December and January

I had been back to blogging regularly for a while there, but the Christmas season preparations overwhelmed me this year, and things got out of hand again.

I only got a little bit of painting done during the month.  My 1/72 scale fantasy campaign collection started from a core of Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood figures I had painted around the turn of the century for a kids’ game, and I have been using it recently with both Dragon Rampant and Hordes of the Things.  While Hordes uses single bases as the maneuver elements and any random stand can take its place in a battle line, Dragon Rampant is generally geared for units of 12 normal infantry.  I’ve had 6 of the armored archer from the Sheriff set (with 2 per box) and the recent Encounter at Terril’s Tavern wanted a distinguishable archer unit of 12 (two stands), so I finished up another stand of 6 for the next time.

My son and his wife came for a weekend of cookie baking, which seemed to fill most of my crafting urges for the month.

Dean Family Christmas Cookie Assortment 2019

I did get a few games in.  I even took miniatures on the road, and we had the now-traditional family Christmas battle with my brother and both sons.  We borrowed a table from the nice folks at Pandemonium games in Garden City, Michigan, for a try at Chaosium’s 1978 rules Perilous Encounters.  My brother has been collecting old rules to go with his vintage miniatures, and had been wishing for a test of these rules for some time.  Unfortunately, we didn’t really care for the results, with the morale rules, in particular, being a bit dd.  It was still good to see all the vintage lead on the table.

My brother and younger son commanding the Younger Sons Alliance

My ancient McEwan lizards supported by Broadsword rangers

A Superior lizard moves up in support of Minifig archers; RAFM wizard overseeing 

Elder son Norman received a copy of DBA 3.0 for Christmas, and thought that it would be interesting to dust off our somewhat neglected joint 1/72 scale Bronze Age project to use with the rules, so as the calendar turned over to January, he started painting Caesar Hittites to put on regulation bases. Our previous efforts were mounted as the 6-8 man 60mm by 40mm infantry bases we have been using uniformly across our 1/72 scale projects, and chariots were mounted on the same bases oriented toward the 40mm edge.  DBA wants chariots on 60mm by 80mm bases, so I cautiously pried four of them loose from their old bases for rebasing, rather than building sabots of sort sort.  They looked a little lonely on the large bases, so I started my efforts to support his enthusiasm by painting a pair of chariot runners for each base:

With that done, I could field an Egyptian army, as long as I didn’t mind using the original double rank infantry stands.  While I will probably paint single rank Egyptian infantry on regulation-depth stands fairly soon, I then turned my attention to the first of the opponent armies.  I should be able to do Libyans, Sea Peoples, Nubians, Syrians, and my own Hittites eventually. I have the stockpile of miniatures already, at least, even if the inspiration sometimes comes and goes...I decided that the Libyans would be first, and began with their 5 (?!) light infantry stands:

Libyan archer psiloi for DBA 

Libyan javelin psiloi for DBA

They also get two stands of swordsmen (‘Warband’ by the rules):

That leaves me three stands of warriors at three figures each, a commander in a chariot, and a stand of Sea Peoples swordsmen to go before a test game.

The  other things that has been occupying my paint brush this month has been vintage Minifigs “Mythical Earth” figures.  I’d had a unit of little goblins on the work bench for a couple of months, and finished them off as the “skull” tribe at the end of my vacation, before going back to work on January 6th.  I based them in 3s for flexibility.

I also finished off eight “true orcs”, based as single figures, which should give me a round two dozen for use with Dragon Rampant or as opponents for the heroes in some potential retro-style D&D game.  

Inspired by the rapid success of that effort, I tackled the next dozen goblins, of the “red hand” tribe:

With the completion of that unit, I was down to the last dozen on hand (and they are not presently available from Caliver Books collection of old Minifigs molds) and had the pattern of painting them worked out, so finishing up the sixth (and final, for now) “mountain” tribe did not take long.  I had based the first tribe on 1” individual bases, but thought that it might look better if they weren’t in quite so loose an order. I therefore chose to mount this last group on individual 3/4” bases, which will make it easier to use them in that potential future D&D game as well as in Dragon Rampant.

