Where the hell have you been?

Well, there’s a couple of answers to that — firstly I wasn’t very well for a while (I’m OK now, nothing to worry about), but secondly I’ve been painting like crazy.

A while back we started doing Fantasy Warriors at the local club, about which I’ve previously blogged. I’ve always had an ambition to have a ratman army. (Yes, I own a copy of that White Dwarf issue!). So this seemed an opportunity to go build one, in all it’s squeakyness.

Now the problem here is that ratty troops aren’t very good, so you get a LOT of them. I started out with the intention of having an army with no exotic things in it, but that plan fell apart when I started looking at how many figures I’d need…

As the vast Green River wends its way to the sea, it sprawls out across a long valley. Shallow and slow, its waters fill with weeds which provided the original food source behind the rats’ establishment there. Behind the valley are hills rich with metals, whose extraction can be funded by the easy food gathered from the flood plains. The rats of the Green River can afford to breed and arm huge armies...

OK, first off, I’d need some big blocks of troops. These can soak up archery and although they’ll get battered in combat, they need vast numbers of casualties before hitting their breaking points. They get banners and drums to bolster them a bit.

The first batch of 40 slaves are from the alluvial floodplains. Their clothing is dyed blue from the woad which grows plentifully in the area.

The second unit of 40 slaves are from the mining tribes. Their clothing is coloured by the waste ores and hence they’re in tones of brown and yellow — they also carry the green flag of their alliance. The majority of these figures are Black Tree. Not all of these figures are rats — for some variety there are fishmen (from CP Models) and also dwarf slaves and convicts (from Midlam).

Next up, some tougher units. Leather armoured fighting rats; the bright green shields & banner tie them into the army theme. Black Tree figures again. They’ve been in battle before and have kill marks and victory skulls on their shields to show for it.

Elite warrior monks. FW doesn’t have a unit type as such for these guys, but I like the figures so I had to have a unit — they’re wearing lighter coloured clothing to signify their status as monks.

And the last of the main units are pike-and-crossbow elite guards. This unit is a little more ragtag — or “experienced” as we prefer to call it made up of various Black Tree figures. They’re accompanied by one of the battleleaders (Reaper)

Next up was the hardest unit to assemble...

Rat swarms. Rat armies in FW can buy these for silly cheap; they’re basically fire-and-forget attack units. I wanted some variety in there since there’s a lot of bases and that’s why it got complicated. I bought giant rats from Reaper, from the Reaper Bones range. There are GW chaos mutant rats in there, Black Tree’s large rats and (to fill in the spaces), the teeny-tiny individual rats produced by Warbases (on whose 40mm squares they all sit).

Warchief, a battleleader and two soothsayers — the Seer of the Autumn (on the left) and the Seer of the Summer.

This a messenger (a Bones figure with a scroll on his backpack), three scouts (2 Reaper metals and a Black Tree figure) and a hero and destroyer hero (both from Black Tree). The scouts I’d hoped to get me control of the battlefield, but even with their support my lousy dice rolls meant the first outing was against Elves on ground of their choosing.

Guns! FW doesn’t have any 2-part Jezzail units, so I cut these Black Tree figures off their tabs and rebased them onto single 25mm squares. The leader and banner are Bob Charrette’s Ratmen figures. These particular ones were part of boxed set bought in the 1990s when the Virgin Megastore in Birmingham were selling off their wargames stock…

Shooting units need ammunition counters; once again these are Warbases 40mm casualty markers with a diorama on top.

A rat delivering stuff on a barrow (GW figure, Warbases barrow and, I think, Alternative goods), the next is a whip-wielding Black Tree rat ordering a encumbered human to carry stuff about (Reaper’s “Compleat Adventurer’). Finally a Reaper rat is cutting up a Warlord dead horse for supplies.

Next up, we need some ranged power.. A proper gun!

GW figures which were customised with all sorts of bits; there’s Battle Forge parts in there and loads of Warbases products including and ammunition counter. Hats came from Warlord’s historical lines, the gun is from Redoubt and the gun tools are ages old Bicorne.

And from the wrong end, it looks like this!

The final piece is a giant worm. I was a little worried about this — it’s expensive, getting it to appear is a random event and it felt a bit unpredictable. But it adds some variety to the army and it’s something apart from another-unit-of-rats-with-spears.

