All Based and Ready to Go (NQSYW and 54mm Fantasy)

 It has taken a few days since my return from visiting my father to finish up what I had painted, and I also had three more of the NQSYW figures which needed basing.

That brings a Charge! company up to full strength, so I will need to find a way to get it on the table this Saturday.

I also finished the one witch.

Next up on the painting table will be a few more 54mm fantasy figures.  I’m trying not to look too far ahead, so I won’t predict what might be after that.

Some NQSYW (and other) Painting

Please pardon the cluttered table picture!  I have been visiting my father on a regular basis this past year, and I usually try to bring along some sort of hobby project I can work on in the down time.  This trip I brought along the travel paint set and some NQSYW figures for the red-coated army of the Archbishopric of Schlüsselbrett.  When we picked up the redcoats in the Annexation in 2011 there were a few figures with yellow facings that didn’t amount to a complete Charge! company, so I eventually cast up the rest of the needed figures and have worked on them very intermittantly for the last several years.  (More libations for the Muse Clio would be in order, I suppose … ) I was down to the last four I had in progress, so that’s what I brought, figuring that finishing them wasn’t too ambitious.

So, while my father was off to his volunteer gig at the Henry Ford Museum I buckled down and knocked these out. I should have time to get all the basing done to allow the company to appear on the table at Barrage next week.

After playing A Fistful of Lead last week I was also inspired to bring along a few 54mm fantasy figures.  (I have the magic/fantasy expansion for those rules.) I finished off one sorceress, from the old Toys R Us Mythical Warriors play set. (Less the basing, as I didn’t bring the basing or final varnish materials with me…)

During my last burst of inspiration for 54mm fantasy I picked up a bunch of Marx recasts (knights, Vikings, and Robin Hood), so I have plenty of possible figures to paint.  With a bit of help from the Muses, perhaps I can get an initial game on the table some time this winter.

 

October Wrap-Up

 

In keeping with the now-traditional hobby theme of “Orctober”, one of my projects this month was a plastic 54mm orc from the Toys R Us “Mythical Warriors” bucket.  

There is only the one pose available, and I have a dozen or more of them available to work with.  I don’t intend to do too many of these fantasy figures, but my goal is to try to make each one unique. The easiest quick change seemed to me to be re-arming them.

We had one late warm day a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I would try a very abbreviated casting session.  In my collection of molds, I have a weapons sprue for the Britains knight molds originally sold by Castings, and now back in production from Dunken.  To my surprise, the first pour into the mold came out nearly perfect, minus a shorted haft on the spear-thing.  

So it was not difficult to choose three more orcs and give them different weapons.  I intend to play around a little with shields and an arm repositioning, but haven’t gotten there yet.  While I was digging around in the molds and castings boxes, I came across a reasonably complete example of the knight on the left from this vintage metal mold. 

The upper left corner of the shield didn’t fully cast, so needed a little greenstuff repair.  However, I was glad to be able to put one of these into a (potential) game and therefore have an excuse to justify owning this mold.  (For the future, I note that the knight on the right, shaking his fist at the enemy, could be given a weapon from the replacement weaposn sprue as well…something for the spring.)

Earlier this week I was able to base the figures from the Italeri tournament set (i.e. the budget challenge project), the home cast knight, and another figure from the “Mythical Warriors” bucket.  I looked over my storage situation recently, and concluded that the 54mm fantasy will probably go beyond the approximately ten spaces currently empy in my 54mm Medieval Boxes.  The upper limit would be to add one more 11-liter Really Useful Box, which would have space for 56 40mm square bases.  So, we’ll see …

54mm Fantasy?

 While I have been casting about for inspiration this month, one other idea (other than Prince Valiant, that is) has been given a new push.  I have noticed recently that there are now two boxes of soft plastic 1/32 scale fatnasy creatures available on Amazon (and probably elsewhere). The Series I box was $20, and the Series II box was $25, within my impulse purchase range, so I decided that I would order them and have a look.