There’s still one more weekend left in the month, so it’s possible that I’ll get some more Libyans or the next Mythical Earth true orc unit done, but even if I don’t, it will still have been a solid month.

Renaissance Reinforcements (and more)

I had some painting time yesterday, so I finished up the other three pikemen, all in unusually subdued colors for this project, loosely inspired by the Medici Black Band.  Given that the practical minimum size for a unit of pikes in our rules is probably 4 stands, I'm thinking I'll aim to do three more eventually, with the remainder of the reinforcements being back to the usual colorful style.  

First stand of my "Black band" pikemen

May was a slow month for painting, although I did manage to game while visiting my parents one weekend, and got to Huzzah on another, so it wasn't a bad month for gaming overall.  At the start of the month, my top project was vintage fantasy, and I finally finished the basing and varnished these three Minifigs NS-range figures as part of a small batch of individually based berserkers/bandits/brigands to fill out the original D&D encounter tables for a future D&D revival game supported by all vintage figures.  

Minfigs NS figures from around 1978

I was also digging through my old notebooks recently, looking for information about the molds I've been using for the Dux Bellorum project, when I found that I had ordered a one-each set of Vikings/Saxons/Normans from Foundry in 1996 some time.  Many of these figures were finished up promptly, and have served in various Dark Ages games since, but a batch of Normans got sidetracked somewhere along the way, and have been languishing on painting sticks in primer for the better part of the past twenty years.  I had a break at lunch one day the week after Huzzah, and I have had a few of them with my portable painting kit at my desk since I was inspired to buy the Saga rules last year. With the Saxon/Viking game I'd played on my mind,  I finished up one Norman archer. I suppose I should sit down with the rules again at some point soon and figure out what I would want to paint to be able to deploy a pleasing Norman war band.

Foundry Norman archer

 Unfortunately, of course, shortly after I bought the rules, the 2nd edition was released.  The local Saga players seem to have stuck to the 1st edition for the most part, so I'm in no hurry to 'upgrade'.

25mm Minifigs Elvish Reinforcements

I've decided that the next couple of months will be devoted to painting a few pending projects.  One of these is the vintage Minifig Middle Earth bands.  I inventoried all of my carefully gather stocks recently and concluded that I have about three hundred to paint, so I hope eventually to have a game like the one I wanted in 1974 when I first bought these.

I had a team of 15 elvish reinforcements in process, and finished them up over the weekend.  I am anticipating that they will be used for Dragon Rampant, but I am trying to keep the basing fairly flexible.

So, after that, I have two 12 figure units, a six figure scout unit, a command stand, one lone individual, and a stand of three:

The stand of three is an anomaly.  I stumbled into a handful of ME figures at Cold Wars in 2015, including three elves and seven dwarves.  Having not seen any in years, I did not anticipate that I would be able to find any more, so I gave them special base treatment.  With another twenty or so on hand, awaiting painting, I now expect that I will end up with a second base done to match that one (and to form a Dragon scout unit), a second command stand, a pair of mounted elves, and a handful of singles.  The current two and a half units of twelve should become four.

I'm working on some goblins and orcs this week, but I think that I will set up a dozen human spearmen (really Saxons but ready to stand in for Lakemen, Rohirrim, or Dunlendings) next, so that I can field a basic 24 point Dragon Rampant war band of the northern allies after the Battle of the Five Armies.

Hinchliffe Week

I've mentioned previously that I ended up with a cache of mostly Hinchliffe mostly Byzantines from the flea market at Huzzah in 2015.  Last year sometime, I cleaned and primed a dozen Varangians with axes, intending to add them to my fantasy Byzantine project.

I recently finished them.

Myzantine Dragon Guards

Inspired by this success, I went to the box and pulled out eighteen peasants, a handful of crossbowmen, and ten Pecheneg horse archers.  I figured that, as long as I had the metal cleaning gear out, I might as well add a half dozen Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals Mongol horse archers to the mix.  That was Monday, the 29th of May.

