At the Prince-Palatine's Table

We were invited to share a traditional Wachovian delicacy at the Prince-Palatine's table today; a tasty homemade apple pie.  It's nice to have multi-talented children...Unfortunately, time has been too tight for an actual game this weekend.

Constructing Adelheim, Part III

nDuncan has been busy this past week, and decided to relax with some of the fortress work:

The ravelins are likely to end up smaller in the final trace.

Here's a view from the back:

Unexpected Painting

The weather here was fine today, although I could tell from my allergies that we're well into spring.  I had been planning to go for a walk at lunch today, but the excessive pollen count convinced me that I would be better off spending my time doing something else.  Since I wasn't expecting to paint, I had not brought any of the Schoeffen-Buschhagen troops with me, and was limited to what I had in my travel paint kit.

I ended up finishing up another of Beowulf's retinue, from the Eureka set I've been idly working on for some time:

This brings me up to five of the fifteen figures completed.  I might note that my improvised studio backdrop is a notebook, and that the picture was taken with my phone, using a pocket magnifying glass as a supplementary close-up lens.  It occurred to me that I have mentioned my travel painting kit several times, and have been intending to say something about it.

It's packed into a tough plastic toolbox, shown here with a ruler for scale, so about 16" by 9" by 9".

The top opens onto a set of compartments I usually use for tools.  I've got some 1" washers for basing, some 40mm French and Indian War bits for a future project, a knife, and spare blades.  There should be a tube of Walthers Goo, a popular hobbyist contact cement, and some superglue; I think both of those items have made their way onto my painting table and need to be recovered.

Inside the main compartment is a removable tray, where I keep brushes and a small assortment of miniatures I could work on.  Today that included some Beowulf figures, some Prince August 25mm fantasy, a handful of Pulp Miniatures, and some 6mm cataphracts.  My ultra-close vision glasses should be here too, but have gotten separated.

The remainder of the main compartment is taken up by about 30 bottles of craft acrylics, plus a few old bottles of Ral Partha paints (steel and two caucasian flesh tones today) and a bottle of white glue.  I usually unfold a newspaper or something similar to protect my desk.

The tool kit is supplemented by a few things that just stay at the office; some yogurt containers for wash water, plastic coffee can lids for palettes, and a large bottle of Liquitex gloss varnish.  (Once the figures are based I spray them with a Krylon matte varnish; I don't really care for the look of gloss painted figures on 'realistic' bases.)  I can have it laid out in just a few minutes, and with five minutes allowed to clean up at the end, I can squeeze 45 minutes of painting into a one hour lunch.  That's about half a 28mm individual, or more if I can work in groups, averaged over several sessions.  It can add up, if done consistently.

Constructing Adelheim, Part II

It's been a long week here, so this entry has been somewhat delayed.  We had a work day on the Adelheim fortifications last Saturday.  After a planning session, Duncan and I went out to buy materials.  Duncan set up his saw, and we started ripping the large foam sheets into the raw materials for the curtain wall and parapet lengths.  Bastions will be built by gluing parapets to large solid bases. (See picture below.)

Here one of the bastion bases (we're building three) takes shape on the saw.

Two of the bastion bases laid out on the kitchen counter to start visualizing the final trace.  Multiple trace concepts can be seen on the plan sheet; the triangular section in the lower center is in my hands this week to use as a test for painting.

No engineering project is ever completed on schedule and under budget, and this wasn't an exception.  As the available time drew to a close, Duncan cut a curtain section to fit to the bastion bases as a test.  I think this is going to attract some attention at Historicon.

One of our shopping finds was this ceiling molding piece, which almost looks like it was intended to be the basis of the gate structure.  It's show here temporarily supported on plastic columns from the wedding cake decorating aisle of the arts and crafts store.  I hope to have some time to try some painting techniques on the test section this weekend...

Constructing Adelheim, Part I

I received some pictures from chief fortifications engineer Duncan Adams today.  On Ross's Battle Game of the Month blog, he's discussing rules development for our Historicon Charge!/Fire and Stone game.  The Maryland team, led by Duncan, will be building the fortress of Adelheim, the objective of our siege.

This view is a dimension check on our proposed fortress cross section.  The parapet and covered way are 1.5" in height; the fortress's gun platform area 2" off the table.  Looks good to me!