This also took some assembling.. the soothsayer to summon it is obviously another Black Tree swarmmaster figure. The worm itself was complicated… The front comes from a Reaper miniature… but it’s not very long and the FW rules specify the worm takes up 15cm. So I went digging in the bits box; a while back I Ebay-purchased a pile of Kryomek figures which included (amongst the wanted figures) a Warmaster that someone had, for some reason, cut up. Well, because I’m a hoarder, I kept the bits… and, with a bit of modelling, they make up the back sections of the worm. Lots of wood filler and Woodland Scenics ballast as stones and the worm is burrowing through the terrain.

In the end it turned to be both effective in battle (eating a total of two cavalry units), taking a lot of punishment (turns out that being a land-burrowing worm gives you a tough hide) and also completely terrifying to the Elves. Who ran away when it showed up!

Fantasy Warriors Time Dial

Fantasy Warriors is one of the few games that makes extensive use of time in the game. The day is divided into 12 periods and not only does the daylight or night darkness matter (affecting the soldiers abilities), but also at dawn, ghosts disappear and there are other time triggered effects.

The original game came with a cardboard dial and an hourglass to move around on it, but since I'm replacing things like the ammunition tracking with nice tokens, why not the time dial?

Warbases very nicely cut me out a double-sized version of their casualty counter to use as a starter. I wrote up some PostScript to generate a suitable disk to go in it numbered 1-6 twice. The disk got some light painting (oranges & yellow for the day and then two shades of blue for the night).

Then I needed something to put on it -- GW at one point did a monk with quill... Actually he's a techno-monk, but that was easily fixed with a scalpel trimming off tech down to just being ornamentation. The rest of his station is made of pieces from the bits box. A lantern from Mordheim, an Ainsty barrel, a telescope and theodolite from Mega Miniatures and various other bits and bobs. I've left them on smaller bases so that I have the option of using them separately or swapping them in the future for other features.

You can't see it too clearly in the picture below, but the crate is being used as a desk, with a chest, scrolls and an Alternative Armies pie on it.

The dial's basework was built up with the same B&Q filler I use for figures and Woodland Scenics scatter with tufts from Great Escape Games.

And so, instead of a boring cardboard dial, I have a monk, recording the battle for history!

Time Dial

Have you ever wondered...

what it would be like if you built a Fantasy Warriors army from figures you had lying around the house?

Well. That's what I did. (Well, mostly. I'll fess up to cheating very slightly later).

So the obvious army to pick is the "Men-at-Arms" which is basically a War of the Roses army -- and it turns out I have two boxes of Perry plastics with a couple of test figures assembled. Also nearby is a box of Gripping Beast dark age warriors.

So the warriors can make the peasant levy;

10 figures and a leader makes a 30p unit.

The various retinues will provide bows, bills and men-at-arms.

Two 80p units of bows. Each has 12 figures, leader and banner.

The bills are a 70p unit of 10 figures, leader, banner and musician.

The men-at-arms are the smallest constitute of each retinue, combined they're a 268p unit of 8 figures including a leader and banner.

That's clearly not enough shooting or fighting units, so we better hire some mercenaries.

12 crossbows for 80p...

...and 12 handgunners for 80p should add some shooting.

12 pike with leader and banner and musician for 66p will bulk out the fighting units.

Right, that's the army soldiers. Shooting units need resource markers to track their ammunition. There are tokens that come with FW, but they're fiddly and there's obvious opportunities there to make neater stuff.

This is where I started cheating a bit. First off, I bought some of the excellent casualty markers from Warbases. Then I wandered around a Partizan collecting bits and bobs. Some of the figures are the Perry metal pack of workers; the others are from Courteys/First Corps who make a fantastic dark age civilian pack. The barrels and other equipment are plastic Renedra, the brilliantly named "Dead Man's Baggage" pack and several sets from Warfare Miniatures. The pack horses are Redoubt. Mixed together, dry-brushed, washed and based up on the casualty markers they make much more atmospheric supply counters.

Then we need some leaders. We'll stick with foot versions to keep the costs down.

A war chief and two battle leaders adds up to 246p.

The battle leaders are a Joan d'Arc (give-away with Warhammer Historical's Age of Chivalry), and "Martin Schwartz" (a Partizan give-away). The war chief is (I think) a figure from Colonel Bill's Dark Age heroes range. These were all in the store of unpainted figures.

I also built a couple of extra bits for the army; the chap at the back is the paymaster (Perry figure and Warfare extras) and the encampment is from the First Corps pack. The blacksmith at the very back is another Partizan give-away figure from several years ago. He's slightly out of era, but never mind.

So that was quite an interesting project. I'm just waiting for their opponents to be painted to try them out...

Terrain Building

So it's not all painting figures. There's other boring but necessary parts of wargaming and now we come to that sort of work...

