Res Publica Color Scheme Test

 I knocked this hastati figure out rather quickly, once I finally settled on a color for the flesh.

 

Fear not! This figure will be given a shiny gloss, once his two compatriots on the table are painted.

I ended up using Vallejo Bronze for the skin tone - making them literally "men of bronze". Whether the background fluff will have them as metal men or just a play of light off their skin (think sparkly vampires from Twilight), I'll decide later.

The shield is Ceramcoat Laguna Blue -I love this color and used it with my lizard folk marines. I wanted an excuse to use it again!

The feathers are Ceramcoat Tahit Blue with a little white mixed in. Unfortunately, I'm out of Americana Desert Sand which I had been using for basing. So, a very old bottle of Anita's Nubby Linen it is.

Of course, with skin of bronze, I had to decide on something else for the armor and silver seemed like a good "go to" for fantasy figures.

Somewhere in Europe a Week Later

After seven days recouping behind the lines, Sgt. Baker and the boys were itching for revenge against the Krauts for the death of Sarge. The battalion in the meantime had been suffering setbacks and needed intel about enemy positions near the hamlet of Pecorino. (Apparently, somewhere in Europe is Italy). A plan to counter-attack the Germans depended on it.

Baker didn't hesitate to volunteer his crew for the job.

Bolstered by a BAR that Pvt Hunter “found”, the squad set off on its mission in the pre-dawn hours.

A thick fog masked the American approach to the target.

As should have been expected, the fog lifted at an inopportune time and Pvt. Leupold found himself looking across a clearing at a German jr. NCO on patrol outside a ruined house on the edge of the hamlet.

Leupold's aim was true and the German non-com hit the ground. As the rest of the squad advanced, shots rang out from the trees to their right - a German rifleman had found himself in the tree line when Leupold had opened fire.

Two more Germans appeared in front of the squad - one fired from the relative safety of the ruined farm and the other came running from his post closer to the road.

Across the road another rifle opened fire from the safety of another building.

Leupold and Hunter poured fire on the Germans with great success. Forcing some to ground and leaving others mortally wounded.

Pvt. Punch rashly decided to charge the German soldier to the squad's right. He was vastly overconfident and was knocked out of the fight, taking a severe wound from the German's knife.

The firefight continued unabated, with the sides alternating who had the upper hand.

Eventually, however, with himself and a rifleman remaining, the German NCO ordered a retreat, but not before the rifleman wounded Pvt. Austin.

Following on the heels of the retreating Germans, the squad made a quick investigation of the outskirts of the hamlet and noted the complete lack of any prepared defensive works.

Carrying their wounded, the squad slowly retreated to make their report.

*****

The scenario and campaign background was again generated by Five Men in Normandy, with the battle handled by One Hour Skirmish Wargames.

The game lasted 8 full turns -although three turns lasted but a card or two before a Joker came up and ended the turn. The game was probably 45 minutes, maybe?

At the end of turn 8, when I drew to find out the fate of the Germans who had been downed in that turn (in some cases for the second or third time), only one was able to rejoin the fight. So, when turn 9 started, I decided the NCO would order a retreat. 

After all, they need to report the patrol to their higher-ups.

Pvt Hunter was the last figure to be named. He had an M1 in the previous games but ising the campaign rules in Five Men, I diced to see if we could get a replacement BAR. I was going to ask for a replacement squad member, but replacement soldiers come only with a rifle.

Pvt Punch was taken out in close combat, which doesn't allow recovery during the game per One Hour Skirmish.

However, as it is a campaign, I draw again after the battle to check whether a figure that was removed during the game is dead or still alive. In this case, Punch drew a black card. That means he survived his wounds. 

 

On the one hand, I feel like he should be unavailable for a bit. On the other,  I don't really feel like tracking healing and all that, so I may just say he's a fast healer and return him to the line up. 

Oh and here's an overview of the entire table to give a better view of the layout:

As I only have two buildings left in my collection for 1:1 54mm WWII games, this was the best way I could think of to represent a built-up area. It certainly worked well enough for the narrative.

Vassal Map Hack

As I am mired into inaction by my indecision over color schemes for Res Publica, my mind has turned to campaign ideas, for both Venus and WWI in Italy. The latter is the concern of this post.