Series I contained orcs, griffins, skeletons, unicorns, minotaurs, wizards, dwarves, two headed somethings, snakey medusas, dragons, centaurs, knights, faeries, and elves, in a mix of light and dark plastic. Numbers were fairly even; 7 of each although I was apparently short a faerie.  For scale, they are shown below with a knight from Accurate Miniatures from my Medieval Mayhem collection. The sculpting on the figures is fairly basic, but the human-sized creatures are not a terrible match.  The dragon is a bit small, and would probably be more comfortable looming over some 1/72 scale figures.  There are no pose variations, so any units would end up with a bit of an old school Minifigs aesthetic going on.

The Series II figures were more of a mix.  They included Cerberus, Amazons, frog-men, wolves, lizard men, cyclopes, a second unicorn pose, a headless horseman, a phoenix, a militant mermaid, a berserker, and a harpy.  The numbers were more random.  I was short two figures of the 56 promised, and had 1 Cerberus, 2 phoenixes, and 2 frog-men.  As with Series I, size of the humans is a reasonable look next to the Accurate knight.  The cyclops, like the dragon, would be happier with the 1/72s, and one phoenix may also find his way into that project as a roc.  

The plastic is pretty soft, so a test of paintability will need to be done.  There are plenty of spares of things I won’t need in units to test compatibility with spray primers...

I’m not sure what I would use for rules; adding a bit of fantasy to Medieval Mayhem seems possible, and playing Dragon Rampant (perhaps with half-sized units—a default of 6 foot or 3 mounted rather than 12 or 6).

In addition to these new figures, I also actually have a bucket of plastic toys laid by when Toys R Us closed out in 2018.  They had a bucket of Mythical Warriors in their “True Heroes” line (there’s a mis-naming...).  It had included 7 different figures, a female rogue, a hero, two witches, an orc, an elf drawing an arrow, and a dwarf(?) with a hammer (who is big enough to pass for human, so possibly equally usable as a berseker).  

Each bucket included some rudimentary toy scenery; a bridge, a couple of pillars, a prisoner cage, some rocks, some machine gun nests (?) and a pile of candlesticks, plus an odd structure I’ve dubbed the “mystic gateway”.

As you can see from the picture above, the mix of figures was pretty random.  I got one rogue, three heroes, four orcs, and thirteen elves.

They also are not a bad match for the Accurate knight.  Unfortunately, with Toys R Us out of business, the molds are currently idle, so there’s no chance of acquiring more rogues or orcs.  

There’s more to follow on this, but I am enjoying considering whether I could finally have a 54mm D&D game...

(For the record, I am aware of Irregular Miniatures 54mm fantasy line...I may end up with some of those if I do get started on this; the humans tend to be rather taller than the Accurate figures, at least going by the Irregular 54mm medieval civilians I have for Medieival mayhem.)

Convention Reports

So, like many people, I have been transitioned to telework for an indefinite time.  Getting ready to ride this out at home has taken some time, and so far I have not been able to find a dedicated block of time for hobby activities.  Perhaps this week I will have the time management worked out better.  For the moment, that’s all I’m going to say about the pandemic.  Stay safe; stay sane.

Before this, I had been to two conventions in two weekends.  Scrum Con was put on in Silver Spring, Maryland, by the Second Saturday Scrum Club.  This was only its second year, and I missed last year.  It was a one-day event featuring both roleplaying games and miniature games, and I was one of several HAWKs who were hosting games.  Scrum Con was set up this year on a time-block system, in which the majority of the games started at the same time, with two time blocks, morning and afternoon.  Due to a late cancellation by another GM, I was afforded the opportunity to run my game in both time blocks, so I got to the facility comfortably early.  The venue was the Silver Spring Civic Center, which was clean and well lit, though lacking so much as a vending machine for onsite refreshment. Free parking was available in the municipal parking structure immediately across the street, which was pretty good.  Carts for GMs were recommended, and I have one, so that was not a problem.  I should have rehearsed how I was going to stack my boxes and bungee them in place, though, as I was running a 54mm game with some large boxes a little precariously arranged on my cart, and my bungee cords turned out to be shorter than I had thought.  That wasn’t the convention’s fault, of course. Scrum Con was spread out over three function rooms, which had been set up with round tables for RPG events, and rectangular tables for the miniatures events.  Two rooms were downstairs adjacent to each other, and the room I was in was upstairs.  An elevator was available to get my cart to my table.  