First up, barricades.

They're resin castings that have been lying about half-painted in a drawer for ages. I stripped the half-paint off them and re-did them. There were a couple of casting flaws which I thought about filling and then decided to model as splits in the bags -- a scattering of fine ballast in the hole and around the sacks completed that look. I wish I could tell you who made them, but I honestly can't remember.

Next up is the reason I've been painting so slowly recently... bocage hedgerows. I've been making these for ages and I'd finally got to the stage of making the trees. Wow, that's a fiddly job. Woodland Scenics actual glue which they suggest for this purpose is rubbish. I tried a couple of "tacky glue" variants bought from hobbycraft and while they might glue glitter onto cards, foliage onto trees they don't.

In the end, copydex -- proper, gunky, smelling-of-fish copydex -- turned out to be the Right Approach.

And patience. Doing a small area on each tree and then leaving them to dry means less of the "every time you add a clump another one falls off" frustration. The finished bits look like this;

The base is a length of wood moulding, triangular in cross-section. Over this, wood filler for the "mud". The bushes are loops of wire hot-glued onto the moulding. "Rubberised horsehair" (apparently it's mostly pig bristles these days) hotglued in sections onto the wire loops gives the underlying structure. They're finished by a layer of white glue and a scattering of Noch leaves.

Mostly these are about 11 inches long (to fit on a 12x12 field grid allowing for the corners), but some are shorter both to edge roads and also leave gate gaps. I've also done a set of lower hedges and some tree clusters.

Ruined Cathedral

A little while back I was ordering a boardgame from Spirit and they do free shipping if you buy over a certain amount -- the game was annoyingly close so I was trying to think if there was anything to get at the same time and remembered that they stock Scotia-Grendel resin scenics. I've always liked the range, so I had a quick browse and found they had the ruined cathedral in stock.

So I got the free shipping and hence (effectively) a cheap cathedral ruin. It needed a little tidying up, but not much considering the model is so old; I guess it's been remoulded at some point. The six resin parts are supposed to assemble into an L shaped part, the doorway section and a long side. I decided not to connect the side to the window-end in order to aid with storing the parts.

On Friday I was working from home, so in gaps in coding while the enormously slow self-tests were running (we really need to invest in the cluster of systems that runs on. It's slow in the mornings, but in the afternoons when the US developers are using it as well it's glacial) I could get some painting done and brickwork is something that can easily be done in small bouts.

One side...

The parts had already been under-coated with black spraypaint. The brickwork gets a light drybrush in a mid grey. It's important that it's a chromatically neutral grey, because the next stage is to use various inks to tint the bricks in various colours. I use Ogryn Flesh and the three Army Painter shades.

The other side...

The inking produces not only bricks with subtle different colourations, but also will vary those colourations across the bricks; making them look more like natural stone. One can get similar effects by very lightly dry-brushing colours on, but it's harder to do that on a brick-by-brick basis. Once the inks have dried, I dry-brush everything with Howard Hues "Old Wood". It's a dusty off-white which is one of my favourite ways of getting a quick weathering effect on almost anything because it's colourless enough that the underlying tones won't be erased by it but just given depth. I don't actually find the HH range particularly good to paint with - I find they have terrible coverage despite being quick viscous. However, exactly those properties seem to make them excellent dry-brushing colours.

The doorway!

After that, the plant growth was picked out in a dark green Vallejo colour (I can't recall which one now) and coated in PVA glue and then Noch Olive Leaves provide the texture. These are excellent for plant growth; larger than normal ground-scatter, they're visibly individual leaves which make the plant portrayals more eyecatching when you want them to be a feature rather than part of the backdrop.

Quite a nice bit of terrain for what amounted to about a tenner (after the free postage!) and an afternoon's work.

Flintloque Wraith Infantry

I wanted to try out having some more unusual troops in my "Undead" army. Wraiths seemed like fun -- they get to have ranged weapons, command points and so on but they also get to turn into spirits and run through the scenery... and be invulnerable while they do it...

But Alternative don't make Wraith infantry as far as I could tell -- I certainly can't see them in the catalogue

Finding suitable figures turned out to be a little difficult. Many "Wraith" figures are very obviously tooled up for fantasy medieval combat -- lots of glaives, giant swords and so on. Those that are unarmed didn't look easy to convert.

I looked at the two Warmachine Pistol Wraiths, and decided they would make possible leaders if I could fill out the rest of the unit, but I couldn't locate suitable figures so I parked the idea for a bit.