There are two articles in the current issue of Lone Warrior (#222) that are in part responsible for this diversion, as well.

Although I very much want to use a map, for WWI,  hexes force me into a state of worrying about area, unit frontages, etc. Which is fine, but I'm trying to be a little more "toy soldiers"  and flexible about that sort of thing - units for example, are probably going to be two companies per battalion, two battalions per regiment, two regiments per brigade, etc.

But, like I said, I really want to use a map. 

Inspired by the articles in the aforementioned issue of Lone Warrior, I decided to create a point to point map

I didn't just want to randomly draw some points on paper, I wanted it to reflect actual places in Italy that were fought over.

One of the few remaining boardgames in my collection is Burning Mountains 1916, which covers that very topic. It has a lovely map and would make a good basis for a campaign. However, I have no intention of marking up the map.

Somewhere, and I cannot recall where (BoardgameGeek maybe?), I learned that if you rename a Vassal module to a .zip extension, you can treat it like any other compressed folder and you can extract the contents, including the map.

There is a module for Burning Mountains 1916, so I grabbed the file and pulled out the map. I then uploaded into Google Draw to add the nodes, which would be towns and forts, with connectors being the roads.

Here is the map with all towns circled and rectangles around the forts. 

The roads aren't so much drawn to follow the path as to cover the spirit of the connection, that's it. I also traced the rivers, because the next step would be get rid of the underlay.

Triangles are reinforcement entry points. Except for the black ones, which are mountains. That is the only entry point not connected to a road, so I added an overland route and wanted to make sure I remembered that it's a difficult route.

 Stripping away the underlying map results in this:

I changed the triangles to crosses, because I didn't like that I had used triangles for mountains, too. I will add labels for all of the forts eventually.

When I was done, I was quite pleased with the result. Except, my goodness, that's a lot of nodes. I decided it would be better to take a small section to use for working out campaign rules. 

Below is a segment of the map (from the left edge):

I took some license here with the lower right - just a single fort and a spawn point rather than the exact copy of the full map. I did this to allow for more at the campaign-level game, without getting too crazy.

The gray town and forts are starting positions for the Austrians. The green are the Italians. The latter have two entry points for reinforcements, again to add some interest to the campaign-level game.

I don't know when I'll get around to actually play testing my ideas - my plan was to start work on this much later in the year. It may have moved up a bit on the timetable though.

Decisions Decisions

The other day I started to paint up the first of the Res Publica forces - HaT Hastati to be accurate. I wanted to see which of the yellows I had available would work for a suitably alien flesh tone. Yellow, I reasoned, would not only work as Venusians but as the famed Yellow Martians as well. 

Unfortunately, every yellow I have took multiple coats - too many for my taste - to achieve opacity. The one that did it in the fewest, Ceramcoat Pale Yellow, resulted in a figure, that according to one unsolicited observer, looked like a "butter sculpture". 

I liked the look of Pale Saffron from Reaper? (well, it came with my Bones kickstarter many many years ago) the best, but it was at least five coats if I had to cover anything other than white. I don't want to repeat my experience with the oranges I used with the Tanitans.

So, the figures have been stripped to bare plastic again (which gave me a chance to remove some of the more egregious mold lines that I had skipped). And, it strikes me that they look like B-movie aliens in their present state:

Now, I'm not saying I'm going to leave them this way - I'd paint their bases at the very least - but it's got me thinking of maybe giving them metallic skin. Perhaps literal "men of bronze"?

One of my favorite books in middle-school was Code of the Lifemaker. The cover art, which you can see here was just so intriguing. 

What if these Res Publicans are an ancient race of sentient robots? Maybe they have a similar origin story?

Would I paint the Triari the same way? A different metallic? 

So many questions.

Painting Update

We interrupt this WWII skirmish campaign to bring you this update. As I had mentioned previously, I had turned to painting to deal with the grief of Peppermint's passing. The result has been a bit of unanticipated output which seems to be sustaining for now.

Up first: Tanitia's forces are on the move!