Metal cleaning day

Old Hinchliffes have a rough-and-ready sculpting style, which responds reasonable well to mass painting.  I'm not too fond of the crossbowman casting, but I painted them anyway, but the peasants came out reasonable well for as little time as I put into them.

Five Myzantine crossbow skirmishers

With eighteen peasants (including one stray Byzantine staff slinger), I decided that I would base two groups of six, and the rest as individuals.  Most of the fantasy rules I'm using now are based around twelve figure units.

Hinchliffe Peasants

Unfortunately for my budget, just as I was cleaning and priming the figures, somebody on the Old School Miniatures discussion on FaceBook posted a picture asking for identification of a Hinchliffe Robin Hood peasant woman.

I ended up deciding to thicken up the individually based peasants with a bunch of Robin Hood figures, since the castings are available from Hinds Figures. Mr. Hinds was very prompt with my order, so I now have a couple of dozen Robin Hood and Sheriff figures in hand, which will probably form a pair of matched war bands for Dragon Rampant, as well as serve as bandits for D&D.

Newly arrived Robin Hood range figures

I have a dozen of those, including the principal characters, primed as of this morning, and hope to get started on them shortly.

As a bit of a digression, I had some time to paint at lunch this week, and finished a unit of Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals orcs, from the recent Chaos Wars Kickstarter.  They'd been sitting in my cupboard for a good while, so I was glad to clear them out.  I've also primed another dozen goblins to follow up.

Chaos Wars orc warriors

So it's been a good week or two for painting...

Some Recent Painting

Following my string of defeats in Dragon Rampant (DR) at Huzzah, I decided it was time to add a new unit to the mix.  DR calls for 6 figure cavalry or war beast stands.  I had wanted to do some giant rats in Iron Wind/Ral Partha, so I'd bought enough for six bases some time ago.  They have been sitting around primed, but otherwise untouched, for a few months, and this was their week.

I kept it simple, three base colors with three corresponding dry brush shades over them.  The large swarm bases are Iron Wind catalog number 01-045, and the individual rats on the smaller bases are DF-106, originally sculpted by Julie Guthrie as part of her "All Things Dark and Dangerous" line for Ral Partha.  I had them done in about an hour; it probably took longer to base them than to paint them...

These two veteran Minifigs are destined to be part of the upcoming ME war bands project.  The Ithilien ranger (ME34) is an eBay acquisition, but the heavy goblin (ME56) was handed to me by my brother (one of seven), and is one that's been in the combined family collection for 40+ years.

I took my travel paint kit and half a dozen miniatures on my most recent business trip, a week before Huzzah.  My actual painting time turned out to be somewhat limited, but I finished these two Heritage figures.  The Boromir (movie version, catalog number 1750) is a Mike Thomas/Classic Miniatures recast, and completes (finally) my Fellowship.  I think it's been about two years since I bought them from Mike.  The cleric is from a package of four expansion figures for the TSR boardgames Dungeon, based, I believe, on an article in a Strategic Review or Dragon. (The expansion, that is...) He drifted in as part of an eBay lot with a lot of nice (and unusual) Heritage stuff early in my eBay obsession, so also almost two years ago.

While most of them have been done for a while, here's the Fellowship lined up:

I mentioned in my Huzzah report that I took my 1/72 Hordes of the Things armies with me.  These mixed manufacturer Vikings were finished in time for the trip, but Ross's army was using pretty much the same figures, so I thought it would be less confusing to leave them out of the game. (My army was mostly Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood figures...)

That puts me at 5 bases of "Cold Islanders" for the campaign, so I hope to get back to painting more of them soon.

Vintage 25mm Fantasy Reinforcements

Part 2 on the solo fantasy campaign is still shaping up, but I did finally finish a few figures yesterday, so I though I would share them.

