures are controlled by the two players but there will also be a number of "mob bases" in the playing area. These represent the uninvolved population of the city and they move at least partly under the control of one player or another but only for short periods of time and on a random basis.

An interesting idea is that in some circumstances characters can disappear into the Mob, their figure being removed from the table only to reappear where least expected.

Another interesting aspect of the game is the activation system. This is initially driven by drawing counters from a bag. When one of your counters comes up, you choose a figure to activate and place one to four counters (marked I, II, III and IV) on the board stating what the character will attempt to do.

So you might say, I'm going to move to here (placing the "I" counter at the location your gang member will move to), climb down to ground level to here (placing counter "II"), move again to here (counter "III") and then blend into the this Mob (counter "IV").

The player then rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to the character's Agility stat (this seems typically to be in the range 5 to 7). Each success (4+) sees one of the selected actions completed, obviously taking them in chronological order. Any action that isn't made puts stress on the gang member and has them rolling fewer dice next time. You can only remove this stress by achieving everything you attempt to do (you must attempt a minimum of one action) so a stressed character will probably take it easy when next activated.

The game is clearly designed with a view to urban adventures in the Eternal City but I could see myself adapting it to cover the encounters of a certain Imperial agent and his allies in the countryside around the Bay of Naples or perhaps even in the wilds of Germania Libera.

Finally, as always, I'm giving some thought to whether these rules might have a Gloranthan application. Gangs of Pavis? Gangs of Glamour?

Sharp Practice night fighting rules

My Puebla 1863 scenario involves night fighting in a built-up area. As there aren't any rules for fighting at night in the Sharp Practice rulebook, I'm forced to come up with my own.

In the first playtest, a couple of weekends ago, I wanted to keep things simple and concentrate on the character motivation parts of the scenario. Accordingly I just had two rules:

1. All units count as one cover level better when fired at, and
2. Any unit firing removes one in every three dice.

Subsequent discussions (Mark was particularly helpful, thanks mate) led to the conviction that uncertainty as to whether a unit was going to be visible would make for a more dynamic game. With this in mind, the second playtest will use the following rules:

1. All units count as one cover level better when fired at, and
2. When activated a unit make an alertness check rolling one die as follows:

Regulars or Light Infantry                        3+

Conscripts/Volunteers or Skirmishers       4+

Militia or Irregular Skirmishers                5+

If successful, the unit receives a marker:

3D printed telescopes as spotting markers

Enemy units are spotted at the following ranges:

Line Units in the open                24" / 12"

Skirmish Troops in the open       18" / 9"

Units in cover                              12" / 6"

Units firing                                  48" / 24"

The distance before the slash is used if the spotting roll was successful. Otherwise the distance after the slash is used. I may create some additional markers to remind us which units have fired from their current location.

If you can see the unit, you can fire at it (remembering that it counts one cover level better thanks to the darkness).

More plane buildage

My kit-building for display has continued to proceed slowly and I've recently completed another two 1/72nd scale jets.

First up is this British Aerospace Hawk in Red Arrows colours by Revell.

This kit is a bit of pig. As well as the instructions being a bit vague in places, following them as written will lead to you gluing on half a dozen parts that make it impossible to then apply the decals!

At one stage I nearly binned it but in the end I decided to get it sufficiently finished to go into the display cabinet at least until I manage to build a better one. I may go for the Airfix version but not until I've had a chance to recover from this one!

Next we have the Armstrong Whitworth Seahawk from Airfix.

This mould dates back to 1959. I've wanted to build one for years, ever since I obtained an ex-lending-library copy of Airfix Magazine Guide 16 - Modelling Jet Fighters. 

The original plan was to improve the kit as per the guide and build it as an Airwork Services Limited target tug; it would look so cool in all black! In the end, however, I couldn't source the necessary markings so I decided to build it as a West German Marine Mk101.

The improvements involved replacing the over-thick undercarriage doors and underwing pylons (the latter requiring moving too), drilling out the cannon ports, adding cartridge ejection chutes, and adding the aerial and radar fairing to the rear fuselage. I also added some scratch-built cockpit detail but you can't see it through the canopy.

The Seahawk was much more enjoyable than the Hawk. If I found another one going cheap I'd certainly buy it with a view to making a Fleet Air Arm example.

Another rescued miniature

Another mini rescued from the to-be-melted-down bag has now had a visit to the painting desk.

As you can see, it's a D&D-style druid, somewhat heavily armoured for use in Glorantha so I may stick him on eBay.

Anyone know who he's by? I haven't been able to find an image online. 

A foray into 15mm

I have some self-imposed rules to prevent my getting sidetracked into projects that take up too much space and effort. One of these is that I avoid adding new scales beyond the 6mm, 20mm and 28mm that I'm already heavily invested in. The only exception to this is that I have some legacy Hordes of the Things armies in 15mm scale.

A few years ago I acquired some 15mm English Civil War / Thirty Years War figures. Not sure where they came from, I suspect in a box of various figures that passed through several hands before and after mine. For a while these guys sat in a drawer but after a bit I decided they were poor quality and unlikely to get used so I consigned them to the bits-of-white-metal-to-get-melted-down-one-day bag.

Last week I came across them whilst looking for some scraps of metal to weight down the nose of a jet aircraft kit. I decided to paint a few of them.

I decided to paint them in colours roughly inspired by a plate in the Osprey book on Gustavus Adolphus's infantry - men of an English or Scottish mercenary regiment.

In line with the advice of Dex (who suggested they may be old Peter Laing models) I've based them in 40mm wide elements.

They'll be going on eBay shortly as I don't have any use for them. A few more may follow if I feel the urge to keep painting these little guys.

ACW Sharp Practice gold

A trip to a local antiques centre yesterday threw up this book, Spies, Scouts and Raiders, potentially marvellous source of American Civil War skirmish scenarios.

It's part of a series of 27 books published in 1985 by Time-Life Books. Apparently the series is quite well-known among ACW enthusiasts but I hadn't come across it before.

This book covers intelligence work, codes and signals, guerrilla operations, the damage and repair of railways, and finishes with some notes on some of the more bizarre technological developments during the war.

There are plenty of contemporary photographs that just cry out to be reflected on the wargames table...

There were lots of these books on sale but at £7.50 each I didn't want to blow my budget. I did, however, sneak a photograph of this plate from First Blood: Fort Sumter to Bull Run. 

It depicts a scene during the Union retreat from first Manassas, a situation I've thought for some time could make for a fascinating Sharp Practice game. Now should I start sourcing mule-pulled supply wagons?