Progress on the Home Front

Greetings, readers, and to my fellow Americans, happy Thanksgiving! I certainly had a pleasant one this year, spent with friends rather than family, and more importantly, I've taken some time off work to give myself a five day weekend, during which time I'm hoping to get some serious modeling work done.

Going through the rules for Broken Legions, I'm finding myself not wowed by them - certainly not the immediate, viscerally-positive reaction I felt during my first read throughs of Frostgrave and Lion Rampant.  I think I'm going to have to give them a play-through or two to really see if they're for me or not.  That being said, I'm revisiting Lion Rampant (I might be getting Dragon Rampant as a Christmas gift, which is the only reason I've held off thus far on buying a copy) and I downloaded the PDF version of Wargaming Soldiers and Strategy magazine issue 82, which has a Bronze Age variant, "Chariot Rampant." As some of you may recall, back in 2014 I made a rather large order from Wargames Factory, before they went belly-up.  Among what I bought were a box of Greek Hoplites, a box of Fantasy Amazons, and enough Achaemenid Persians to choke the Hot Gates.

Digging out the box of Hoplites the other night, I assembled a unit of 12, based on round bases for skirmish gaming, for use with Lion/Dragon/Chariot Rampant.  I can also draw from this pool of figures to create an "Argonauts" warband for Broken Legions.  I opted to model them with kopis-style short swords rather than spears, in part to make them easier to store and less likely to break in storage, and in part because the default Argonaut in BL carries a hand weapon, not a spear.

Shields will be glued into place after they're painted.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to get out the box of Amazons and assemble a unit of them; in a game I'd probably field them as Fierce Foot or similar in Lion/Chariot/Dragon Rampant.  After that I'd like to start on a couple units of Persians, but we'll see how much free time I end up having this weekend.  I'm envisioning them as the backbone of a "fiery sorcerer from the eastern deserts" type Dragon Rampant retinue, supporting an elemental-summoning sorcerer and backed by things like cockatrices or manticores.

The weather should be nice enough to prime this weekend too - I'm looking forward to painting these guys once the Challenge begins.

Carry(ing Case) On Up the Appian Way

Good lord that's a tortured mixture of pun and pop culture reference in the title of this post, isn't it? Terrible.  But it's the best I could do to appropriately title this post.

Yesterday marked my six year anniversary with Gina, and in keeping with her tendency to be incredibly thoughtful and generous, she bought me a new carrying case for miniatures, Reasoning that I'm looking at building all these warbands and armies for various games and my stated desire to run demo games at the store, she decided it would be a better gift to buy me the carrying case I'd been eyeballing rather than more miniatures.  This is the unbranded "Sword Bag" from Battlefoam, with pluck-foam trays rather than precut.  It came with a 3" tray, a 2" tray, 2 1.5" trays and a 1" tray, which will cover all my needs admirably.

Atticus thinks this is for him.  

Additionally, we bought it from our local FLGS, rather than ordering it online, in the interest of supporting our local gaming community with our purchase.  Just Games was running a Thanksgiving promotion this week, meaning by spending more than $40 in store, we got to select a free game off a pile by the register, and we walked out having added "Nitro Dice," a card/dice racing game, to our collection.  It is a game that can be played with 2 players (unfortunately, a number of games we've bought require 3 or more players to run), so we'll possibly be checking that out this weekend.  I've played a couple very fun racing games in the past, and this one looks like it'll also appeal to my fondness for women in tiny shorts.

*ahem*

Moving on...

I also picked up a copy of Osprey's "Broken Legions" skirmish game yesterday; for those unfamiliar, the premise is that Greco-Roman Mythology is true, and Roman's continued survival rests not on the backs of its legions, but on small teams of "special forces" fighting a covert war to claim and protect relics of divine might from those who would use them to undermine the Empire Without End.  On the first read-through, I'm inclined to agree with Richard Rush's assessment in the comments on my last post, that it doesn't look like it really does anything that Frostgrave doesn't do as well or better, but I'm willing to give it a run-through in play and see if that changes my mind.

Either way, I think I only need to buy something absurd like three or four more figures to be able to field four 150 point warbands - a Greek, Germanic, Egyptian/"Cult of Set," and a Parthian one.  I don't have any Roman figures handy; truth be told I'm eyeing Foundry's line of Imperial Romans for this somewhere down the line.  I have a ton of Wargames Factory plastic Greeks and Persians that I bought on sale two years ago sitting in my closet that will fulfill the Greek and Parthian warbands, and the "Cult of Set" and Germanic warbands will mostly just repurpose the Cult of Set and Valkyrie warbands I've assembled for Frostgrave.

I think the only figures I don't have readily on hand are a werewolf for the Germans, an Oracle for the Greeks and a Prince and Magus for the Parthians, and those will be fairly easy fixes I think.

Wargames Factory Spartans - Base 1

Happy New Year, wargames and RPG enthusiasts! As they say, what you do this night will be what you do for the rest of the year, so I ate some tortilla chips and guacamole and assembled some toy soldiers.

I had decided I would assemble and base my Wargames Factory Greeks, Amazons and Persians for Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames - I bought a stack of 50mm x 100mm bases to glue groups of figures to; eight figures to a base for heavy infantry, six figures to a base for archers and skirmishers, four figures to a base for cavalry.

In proper gamer fashion, I rolled a die to determine which unit I'd do first - my plan is for three bases of Hoplites, three bases of Persian Archers, three bases of Persian Immortals, and three bases of Amazon Archers/Skirmishers.

