Yes, the Dead ride behind. They have been summoned

    As I mentioned in my last post, painting time and motivation has gone off the cliff at the moment but I've not stopped thinking about projects. One thing I keep thinking about with my 15mm Undead army is how to include a unit of ghosts/spirits to my ranks of risen mortal remains. A few companies do the classic sheet shaped ghosts, which I think look brilliant in small units like DBA/HOTT but ranked up I'm not sure they would work as well.

   My next thought was to buy some normal troops and paint them as ghosts, so as I am reading a series set in the late Roman republic, I decided that would be a good era to buy figures from. The figures are from Essex and are a mix of their Marian troops including a pack of cavalry for variety. I painted the figures in my normal ghost colour scheme and spread them across 3 bases in what I hoped was a fairly even manner. 

   I could easily have just done a single base to test the idea out but there is always something about doing 3 units of any standalone project that I like and now they are done and based up, it has got me thinking about whether a whole army would be cool, but that is a project for another day.

I really could do with getting the necromancers done for this army now . . .

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Essex Regiment of Foote Pt2

  I've called this the Essex Regiment of Foote pt2 as its basically a rehash of a project from last year, so let's start at the beginning. Last year, I finally managed to get my ECW project moving and once the momentum had started, I found I really enjoyed it. It was a pity it only got onto the table twice, but with everything that happened last year, twice is actually really good going.

   However, with my head currently thinking in terms of 15mm armies, ECW was one of the projects where it dawned on me that 15mm would make a huge difference. A regular infantry company of pikemen and musketeer wings takes up a lot of space and as I'd like both sides to have at least two of these blocks, 28mm on a 6/4 board looks cramped very quickly. So on a recent trip to Essex Miniatures (I was only going to have a quick look) I saw the ECW figures in the display cabinet and decided to sate my curiosity.

   As this is the second time I've painted this unit, I decided to match both the officer's uniform and the flag to the 28mm version of the unit. I'm not planning on getting rid of the 28mm stuff any time soon, but if my idea is right, I think the 15mm might see more table time. Size wise, I've double the figure count from 28-15, so that I think the pike block looks more dangerous and less like a minor annoyance with 20 pikes vs only 8, while the full length of the unit is about half of what it is in the bigger scale.

I really do need to focus on a single project again now, though.

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The Battle of Wattling Street (ish)

    I've had a few weeks off from painting now, but I've managed to get one of my lockdown projects onto the table and I thought it was worth blogging about. As of (I think) Saturday 22rnd May, Wayland Games has reopened it's gaming side of the business to those who prebook a table, so on the first Wednesday after that, my club arranged our first proper club night since the start of March last year. In the end we booked 2 tables and had 5 members turn up, with one of the games being my attempt at a small version of the Battle of Wattling Street with Boudica vs Gaius Suetonius, with only the Roman occupation of Britannia at stake.

   We used a modified version of Lion Rampant that I had found online and got playing. About turn 3 we noticed that there was something wrong with the modifications made and it was only on the drive home that it dawned on us what it was. The author had modified the test rolls to match Rebels and Patriots (so 1 ability score rather than separate ones for Move, Attack, Shoot and Courage) but left the morale rules the same as base Lion Rampant. While not major, this meant if a Ancient British unit lost 3 guys to the Roman shooting (pilums) they needed a 10+ on 2 dice or else they got a Battered marker. In Lion Rampant a Battered marker means the unit can do nothing the following turn but Rally, so the next turn they would be shot at again. If they lost 2 more guys they now needed a 12+ to pass, with anything below a 7 removing the unit from the table. As you can imagine, this got brutal quickly, so that the Ancient Britons only got to the Roman lines to actually attack on one occasion.

   Suffice to say the game did not go well to the Brits, although the chariot unit did manage to wipe out a unit of Legionnaires with hit and run shooting attacks. We have some modifications to make to the ruleset for next time, but it was still a really fun game and it was great to see real people at a gaming venue to chat about games, plus who doesn't like seeing projects get onto the table for their first outing?

   While I haven't managed to get any painting done, I did have a few bits for this project that were waiting on a varnish, so I thought this was the perfect time to add them to the bottom of a post too. They are from a few different ranges, the first wagon is from Fenris and I think has been on this blog in a different form a few years back, the Ancient Britons are Warlord Games and the Roman Wagon is from Warbases.

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The Unquiet Dead

    I've made a bit of a concerted effort to paint this week even though life has been pretty busy again. The lists I put together for a Middle Imperial Roman vs Undead Dragon Rampant game last week were small due to how cheap Undead units are compared to Romans, so while my Romans should be the priority, I decided to get moving on some Undead instead.

   While I was mucking about I, also, painted up a unit of praying monks. Quite a few of the historic novels I've been recently have had mentions of the commander at the back of the field, surrounded by a crowd of aides to advise, religious people to advise and pray and hangers on just getting in the way and this is a lot of the stuff I want to start getting onto the board. These monks are from Essex Miniatures and are part of my first small order where I wanted to check scale with other ranges - figuring a stand alone side unit doesn't matter if it is slightly out - and while I mostly plan to use them in future Dark Age/Medieval projects, what I thought I could do with them for the short term was give them to my Middle Imperial Romans for their fantasy games. While I am aware that the Romans I am painting would be mostly pagan, in a fantasy world where the risen dead are shambling towards you, any divine favour wouldn't go amiss.