I was mildly disappointed, though not surprised, to find that I didn’t end up with players for the morning game.  At least my table was already set up and ready to go.  I jumped into Duncan Adams’ Space Station Accipiter game, a perennial favorite HAWKs offering showcasing the large club collection of Buck Rogers semiflat figures from vintage 1930s home casting molds.  This was the first outing for a vintage Princess Ardala figure my son William found and painted for me a couple of years ago.  

Princess Ardala and her Tigermen of Mars minions skulking around Accipiter

 For my own game, I chose to run a 54mm skirmish game with Medieval Mayhem, the home rules that Ross Macfarlane and I put together as part of the HAWKs Battles for Beginners contest/project back in 2003.  I had just dusted off in September, after a rest of a couple of years, for Barrage 2019, about the same time that Scrum Con was soliciting for games, so I had been reminded that it was just the sort of easier to approach game that would be appropriate for a mixed genre convention.

Defenders of the village take position

Attendance may have been suppressed by the growing concern over the corona virus, but, in any case, a couple of my pre-registered players were among the folks who did not pick up their badges.  The scenario I was using is easiest with an even number of players, so, with five who showed up to play, I took a role in the action myself.  The original purpose of these rules (and this project) was to provide a game which any player would be able to pick up in a few turns, and I was pleased that was the case at Scrum Con.  By the third or fourth turn I scarcely had to adjudicate anything, and everyone seemed to be engaged, with some side discussion about the possibility of using the rules at home.  So, from my point of view, a success.

Once I had the game packed back up, I figured out where the nearest Starbucks was, dropped my boxes back off at the car, and wandered over to recaffeinate.  Generally, it was a good day, and I look forward to attending/GMing again next year.  I would recommend it to anyone within driving range.

The following weekend found me in the Cincinnati area for Cincycon.  My brother and I had talked about going.  It’s somewhat local to him (two hours) and is the designated gathering for the Chaos Wars Demo Team.  I had about decided not to go, when my partner urged me to go and spend time with my brother. It’s a very good local convention, with a reasonable selection of dealers, and a program of all three main tabletop genres—miniatures, RPGs, and board games.  I flew in to Indianapolis on Friday morning, where my brother picked me up on his way.  We were on site by the middle of the afternoon.  He set up his Chaos Wars demonstration scenario, and we played through it a couple of times while waiting for the crowd to build up.  Unfortunately for Cincycon, the coronavirus concerns were rapidly growing, and it looked to me as though attendance was down considerably from the other two years I’d gone.  

Chaos Wars demo armies in action

It’s always nice to see a bunch of classic Ral Partha miniatures in action. 

My brother, commanding intently

Paint and take table with classic Ral Partha

As it seems like Cincycon may be my last gaming convention for a while, and, as two weeks have elapsed since then with symptoms, I am glad that I went.  I came home with a bunch of notes about how to display miniatures gaming for a broader audience, and an urge to paint some miniatures, so we’ll call it a success.

I had intended to go to Cold Wars the following weekend.  While it occurred, the fact that the state governments were already calling for cancellation of large gatherings before it was time for me to go reinforced my decision to pass.  Huzzah, out in mid-May, is starting to look like it is going to be within the timelines for social distancing.  More to follow, I suppose ... I’ve gotten some painting done the since the previous post, but I’ll save that for next time.