First up is a team of 18 Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) elves from ~1974.  I got my start in fantasy miniatures wargaming with Minifigs, and I've been working the past two years to reassemble a representative force to supplement the handful I still have from back in the day.  As I was finishing these figures up, I ended up with another lot of 18 from eBay, so I hope eventually to have two units of twelve, a unit of six, and the three-figure command stand to represent the elves.

Minifig ME Elves

When I revived the old fantasy project, I looked at other Minifigs ranges on the Lost Minis Wiki.  I don't really remember seeing the Valley of the Four Winds figures in stores at the time, but today they interest me.  Among the other oddities in the range is this "giant armored woodlouse" (aka pill bug, or sow bug), so I was pleased when I was able to obtain one last year.  I'm not sure how it's going to feature in a scenario yet, but it's ready when I figure it out.

Minifig Valley of the Four Winds Woodlouse

Another eBay lot last year brought a pack of wargs, a mix of these Custom Cast/Heritage figures (catalog number 1011) and some old Ral Partha Wizards, Warriors, and Warlocks ones.  These were finally painted last month, when Norman came up for a game and paint session on the 11th.  Painting them turned out to be easier to get done than the basing. (not that the basing was especially difficult; just questionable time management on my part.)

Custom Cast/Heritage Wargs

The last thing finished off yesterday is this Iron Wind Metals "Elven Colossus", originally cast by Ral Partha as part of a small range of 54mm display figures.  IWM rereleased it as part of the 2015 Chaos Wars revival Kickstarter.  I did this one as fairly well polished bronze; there are just a few traces of verdigris in the deeper crevices.  The HAWKs members have been playing around a lot with verdigris effects in the production of scenery for Frostgrave.  If I were to do another, I might be "greener"with it.

Iron Wind Metals/Ral Partha "Elven Colossus"

Finally!

According to my painting records, the last time I finished anything was toward the end of August.  Now, for purposes of my records, "finished" is defined as putting the final spray varnish coat on figures that have been based.

A couple of years back, I started having trouble with the Krylon 1311 matte spray sealer I had been using for a long time, in that it kept fogging on me.  I can't help but think that they changed the formula somewhere along the way, and that it was now more sensitive to humidity than it had been, but, in any case, it stopped working for me.  I invested in a humidity meter, and also changed to a Krylon Low Odor matte spray varnish, which seems to be less sensitive.  Nevertheless, this weekend was the first time in two months that the relative humidity dropped below 60%, and I therefore felt confident in spraying everything that I've been dabbling with lately.

I continue to be working on vintage fantasy and related figures, for the most part, and the group shown above includes some Hinchliffe medieval Pecheneg horsemen (from the flea market at Huzzah in 2015), some old Heritage figures of a couple of different ranges, a Minifig Dark Ages warlord (though actually from their Imperial Roman range) an early Grenadier elf, a Ral Partha horseman, a couple of stray 1/72 scale plastics, and a fairly modern Reaper fantasy crossbowman, in the back (based for my Frostgrave war band).

I have been considering the question, without much of an answer so far, of whether I should write down a plan for the vintage fantasy project...that's probably a post for another time.

In the meantime, Fall In is coming soon, and I will be shifting back to historicals for a couple of games co-hosted with Ross Macfarlane.

Technology Test (and an old Garrison Figure)

I have been experiencing technological difficulties in updating this blog lately.  I will leave this up if it works, but, basically, I'm tring links to photobucket to allow me to email an update with more than one picture.

The Reaper Forums, as I mentioned in the last post, sponsored a Memorial Day binge painting event.  Some of the other participants were also painting some vintage figures, so when I cleared my desk of what I had done, I finished scaling off the old paint on a couple of Garrison Sword and Sorcery figures, plus a Minifigs ME elf archer.

I didn't check the Lost Minis Wiki for the identity of this fellow until after he received the blue and white paint job, so he's probably not really going to be used as a "Follower of Set" when he goes on the table.

(So, that didn't work, but I did manage to edit the links in...)