   I've ordered the fantasy version of Sword and Spear, so that I can work out how to base up my necromancers for my Undead army, but I suspect it will be the same as I plan to do my captains for historical Sword and Spear.

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A busy week

   This is a bit of a mixed post, but here we go. As with past years, I don't plan to post about every game I manage to play but with it being nearly six months since I last played a physical game, I though I would celebrate the UK starting to open up and start to arrange would games I could.

   The first game I managed was of Warhammer 30k with my podcast mate, Keith, and was in fact 2 games (as I lost the first so quickly) and was, also, last weekend. He wanted to get his new Imperial Fists on the table to try and motivate himself into getting them finished and I used my favourite legion, my Sons Of Horus. As I have already mentioned, the first game was a complete loss with the final score being 17-0 to Keith, as his first turn of shooting neutralised the two tanks I was relying on. The second game was much closer but was still a loss, but only 2-0 to him.

   Then this week, I really went to town with arranging games to test gaming on our new(ish) garden bench. When we picked the bench I pushed for one 6 foot long, however it isn't wide enough to play a decent 28mm game on - although I plan to rectify that by buying some board to sit on top of it - but for 15mm it is a perfect width, so that is what we did. 

   The first game we tried was after work early in the week and was Rebels and Patriots using my epic scale Warlord and Kallistra ACW stuff. While I lost, again, I'm really taken with Rebels and Patriots at this scale. We played with 38 points a side, which was 4 or 5 infantry blocks depending on the side, a cannon with limber and 2 units of light cavalry each, which is a big game at 28mm. In 15mm it was a couple of hours where we had space to manoeuvre and attempt to flank. I want to get more 15mm on the table in the next few weeks but it's really made me feel more confident with this scale shift.

  We then arranged an afternoon of gaming for Saturday which was going to be another test game using my 15mm Lion/Dragon Rampant armies to see how that looked in 15mm for which I did some frantic late night painting of a unit of Undead Knights and Undead Chariots. Both units are entirely Alternative Armies figures. The knights I'm not hugely keen on as they look too fantasy for me (in my head undead knights should just be skeleton knights, they don't need bat banners and skull shields) but I couldn't find another model range I liked more, I also, just about fitted the 8 cavalry on that my basing requires, but it was tight! The chariots have had a crew swap as I have other plans for the drivers and I've put them on half width bases to allow a bit more flexibility in future gaming.

   It was all moot in the end as time and other stuff meant we played a couple of board games instead - something for the future.

   I also saw online that Mike Hobbs has sadly passed away this week. He was a play tester for various rulesets, was a co-host on Meeples and Miniatures, was seriously entertaining on Twitter (both for his hobby and for his cats), was a friendly person you could ask questions of and was the cause of a lot of my hard earned money being spent on projects I didn't know I wanted to get involved in. My thoughts go to his wife and family at this time. He will be missed.

Thanks for reading.

Sani Scale

    One of the real stand out series I've been reading since the first lockdown is The Burning series by Evan Winter, a big story fantasy tale set a non-Earth version of Africa. Its the classic big bad is coming but we need to sort ourselves out first genre, but with dark twists that keep you guessing at what is going on. Plus there are dragons, how can you not like a good book with dragons in it?

   With the second book coming out recently and me reading it even more recently, I got thinking about this twist in a fantasy army. When we think of fantasy games its a very white affair with maybe an Arabic looking race as one of the bad factions but wouldn't an African army look really interesting on the battlefield - effectively Evan writes the Omehi armies as (and probably going to show some ignorance here) looking like Zulu armies but with access to unridden dragons, and instead of married/unmarried being a distinction in Omehi armies it is Noble/Lesser that is the distinction. So I plan on using Married Zulu as Nobles, using the Foot Serjent profiles in Lion Rampant and Unmarried Zulu as Lessers, using the Yeomen profiles.

   The figures are from Essex and are properly nice to paint, but a nightmare to put together. I only bought enough for a single unit as I wanted to test a theory (there are more single units from potential armies coming) and, once they were built, I enjoyed the rest of the process a lot.

   So here is Sani Scale* - Omehi Nobles. 

*In the theme of dragons the minimum unit of organisation is a scale

Again, sorry for my shocking photography

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5th Line KGL - light Company

    A bit of a let down after the amount of finished figures on the last post, this week I think I burnt myself out by pushing too hard over the long weekend, so to ease myself back in, I picked a fairly easy job, two units of light company from the King's German Legion 5th Line Battalion. If I've got my history right, the light company were sent to reinforce the KGL 2rnd Light Battalion at La Haye Sainte, so this is my representation of that company (12 figures per company at the sec until I can get a game in and see how it looks).

   Like the other 15mm Napoleonics I've been painting, I've used the same recipe I use for my 28mm, just with grey trousers rather than white.

   The only thing worth noting more for how much it annoyed me when I realised was that in my haste to order the first batch of bases for my 15mm Napoleonics project, is I ordered the wrong size bases for my skirmishers. The guy I copied (can't remember which blog it was now) put his skirmishers on 25/15mm bases to match the width of his line infantry who are on 25/20mm. I, for some unknown reason, ordered 20/15mm - in the long run it doesn't matter, all my skirmisher will match and I have no real interest in rebasing figures so recently finished, but it's something I will remember every time I look at these armies.

Again, I apologise for the photo quality.

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