Barrage 2019 Report

The Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers (HAWKs) ran our annual game day/convention, Barrage, this past weekend, 27 and 28 September.  This is the second year that we have extended Barrage to a second day, and the experiment seems to be working out.  Unofficially, it was looking like we had about 190 attendees, up about 30 over last year.  We wanted to make sure that there were enough games to keep everyone playing, so our event organizer encouraged us to offer something extra.  I signed up to run three games, two 54mm medieval skirmish games, and one 40mm Not Quite Seven Years War game.  My elder son, Norman, volunteered for two sessions of mass fantasy battles with his home rules using 1/72 scale plastic figures.

Norman’s fantasy game on Saturday

Since this is only the second year that we have had the extra day, I was unsurprised to find that attendance built a little slowly on Friday, so I cancelled my first medieval skirmish game and jumped in a guest GM’s modern microarmor game, with a NATO vs. Russians scenario.  (Norman ran his six-player game for two players about that time.) The tank scenario was a night action, so spotting was difficult and ranges short, giving it the flavor of a knife fight in a phone booth.  It was interesting, and not my usual cup of tea.  I was absorbed enough in the play that I forgot to take any pictures, but the GMs had pre-assembled the battlefield from hexagonal tiles in a traveling case, a very clever technique.

As the afternoon progressed, more attendees were arriving, so I was able to run the second scheduled session of my skirmish game with all six positions filled.  This was done using my home rules, “Medieval Mayhem”.  The whole project was originally built in 2003 for the HAWKs’ Battles for Beginners Contest, a showcase of things that one could do with a limited budget—one hundred 2003 dollars, equivalent to about $150 in 2019.  I ran games with it regularly for quite a while, but the figures hadn’t been on the table since Historicon in 2014.  I’ve added a few bits and pieces since then, and I have a few more left to do, so I’d like to get this back into the rotation for conventions.  The only difficulty in that is that the 54mm terrain is bulky, so I can’t really take it too far away unless I’m driving. I used my usual scenario for this game, involving a group of French soldiers attempting to prevent an English foraging party from returning to a besieged castle (which is off the table).   This was a bad day for the English; their longbowmen were generally ineffective, so only a single knight from the foragers made it off the table on the castle edge, which that player considered to be a personal victory, given the circumstances. I discussed the rules with Ross Macfarlane before the convention, and have edited a slightly updated 2019 version, which I’ll try to figure out how to post here.  Mostly, though, the rules are still the same as the prototype version we wrote on a napkin over dinner just before the convention in 2003.

Medieval Mayhem game in progress

 After a night’s rest, I loaded up the car (with assistance from Norman) with all of the Not Quite Seven Years War figures we needed for the game.  The scenario was a riff on a game I fought with second son William a couple of months ago, in which a relief army (provided in this case by Schoeffen-Buschhagen and Wachovia representing the Pragmatic Coalition) needs to seize a set of three objectives defending by the besieging army (provided by the the forces of the Western League) in order to raise a siege.  We used A Gentleman’s War for the rules, setting it up with one of the recommended multi-player techniques—using one activation deck per pair of players. I was kept busy shuttling from one end of the table to the other refereeing, so I don’t have a good grasp of the overall action, but none of the three Coalition columns took their objectives.  After two and a half hours of play, the attackers were pretty thoroughly depleted, and we called it a resounding League victory.  I was unsurprised to find that one wing and the center ended up in an overlapping battle, and the players concluded that they needed to be on one activation deck.  They took care of that without my intervention, showing that they had a firm grasp on the rules by then.  Everyone seemed to be having a good time, but I feel like I could do a little better on the rules explanation.  The melee system is the fussiest part of a fairly simple set of rules, with three steps necessary (determination of advantage, melee, casualty recovery and results).  None of them are especially difficult, but it did seem to be the cause of most of the refereeing, so perhaps more practice on the explanation would help.