The dice came up with Hoplites, so I pulled out the box and got to work after dinner.  It's been a long time since I've assembled a multipart plastic kit like this - I think the last time I'd done one of these was back in high school when I was still doing Warhammer figures, more then a decade ago now.

So with this first batch of eight Hoplites there's a couple where the poses ended up a little wonky but by the time I reached the sixth Hoplite or so I was feeling pretty confident, and the next eleven bases I'm going to assemble will look darn good.

They're not glued down to the base yet - I'm going to sticky-tac them to a couple of popsicle sticks, prime them, paint them, paint and decal their shields, glue those on, and then glue the figures to the base.

Not Much Has Been Done, But Much Has Been Considered

Confession time: I've not done a lick of work on Cthulhu since Sunday evening.  I just haven't been able to really set aside the time and energy to give him the attention I want to be able to give him.  I have decided that I want to attach the wings and putty the gaps in them before painting, so I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to get on that tomorrow so he's got all Sunday to cure.

In the mean time, boxes - boxes upon boxes - have been arriving at my apartment.  The three orders I'd placed with Wargames Factory during their Black Friday sale event all arrived this week - one on Monday, one on Tuesday, and one on Thursday that would have been Wednesday if it weren't for the damn snow storm.

So let me just do what my girlfriend does whenever she buys new yarn for her knitting habit - spread it out over the bed and take some pictures so she can carefully catalog her "stash" and remain knowledgeable of everything she's got in her collection - and given that she's got two huge tote-bins in the closet filled to capacity with carefully packed skeins of yarn, that's quite a bit!

Those are her little pink piddies in the background, by the way.
Not mine.

I actually see a lot of similarities between her knitting and my miniature painting.  In both cases we're engaging in a certain degree of crafting, from which we derive a great deal of pleasure, and then there's a practical aspect (in my case, the simple joy of pushing figures across a table to simulate conflict; in hers, having a warm neck during these bitter Western New York winters).  And while we both can spend a considerable amount, it's because we're buying quality; when it comes to yarn, she has Cadillac tastes - no $3-a-skein acrylic fiber yarn for her! And with me, sure, I could buy a bag of green plastic army men for $3 at the toy store, but I'd rather have the crisp detail of someone like Wargames Factory, or Bob Murch's Pulp Figures, or even Games Workshop.

And in both cases, the ratio of enjoyment-derived-per-dollar-spent is pretty high.  Sure, she might spend $30 on a nice skein of Malabrigo Worsted, but she's going to spend 5-8 hours, at least, using a pair of chopsticks to turn a ball of string into a hat (which, to me, is pure sorcery), plus the countless days she'll wear the hat.  That $30 ends up going a very long way.  Likewise, for example, during the sale I bought a box of Amazons that was marked down to $16-and-change.  Factor in the hours I'm going to spend carefully clipping the pieces from the sprues, sanding mold lines, assembling figures and then painting, and even before I put them on the table and play a game with them, that $16 investment has gone a pretty long way.

And that's not even taking into account that I'm planning to convert half of them using pieces from the Persian Infantry sprue bundles I bought to bring them a little more in line with what "actual" Sarmatian/Scythian warrior women would have probably looked like, and that stretches the enjoyment even further as I plan conversions, carefully cut pieces apart and glue them together into new configurations.  No longer will my Amazons have frigid nethers as they fight in tiny leather skirts on the arid steppes; nay, it's trousers for my ladies, I say!

I bought enough of these Infantry bundles to assemble into 120 figures...

And in both cases, my toy soldiers and her knitting, it's a hobby where realistically we're going to be doing a lot of work in our pajamas, sitting on the couch with the TV going in the background, some show we've heard rave reviews of playing on Netflix, and we'll poke our heads up and realize that half a season has gone by and we have no idea what any of the characters look like.

I've made a few mentions of pushing figures around on the table, and I may have mentioned previously that I'd been casting around for a good ruleset to use with these Greeks, Amazons and Persians.  And it dawned on me today that I already *have* a great ruleset handy.

I'm a big fan of John "Buck" Surdu's G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. (Glorious Adventures in Science Loosely Involving Generally Historical Times) skirmish ruleset.  The rules are fast and easy to learn, the number of figures required to play are very low, and it really puts a lot of emphasis on creativity and fun.  While ostensibly designed for Victorian Science Fiction, I see no reason why I couldn't quickly and easily adapt it to any setting or genre imaginable (well, I can imagine that a romantic comedy wargame might be a bit tricky).  Strip out the steam-tech and throw in something to give shields and armor some value and I think I'd be ready to go with a "Bronze Age by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T." game.  Heck, there's even rules for strange beasts in the G.A.S.L.IG.H.T. manual - no conversion really necessary to start churning out mythological beasties for more Mythic games.  For that matter, leave in the steam-tech and call it Atlantean technology or the handiwork of Daedalus and we're good to go!

I've got plenty of figures for Amazon, Spartan and Persian factions for Bronze Age by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T., maybe I should get some Egyptians, Macedonians, Scythians...and of course the mythologicals; I'm going to want minotaurs, harpies, cyclopes...And since I bought those British Colonial troops I should buy some Zulus, maybe some Prussians and French Foreign Legion as well...

According to Gina, in the knitting community there's a term - SABLE.  It's an acronym, standing for "Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy," referring to knitters who accumulate more yarn then they can reasonably knit up before shuffling off this mortal coil.  Immediately upon hearing the term I had to laugh, because I know miniature painters do the exact same thing, but I don't know that we have as catchy a name for it as SABLE.  So I'd like that to maybe catch on and get used by wargamers in reference to their overflowing closets of projects and shelves groaning under the weight of unpainted lead.