Here's a view with a field gun testing the look of the parapets and embrasures, the latter being cut into the foam pieces with a hot wire cutter.

I'm glad to have Duncan leading this operation; a hand waving description of why I thought we would need a hot wire cutter sent him to the workshop to create this cutting jig to ensure uniformity of the embrasures.

I'm looking forward to our work day on Saturday, and to getting some sections in my hands for the painting technique tests!

(Photos and foam work all by Duncan Adams.)

Dispatches Delayed

I haven't forgotten reports on the two recent battles; however, I'm on the road this week and finding time has been more difficult than I might have expected.  In the meantime, here's two shots:

Here is the situation as we picked up the first battle; I should have taken an overview shot of the whole table while it was in progress, but we played in the evening and the room was a little dark.  The attackers came from the left; in the forward corner, the Wachovians in orange are in the positions they took as their attack pressed in.  The defender's (S-B's) initial line ran across the table from the building to the woods, approximately.

For convenience the second game used a similar road layout, needing only some minor brushing of sand to accomplish.  The hills moved around and the building disappeared, but the woods stayed in about the same place.  Just a few changes can reset a battle considerably, to change the flavor of a scenario.  In this shot, early in the game, the wagon train is just entering; the rear elements of the escort have not appeared, and only a few attackers are around the edges of the table near the corner at Norman's left hand.

The Not Quite Seven Years War, view from the Author's Desk

NQSYW Order of Battle

Country	Gr	L	Lt	C	LC	G	E	O
Schoeffen-Buschhagen	1	7	2	4	1	2	-	-
North Polenburg	1	5	1	3	-	2	1	1M
Stanzbach-Anwatsch	1	3	1	3	-	2	1	-
Wachovia	-	3	1	-	1	1	-	-
Freedonia	-	2	-	-	-	2	-	S
Kamdenjard	-	2	-	-	-	1	-	-
Burgdorf-Reuthenheim	-	2	1	1	-	1	-	-
Saxe-Kirchdorf	-	1	-	1	-	-	-	-
von Hoggendorf Freikorps	-	1	-	1	-	-	-	-
Free City of Wiegenburg	-	1	-	-	-	1	-	-
Bollmer-Hunz	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-
Saxe-Weilenz*	-	1	-	1	1	-	-	-
Rosmark	1	9	3	6	3	5	1	2M

Latest known troop strengths in companies of foot, squadrons of horse, and guns, 1 April 2011

Troop types: Grenadier, Line, Light, Cavalry, Light Cavalry, Guns, Engineers, Other (M=militia, S=siege mortar)

*Saxe-Weilenz: temporary name for Doug’s troops, in violent purple, not deployed for several years. Will be redubbed when I get a few units of proposed Army #2 built.

Owners: S-B Rob Dean, NP Chris Palmer, S-A Duncan Adams, W Norman Dean, F Geoff Graff, K Jamie Davis, B-R Buck Surdu, S-K Bob Suckling (inactive), vHF Don Hogge, IFCW William Dean, B-H Todd Harland-White, S-W Doug, R Ross Macfarlane

Commentary

The document shown above is a working record that I keep of all known participants in the Not Quite Seven Years War.  I'm in the process of updating it this week; I'm suspecting that I am behind the current situation in Rosmark somewhat.  The relative strengths of the contingents provided by the various participants has varied considerably over the years.  My mental image of the states behind the names has always varied with the size of their forces, and therefore changes regularly.  I have never, therefore, completed a map of the whole region.  We campaigned in 1999 over a map of the Shenandoah Valley, reflagged, which was originally published as a road and town campaign map for a Civil War product owned by one of the Schlegel brothers, HAWKs who do not (at this time) have NQSYW contingents.  The original NQSYW game, The Battle of the Tollgate, established that Schoeffen-Buschhagen and North Polenburg shared a border.  The '99 campaign established that S-B was generally to the west of N-P.  Rosmark keeps getting bigger, so it's on the eastern edge of the hypothetical map, where it won't get accidentally boxed in.  We've used the forces of Stanzbach-Anwatsch to balance convention scenarios, giving me a mental image of their country as bordering on both S-B and N-P, probably to the north, and the note in the previous blog post about a possible diplomatic revolution is an acknowledgment of the fact that we may switch them again this year, especially to put the engineers on the outside of the fortress.  Wachovia is known for its hussars, so I view them as being over to the south and east of S-B.  Freedonia long has had a proportionally oversized artillery contingent; I see them as a small city-state in a coal/iron mining valley, so that the Freedonian foundries are not reliant on imported raw materials.  I have been thinking about another actual map campaign, especially with the fortress model on the horizon, and have considered an effort by both sides to control Freedonia, which would suggest that they border S-B and N-P as well, and probably to the south, if S-A is to the north.  Additionally, I'm considering whether the blue and red forces we adopted at Cold Wars represent new countries...