Norman finished his second fantasy mass battle game before I was done with the NQSYW, so he was able to help me clean up quickly.  We had some extra incentive to do that, because we were both signed up to play the next game on the table: Matt Kirkhart’s Bridge of Khazad-Dum.  Matt makes amazing miniatures from bits of wood and craft foam, and has been coming to Barrage since 2009 or so.  He started off doing ancients with these figures (styled “crafties”), but has brought fantasy lately.  Last year his dungeon crawl feature the idol from the cover of the AD&D 1st edition Player’s Handbook, and this year he went full Tolkien with two Moria scenarios, Balin’s Tomb and The Bridge of Khazad Dum.  Unfortunately I missed seeing the first.

In The Bridge, the nine chararacters of the Fellowship were played by five players, and Matt played the opposition, making it a co-op game.  I had Merry and Legolas.  The Fellowship simply had to cross a hall and the eponymous bridge, which looked easy enough until goblins started swarming everywhere.  Things looked grim as Gandalf was felled early on by a lucky hit by a goblin arrow, leaving us with nothing which would actually wound the Balrog, which presently showed up.  As can be seen from the pictures, he was an impressive bit of crafting, standing nearly a foot tall.  As we retreated step by step across the hall, cowed by the menace of the Balrog, we were lucky that the Balrog couldn’t roll a good die...we just ended up being pushed back, and, in fact, nobody was wounded.  Eventually, eight of the Fellowship made it out the door, just as in the book...so clearly they must have told Galadriel a tale with a few, um, embellishments, to give us the story that we have today.

After that, it was all over for me except for the clean-up.  One wind-down game of Roman chariot racing was going on as we broke down our tables, but everything was well in hand when I pulled out at 9:30 or so.  I needed to unload when I got home, but left things in piles until this morning. Running two different games with big figures and big terrain really tested my loadmaster skills with respect to my Toyota Yaris...Norman remarked that I should consider writing a sequel to our earlier book, Big Battles for Little Hands, which I should title Big Battles for Little Cars.  

The calm after the storm: Some painting

I mentioned in my previous post that it has been a hectic time at work.  We finally ran the week-long exercise I'd been preparing last week, so I reached the weekend tired but calm.

I ended up taking up my brush and finishing two figures from my deep backlog:

Irregular friar and Marx merry man

 and the back:

Not my best side...

I checked my painting records, and it would appear that the last time I finished anything for this project was in 2012.  The last game to be put on the table was in 2014, at Historicon.

One of three games from Historicon 2014

The Historical games that year involved three narratively linked scenarios, starting with the one pictured above, about raiding for provisions.

I was considering the possibility of running Medieval Mayhem at Gencon next year.  The transport is right, albeit somewhat bulky, but would be reasonable if we chose to drive, and if the hotel situation allowed for hauling things to the table.

Anyway, with those guys done, it should be back to 25mm Due Bellorum figures next...

Historicon 2014 Report

The convention report is a time-honored HAWKs tradition, so here is my 2014 Historicon report. I'm pleased to report, by the way, that the blog entry software I use has recently been updated to correct a problem it had been having with uploading pictures, so I hope to be back to posting on a more regular basis.

This is the third year Historicon has been in Fredericksburg, and the convention center is apparently trying to work with us on improving some things. The most important innovation this year was temporary carpeting in the main gaming area. This reduced the noise level to something that wasn't immediately giving me a headache, so that's an improvement. On the other hand, they reduced the number of water stations and didn't seem to be keeping them filled, which was a slip from last year. Bathrooms continue to be a problem...

Getting to Fredericksburg is an adventure, and I don't mean that as a positivie comment. The convention center is just off I-95, which is the only practical divided highway route from the north. Construction between DC and Fredericksburg continues for the 3rd year, and the last 30 miles took me an hour an a half, from noon to 1:30 on a Thursday. If you can't get through during work hours on a week day, when can you?

Arriving as I did around 1:30, I planned to do my shopping first, check out the flea market, and then see if there was something interesting to play in the evening. My shopping list was pretty short, some bases, some boxes of 1/72 scale plastic figures, and an advance copy of Osprey's new medieval rules, Lion Rampant by Dan Mersey. I had hoped that these would be at the con; the Amazon release date is in late September. I'll have a read-through review later, and hope to try them out within a few weeks.