While at a show I was browsing a pile of Reaper figures on Caliver's stand and they not only had a Banshee which I thought would work really well as the musician but several other wraiths -- which led to me wandering about Reaper's website where I discovered Reaper actually do a lot of wraith figures and the rest of the unit came from them; the banner is one of their traditional cowled "invisible" figure (There's nothing inside the cowl or the sleeves). The unit was completed by finding a two-pack of skull-headed, misty wraiths with open hands...

Some mail orders later, and I had two of those packs, a banner and two pistol wraiths. And an armoury pack from AA which provided muskets for those open hands. The duplication was minimised by reposing the figures (ever so delicately, the screaming of the pewter bending setting my teeth on edge..)

When it came to painting them, I knew I wanted them to look connected -- the differingstyles of figures meant I needed to tie the unit together with colours. Plain bone would have left me needing to do something with the almost-naked banshee which wouldn't match, so I eventually went with all-black clothing and both flesh and bone in shades of light blue. Weapons were muted down (tin instead of gunmetal and mahogany instead of my normal mid-brown) to add to the dark and gloomy air. The bases are the usual woodfiller, scenic materials and snow made from glass microspheres (sold as boat-repairing resin expander) mixed with wood glue.

So I have a banner bearer (with the improvised melee attack of hitting with his banner), a banshee who is the unit musician and has the scary music attack from Grapeshotte along with a sword, four musketeers and a sergeant and lieutenant both with a pair of pistols, making exactly 300 points.

WoooooOOOOOOooooo.....!

Royul Marines!!

Marines!!!

Basically, one of the problems with my painting output has been a bunch of pending projects which are only now all getting completed at the same time..

This time it's the crew and marines of "HMS Violence". There's two naval officers, two sailors and six marines. There's actually only two poses of marines and I dislike duplicates within groups as small as this, so I did a little customisation. First off was a bayonet transplant so that one of each duplicate has one and the other doesn't. I also added some extra baggage to some of the figures; one being a fiddle (figure on the far right) which came in a recently purchased Reaper pack.

I'm not actually sure marines of the time carried bayonets -- they used the "Sea Service Pattern" musket which is shorter than the other variants so it could be used in the close environments of a ship's deck more easily. While the musket had suitable fittings, adding a bayonet would remove the point of the shorter weapon..

In the section profile for this unit, I've listed them as equipped with carbines due to the reduction in power and accuracy from the regular Bessie which is nearly a foot longer.

In a change from the normal recipe, I based them with various grades of ballast and scatter and then gloss varnished portions of that to be a watery beach they're storming.

Plastic Kit Buildings for ACW/Wild West

I've collected several of the Pegasus box sets of log/wooden buildings. Technically they're 1:72 scale, but they really do actually work quite well for 28mm. And they're quite cheap -- a few quid each given that you get two in each box.

The come with thatched roofs, which is OK if you're doing Russia in WW2 (or earlier, obviously) but it wasn't common in the US in the American Civil War or Wild West time-frame. The solution to this arrived in the form of 4Ground's laser-cut roof tiles. They come in strips which makes it easy to cover the moulded thatch roof with weathered wood shingles. (Although I'll caution that a pack doesn't cover as much as you think it will!).

The cowboy is (I think) a Foundry figure and even though he's
technically out of scale that building looks perfectly habitable.

I base them on 3mm plastic card, leave the roof off, spray them black and drybrush with Howard Hues colours (greenish-brown "Canvas", ochre "Wood" and light grey "Old Wood") and pick out the log ends with a finer brush. The base gets B&Q wood filler (conveniently a light brown colour, and what I use on figure bases these days) and then Woodland Scenics scatter, bushes &c.

I then hand-paint the visible roof parts black, drybrush them and then add the tiles before gluing the roof on.

One of the sets comes with small extensions which can be used to add variety - you can just see one peeking out of the back of the house in the picture.

Two of each of the two twin-house sets and one of the larger buildings makes a pretty good small town of nine buildings.

What I Did On My Week Off.

People seemed fairly keen on me having some time off. And to be honest after the stressy year I've had, I needed a break as well. So what did I get done? Well, I tidied up the garage a lot and shredded mountains of paperwork dating back to the mid-90s for a business that I no longer run...

I also bought a car. My beloved old Hyundai, mere weeks after having a new clutch and a recovered gearbox fitted (to replace the one which shredded itself), once again started to make a funny road-speed-related thrumming sound. Something expensive about to fall off type sounds. So I decided it was probably time to follow all the advice that I should buy a new car (or at least a less elderly one).