Road trip recap

In the previous post I mentioned that I made a road trip to Michigan to celebrate Christmas with my family.  My brother and I have been working on a fantasy gaming project most of the year, with the intention of running some games at conventions in 2016 using our vintage miniatures collections.

This was supposed to have been a simple operation, but was complicated this year by the Ral Partha/Ironwind Metals Kickstarter to revive Chaos Wars and put a lot of the Fantasy Collector Series elves and orcs back into production, and by a related urge to go into collector mode and recreate the armies that I owned and/or longed for as an adolescent gamer back in the mid-1970s with the help of eBay.

Because my brother lives in Indiana and I live in Maryland, our opportunities to put games together have been limited.  He visited here in May, and we met at Gencon in August.  We started discussing the possibility of doing some gaming around the margins of the Christmas visit, and things started falling into place when my aunt offered to let us use the game room in her basement, so we had a 4x6 table available without having to bring folding tables.  At that point we decided that we could play Chaos Wars, but that we would not reasonably be able to put on a Ringbearer test game.

My brother offered to bring the terrain, based around a Cigar Box Battles ground cloth, and some troops, and I packed up my travel kit as well.  I've showed pictures of elements of this before.  I did some research and concluded that a 12 liter Really Useful Box was the largest that would fit under the seat in a typical airline cabin, so I built my 1/72 scale fantasy skirmish project to fit into one.  It is all ready, just "grab and go", and I brought it this time to provide the basis for scenery for a 25mm skirmish game, just in case.  For this trip, I also added the original edition paper copy of Chaos Wars.

Since I was driving, not flying, I also loaded two 6-liter Really Useful Boxes with a selection of multiply-based vintage Ral Partha figures from my collection.  I strapped the whole assembly together with a couple of lengths of nylon webbing and a "Strap-a-handle".  The final dimensions were about 11x17x12 inches.

Most of my mass fantasy armies are based on 60mm square wood bases, with flexible steel bottoms (from Litko).  My boxes are then lined with sheet magnets.  As can be seen from the photo below, the 60mm square bases do not tile the box with 100% efficiency.  I can fit 18 bases per box, which leaves some extra space.  I filled that with figures on individual steel washer bases, or some of the newer Aurora Project bases, which are one inch wood circles with Litko flexible steel bottoms.  This seems to hold pretty well.  The two box pictures were taken at the end of the return trip, after an eleven hour drive, and everything is still holding.  I did deliberately leave home one or two taller figures that past experience as shown to have insufficient "grip".

I also had to leave at home a couple of units of lancer cavalry whose lances are a little too tall to fit in the 6-liter boxes.  Eventually, I expect to have a 12-liter box with the magnet sheets for overly tall figures, but the dimensions will limit that to road travel rather than air.

In the previous post I gave a link to a battle report on our Chaos Wars battle, which I posted to the Ral Partha forums.  Since my brother had brought troops and had a scenario plan, we only ended up using about half the units I brought with me, but the package is easy to carry once all loaded and assembled, so it wasn't a big deal.  While we didn't end up playing an individual figure skirmish game, I will note that I chose the individually-based figures with an eye toward that, just to keep options open.


With all of the figures showing up from eBay, and with the expectation of the imminent arrival of the Ral Partha Kickstarter box with 200 more, I have been trying to keep up with painting at any opportunity.  I took my full travel paint kit with me (rather than the TSA-compatible flying kit), and had a couple of mornings to work on things.  I only finished two figures, though.  The left-handed elf archer is a Tom Meier sculpt from the old Ral Partha 98-006 Dungeon Party boxed set, an eBay acquisition, and the female on the right is an H-21, a warrior woman (looks more like a rogue to me) from the Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age range, one of three figures from that range that I stripped and repainted this year that have been in my collection since they were new.

Basing is still in progress on those two.