I had hoped to get into a game on Thursday night, but it turned out that the two games in the HAWKs room I wished to play both filled with non-HAWKs, so no fill-ins were necessary. Norman had arrived by then, so we took a walk around and then went and checked into our hotel.




While there were a lot of interesting looking games, my eye was caught by this particular SF game on our evening walkaround, since I hadn't seen a table with a monorail previously.

With an afternoon game on Friday, I was constrained to play something early and short in the morning.





I ended up in an Aerodrome game. Despite my kids having played regularly, and despite it having been a convention staple for years, I'd never played. I picked up the mechanics quickly. It's based on the old Ace of Aces book game, with which I have been familiar since it was new back when I was in college (and saber toothed tigers stalked us on the way to class...). Norman joined me for this game. Since we were assigned planes on opposite sides, he also shot me down once. I was shot down twice in rapid succession, so it seems that my predictive skills are going to require some work before my next try at this.

We picked up a cache of Zvezda Hundred Years War 1/72 figures in the morning flea market.

The first of the three games I ran was on Friday afternoon. I signed up to do three different Hundred Years War skirmish games using 54mm plastic figures and our Medieval Mayhem home rules.





This first game had only 4 of 6 possible players, and two of those were HAWKs fill-ins, so I was concerned. The scenario involved an English raiding party attempting to collect livestock from a village to provision a castle about to be attacked.





The raiders collected some of the necessary livestock, but were eventually fought off by the French, who were arriving on the field throughout the scenario.

Norman and I had both signed up for an evening game with a hypothetical Zulu War scenario. The rules to be used were Black Powder, which neither of us had tried. I think he was considering them as a possibility for a 19th century imagi-nations project he's doing.





He ended up commanding the main body of the British, and in the photo above had taken a defensive position.




Unfortunately, my troops, extending his line, crumpled under a fierce Zulu assault and we were rolled up. Sometimes you win, sometimes Zulus...

There wasn't enough time on Saturday to play anything before I needed to set up my second game.



This involved a follow-on to the first scenario, in which a group of raiders had to cross the board (or at least most of it) with a convoy of cattle and sheep. Again, the French were converging on the board, so that the longer the English took, the more opposition they faced.


Here a reluctant Britains cow slows down the proceedings...

This turned out to be a tense and well-balanced scenario, insofar as any skirmish game (with an inherently wide range of possible outcomes) can be balanced. The English wiped out one of the three French retinues, which game them an opening to get their farm animals off the board for a solid victory.

I had all six positions filled for this one, though it still included two HAWKs to fill in.

Since the game only ran a little over two hours, there was time to check the flea market one more time before resetting for the evneing game. I found someone getting rid of a large stockpile of Caesar 1/72 Bronze Age sets of various sorts, so I swept them up on speculation (and as requested by Norman).

Norman was running two Bronze Age games, and is seen here with the first one:





My third game had six of six players. The scenario involved a raiding party from the castle attempting to burn a siege tower and a stock of timbers and parts for a second siege engine.





The English raiders eventually managed to burn the tower, but didn't burn the extra supplies. With excessive losses on their part, this was declared a marginal French victory. I was happy to see these figures on the table; my records show they were last out for Cold Wars two years ago.

We stayed around on Sunday for one final game (and lunch with some other HAWKs) before heading home. I got into a WWII skirmish game with card-driven mechanics. It's under development by my friend Buck Surdu.





Unfortunately, my luck with cards appears to be no better than my luck with dice, and my German sentries (shown above) were shot down before their first activation. I had better luck with a pair of officers inside the building, but it was still a pretty firm British victory.

The drive home was slow, due to traffic, so I may reconsider Sunday gaming next year. Overall, though, it was still a good convention. One other bit of gaming news came out of it: The HAWKs are now planning a road trip to Huzzah in Maine next May, so I've volunteered to coordinate our events with the convention.