So the map remains complex, and vague, so that it isn't locked in when some new participant adds a large contingent.

A quick sum on the units involved suggests that we could field about 1000 foot, 240 horse, and 17 guns, if we could gather everything in one place.  We put, we calculated, just over a thousand of all arms on the table for the Lobositz scenario at Cold Wars in 2009, so there's been some growth since then.

News from Stanzbach-Anwatsch

As the armies muster for the coming campaign, word of new forces being mustered has been trickling in to Schoeffen-Buschhagen headquarters.

There has been some concern at the Allied headquarters over the reliability of the forces from Stanzbach-Anwatsch.  The recent arrival of a company of sappers to swell the S-A contingent spawned rumors of an impending shift in alliances, as it is anticipated that the forces of the Pragmatic Alliance will be on the defensive in the upcoming campaign season.  

The sappers can be seen here undertaking various field exercises:

However, the country folk and farm animals of Stanzbach-Anwatsch seem unconcerned by war and rumors of war:

(Photography and Stanzbach-Anwatsch forces courtesy of Duncan Adams; farmers, cows, sheep, and goats from antique molds owned by Chris Palmer; horses and foals from Prince August molds.  The engineers are Prince August artillery and pikeman figures, with tools from a Nuernberger Meisterzinn mold.)

Milestones 2

In Milestones 1 I noted that my first introduction to proper wargaming with rules was with Introduction to Battle Games and Airfix figures.  I don’t think that I have any survivors of those figures.  I did a deliberately retrospective game a few years back, a medieval skirmish with Robin Hood and Sheriff of Nottingham figures rather than any of the more modern alternatives, to play with the idea of what I would have wanted things to look like back then, had I had the skill to make it work.

While I did accumulate a few Hinton Hunt 20mm Napoleonics (long gone), my earliest metal armies were for 25mm fantasy games with Chainmail.  I started with Minifigs ME (and SS to a lesser extent) range.  I still have a few survivors, all with more recent repainting jobs:

The “giant” is not much by modern standards.  In later years, I thought that he had a rather Narnian look to him, so he’s earmarked to be part of a Narnian Hordes of the Things army.  I have a handful of magnetic sabot bases for HotT to make it easy to configure individually based fantasy figures for the game.

Most of my remaining fantasy figures were rebased on uniform 60mm square bases for Fantasy Rules! a few years ago.  

Here’s an element of ME Nazgul on horseback:

I’ve never been particularly happy with miniature depictions of Tolkien’s Ents.  I have two elements of these ME range fellows, seen here with an ME Huorn in the second rank.  These were an experiment in mixing some Woodland Scenics products with the painting.

The ME armies never got too large; my budget as a 12-year-old was pretty limited, and the one hobby shop that stocked the figures was a long way away.  Most of my units were around 10 figures, except one “horde” of scruffy ME goblins of nearly 50.  This didn’t make for a very satisfactory Chainmail game.

The next wave of figures that I added were, I believe, Der Kriegspielers (or early Heritage, perhaps? Duke Seifreid, in any case), also from a Middle Earth range.  These Wild Hillmen are from that range.  At this remove of time, I’m not entirely sure whether they were billed as Dunlendings or as some sort of backwoods Gondorians.

McEwan Miniatures was an early player in the market, branching out beyond the Middle Earth or Conan influence.  However, I have only two of their products in my collection.

The first is this rather exotic monster, labelled, as I recall, as “Web-footed Everett” in the catalog.  I have long wondered whether Everett was some local gamer immortalized in metal.  I use this figure occasionally as a water lurker in HotT.

The lizard riders have seen a lot of action over the past 30 years.  I have 10 of these, with what I recall being early Ral Partha Huns mounted on McEwan riding lizards.

I haven’t had a large-scale fantasy game on the table in a few years.  Digging around in my storage boxes for this entry has me thinking I ought to do something about that soon...