I bought a copy of the Osprey wargames rules Lion Rampant when they were released, but time management got away from me, and I still have yet to try playing them.  They have received some good buzz online, though, and we have a couple of HAWKs members who are working on retinues. When it was announced that Osprey would be publishing a fantasy variant, I went ahead and pre-ordered a copy on speculation.  One of the club members sent out a link to  a review of Dragon Rampant just before Christmas.  It looked like this was going to be something I would play. Unfortunately, my pre-order copy was due to arrive after our departure on the day we drove to Michigan, so I splurged on a Kindle copy and was able to read it on the trip up, during the periods when it wasn't my turn to be the driver. (Thank you, Irene!)

My older son was also staying at my aunt's house, where we had staged the Chaos Wars game on Saturday, and was kind enough to assist me on Sunday morning in playing through the rules, with a couple of warbands I built with what was in my travel boxes.  He is not a fan of games using activation rolls, so I knew that he would be a bit dubious, and we did have a couple of turns where we passed the dice back and forth as we each failed to activate anything.

Dragon Rampant uses a freeform system for representing things on the table.  In the medieval/historical version, units have either 6 or 12 figures (generally corresponding to mounted/foot), and casualties are intended to be removed.  In the fantasy version, units have 6 or 12 strength points, and you are free to depict the unit with whatever seems appropriate.  If the unit does not have 6 or 12 models, casualties/damage are shown by markers on the table.  Since I didn't grab my gamemaster box for this trip, we made do with dice.  This ends up reminding me (favorably) of Hordes of the Things, in that you can generally find some game category (with the possible addition of special abilities) to allow you to assign values to pretty much any miniature you might wish to use.

I took a band consisting of a dragon (greater war beast with optional flame attack and flying), a land dragon captain (heroic elite cavalry, depicted as a single figure), some lizard riders (javelin armed rather than bows, with reduced range and a cost break), and some goblin infantry (being green-skinned, they were deemed to be a sort of reptile-man for the day).

Norman's warband had six units, a heroic single-figure heavy rider leader, some heavy foot elf pikes, some sharpshooting elf bows, a spell-slinging single-figure elf princess using the "scouts" profile for stealth and ranged attacks, and allied centaur heavy and light warriors (using the heavy and light rider profiles).  As expected for a trial game, we had to flip through the rules a bit (difficult with the Kindle edition, I'm afraid) and I'm sure that we missed some options as far as our actions went.  There is a quick reference sheet in the book, so I expect that having a couple of those on the table will reduce the need to flip pages considerably.  In fact, I tend to expect that one will be able to play this from memory and your warband profile sheet by the end of the first game.

I'm looking forward to trying this out with the other interested club members soon.  I note that there is a (joke?) rule in this game giving a glory (victory point) bonus to warbands consisting entirely of pre-1984 miniatures.  My centaurs in this game are right on the borderline, but everything else on the table was well within that, so I expect that will not go over well with the rest of the club when I try to (habitually) claim that bonus...

We drove home on Monday, and I was pleased to find that my Ral Partha/Ironwind Chaos Wars Kickstarter box had arrived while I was away, so that made for a nice post-Christmas surprise. (OK, not that much of a surprise--they were very good about keeping us updated on shipping.)

Mine was full of all manner of Chaos Wars goodness.  I'd ordered the large version of the starter set, a package of additional command figures, a unit of elf pikes, an elven colossus, and the new figures sculpted for the Kickstarter.

They threw in samples of skeletons and dwarves, which will apparently be the next Kickstarter.

We also got a handful of bonus figures, originally all from the Personalities and Things That Go Bump in the Night range.  The winged panther is new to me.

The elven colossus, shown here with the new sculpted Tom Meier elves, was originally sold in the early years of Ral Partha as part of a small series of 54mm painters' figures, and resembles, in larger scale, the earliest of the Ral Partha elves.  They suggest using it as a giant animated statue with the 25s, and I think that I'll do mine in verdigrised bronze, a technique that I'll being trying out on some Bones designated as Frostgrave statues before I try it on this.

I'll try to post some New Years project thoughts tomorrow.  While I am really enjoying this revisitation of fantasy gaming, I also want to make time for the Not Quite Seven Years War again in the new year.