WWI Project Updates

I love the look of gas masks, although wearing them maybe not so much (a band I was in once did live music for a theatrical production and were required to wear surplus gas masks while performing - it was hard to breath and seeing the guitar neck through the lenses was something else). I also happen to really like the French WWI horizon blue uniform and the gas mask they used for the majority of the war. 

It was probably inevitable, then, that in a moment of feeling sorry for myself for missing my friend's wedding due to Covid, I would order the ICM WW1 French in Gas Masks. 

They are 1:35 and ICM is small 1/35 in my opinion - based on comparing their Austrian and British machine gun teams with my 1/35 Soviet machine gun crew.  Clearly, they won't fit with the Armies and Plastic, Waterloo 1815, or Dulcop figures. 

That's OK. I have a plan.

I've really been enjoying the army building and background creating for my Venusian forces, I realized I wanted to do more fantasy-based themes. Fantasy role-playing games and world-building loom large in my personal gaming history. I also happen to be a fan of weird fiction (Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, etc.) and the general ideas behind the various Mythos related role-playing games. It struck me that it would be fun to do something themed around that.

Weird World War II might be an obvious choice given my existing collection plus the Nazi occult themes, zombies or werewolves and sometimes mechs. However, I am really more interested in WWI generally speaking and I started this post talking about the ICM figures, so you have to know I'm leading up to their use!

Why not Weird World War I? 

I picture a handful of gas mask wearing infantry (the ICM figures!) heading into no-man's land, exploring mysteriously empty trenches, underground constructions of non-human origin, villages filled with low-hanging fog and no signs of life? Perhaps some slumbering Eldritch horrors have awakened due to the death and destruction sown upon the land? 

So, that's a new project that came out of nowhere - an RPG-light skirmish wargame.

I already have some horrors in mind - the lovely Hook Horror figures from CP Models. The proprietor, Mark, was kind enough to measure the figures for me. They come in around 50mm which is just about perfect.

FYI, the ICM figures come with two heads per figure, one with a gas mask and one without. Theoretically, you could buy two boxes of the gas mask figures to get an extra set of gas mask heads, then by a box of their French infantry without gas masks and gain a few more poses. 

I suspect I'll pick up some ICM British in gas masks as well, Germans too. Why should the French have all the "fun"?

In other WWI gaming news, I finished up my (for now) final base of Austro-Hungarian infantry and Italian infantry as well. They both now have six bases of regular infantry. The Austro-Hungarian force is done, save for a machine gun base that I need to purchase. The Italians need two bases of arditi (6 figures total) and a four cavalry figures painted up and another machine gun base as well.

Speaking of cavalry, here is the first head-swap to make Italian cavalry:

The body is an Armies in Plastic Egyptian lancer and the head is from a Dulcop arditi (the grenade throwing pose - the dagger pose has much too small a head). The head isn't a perfect fit but it's close enough. and is the best I had to work with. As much as it pained me to cut up a Dulcop figure, as was mentioned in the comments on the cavalry post, the AiP French heads are *way* too big to use for this purpose.

I'd be lying if I didn't note that I am already planning to acquire a box/bag each of Armies in Plastic WWI Germans for Caporetto, and the British for Asiago and Vittorio Venetto.