I also managed to get WAY loads of Flintloque figures painted.

After discovering that veteran light elite figures are murderous, we thought we should revert to using regular line infantry, so for 200 points each;

Britorc Centre Company of
9 Privates and a Lieutenant

Britorc Grenadier Company of
6 Privates, a Sergeant and a Captain.

Highland Scots Rats Centre Company of
6 Privates, a Captain and (of course) a Piper.

Ferach Elf Centre Company of
9 Soldats and a Lieutenant.

Another Ferach Elf Centre Company of
9 Soldats and a Lieutenant

Wow. More Elves are on the painting table...

Wheat's Louisiana Tigers

I fancied doing a slightly unusual unit for the ACW skirmishing.

I wanted to do a reasonable sized unit as well so for $400, Wheat's Tigers.

Most of the time these guys get represented on the table as Zouaves, but only 1 of the five companies were equipped as Zouaves -- and then only at the beginning of the war. The other companies were outfitted in "salt-and-pepper" weave trousers, red firemen's shirts and both fezzes (which they apparently left in camp) and straw hats. I really liked the idea of the straw hats, so that's what I did them with.

The figures are Redoubt with 'bare' heads and the straw hats are a mix of plastic and metal parts from Warlord's ECW range.

There's a bunch of riflemen, a sergeant, lieutenant, drummer and flag-bearer. All the riflemen are Zouaves (higher pluck than regulars); it turns out that in larger LotOW games, it simply gets too annoying trying to have different skill/pluck ratings within the units, so the recent additions are units with all the figures the same. It makes it a little more tricky to juggle the unit to fit the cost, but I think it's worth it for the better playability.

Orcs...

Flintloque comes with the ten elves posted below and six Orc riflemen including the famous Sharke and Harpy.

Now they've got their flag, you can have a look;

The figures are, of course, AA and the flag is from Redoubt who do a pack of flags especially for Sharpe-based stuff (two colours for the South Essex and this 95th Rifles pennant). The rest of the rifles (including another Sharpe!) are still on the painting table.

Rocketmen!

I painted these a bit ago but they've got bored waiting for me to finish the opposition and photo them all in one go... they're the rocketmen, from the 1950s TV series "Raddigan's Rocketmen" (read a description of the series).

The eponymous hero, Colonel Raddigan, CSM Vickalovich and the source of all the series' technobabble: Sergeant Zigby.

Captain Ousterman, Smithson (a hand-to-hand combat specialist) and in the background a two-man heavy machine-gun team.

A squad of six rocket infantry led by a Corporal.

The figures are from Scheltrum via the B&B at Salute and are picked and armed to make 100, 200 and 300 ratings units for 7TV.

Finally, after all the weekends spent working, got back to painting. This is a section of Elf Voltigeur for Flintloque -- the guys at the club are up for having a game. As ever, if I provide the figures.. :-)

They're actually from an original edition box set I picked up ages ago at a Bring&Buy at (I think) Salute. I got Sharke's Victory and Deadloque 1st ed ages ago when they were relatively newly released, so when I saw a reasonably priced base set considered it a bargain to get the actual rules.

Painted with a mix of VJ and CDA with Army Painter washes. Still need bases doing, but it was late Sunday before I'd got the colours on.

Next weekend I'll have a bash at the Orcs to go with them. Then we can try it out. And then if it flies, I can paint the other couple of hundred quidworth of figures which are stored under my table. Some of them are still in the original blister packs...

ACW Painting

Painting ACW seems to be a topic that gets asked about a lot on various boards. I'm kind of pragmatic about this, so I have a fairly standard recipe book to use;

Part	Shade	Main	Highlight
Union Coats	VJ807 Oxford Blue	+white	+more white
Union Trousers	VJ844 Deep Sky Blue	VJ961 Sky Blue	+white
Berdan Coats	CDA155 Angel Green	CDA111 Dark Elf Green	CDA521 Army Green
Berdan Trousers	VJ893 US dark green	+white	+more white
Bright Red (Zouave Trousers)	VJ982 Cavalry Brown	VJ957 Flat Red	+VJ911 Bright Orange
Musket Wood	CDA216 Negro	CDA235 Horse Tone Brown	CDA529 Beige Brown
Musket Metal	-	CDA142 Gun Metal	Miniature Paints Silver
Confederate Grey	P3 IronHull Grey	VJ992 Neutral Grey	VJ836 London Grey (+some amount of white for variation)
Confederate Brown	CDA116 Barbarian Leather	CDA519 Midstone	CDA221 Horse Tone Dun