With the last two of my black-orange-lined figures finished, I have completed my original planned force for the Tanitians, 

We have an overall military leader (standard bearer), a military hero (the one with the raised shield), a unit of orange-with-black-line bearing Mythos symbol shields, a warrior priestess (the real leaders of this society), the abyssal beast (actually, they're the ones most in charge I suspect), and a unit of black-with-orange-line (who are my favorite now).

Using two or three figures for a Portable Wargame Ancient's unit gives me some decent sized "armies" for bigger battles, if I so choose.

Here is the black-with-orange-line unit - don't ask me to ID which ones were the most recently finished!

I have a few more of the SCS Direct mermaid figures I can convert into warrior priestesses. The SCS box also came with a number of, what I can only guess are, female elf types. I have enough for a ten-figure unit so they could serve as adepts perhaps. 

That is, when I feel like dealing with this paint scheme again!

The Roman force, and Tanitia's primary opponent, which I'm calling Res Publica, is on the paint table now - just three figures to start, but as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day. They will be painted in a more traditional fashion, albeit with a very unnatural yellow for their skin.

Perhaps less exciting, I finished eight more Austro-Hungarians. I've also rebased my WWI collection to four-figure 3" squares. I really wanted at least one collection to reflect my love for Morschauser.

Two 3" squares can serve as an 8-figure unit (say, for One Hour Wargames) or each square can be its own thing. All of this is anticipation of a campaign I wish to play through later in the year or early next (depends on how long it takes me to paint up more Italians, to bring both sides' assault units up to snuff, the Italian cavalry, and to finish the planes for each side). Because the details aren't nailed down, my conception of what the units represent isn't set yet either.

There's a good chance I'll add one more 8-figure infantry unit, for a total of four. I have plenty of Italians, but I will need more Armies in Plastic figures for the Austro-Hungarians. But not all of them, which means I'll have the start of a small contingent of Germans.

It's funny how things work out like that!

The Next Day Somewhere in Europe (One Hour Skirmish Wargames)

 "You boys did good. I 've got another assignment for you. A German officer was driving on a road a few miles from here and was shot up by one of our flyboys. He was traveling alone, no escort, and at a high rate of speed - that's raised some questions. Someone up top thinks he might have had plans or a codes or something of value and they want to take a look Gather up your stuff and head out. Find the wreck, search it and get back as fast as you can. We think the Jerry's are already on their way."

US approach from the bottom. Germans at the top. The smoking wreck on the bridge.

Jerry gets there first. Meanwhile the US sniper, Pvt. Leupold dropped the German LMG assistant.

Sarge runs to engage him and drops the German in his tracks. After rummaging around in the wreck, Sarge recovered a satchel with a code book and plans.  

Feldwebel Arnold wasn't about to let the Yanks get away unscathed. He burst out of the trees spraying bullets. Sarge tried to use the kubelwagen as cover, but to no avail.

Leupold silenced the German LMG, Cpl. Baker ordered the rest of the squad to advance. Pvt. Austin ran up to recover Sarge and the satchel.

The US BAR gunner crossed the river, flanked the Germans, but was killed before he could do any damage.

Another shootout on the bridge as Baker and Arnold exchange. This one goes in favor of the Yanks.

.

Arnold is only lightly wounded but recovers with just enough time to see the Americans fade into the trees.

"Well done, men. I know it was costly. Sarge was a good man. But that satchel you brought back is going to save hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives."

*****

The BAR gunner was killed outright - there's no coming back from close combat casualty. I drew a card for Sarge after the battle, and he came up red (red is dead).

Our little group just got a little smaller. They started the mission with seven men and finished with five.

Here they are so far

• Pvt Leupold - Deadshot(2), Sniper rifle, working class, political, inexperienced, 
• Pvt. Punch - Brawler(1), M1,straight out of school, joined up because it's a family tradition, 
• Pvt. Austin - Inspiring (redraw any 1 resolution card) M1, farm hand, looking for adventure
• BAR
• “Sarge”, Sgt. Vinny Sergente Pistol (rifle too), Motivator, Entertainer - the 2nd most famous Italian guitar player in South Philadelphia, patriotism, battle hardened, Leader (3)
• Pvt. - M1
• Sgt. Baker - (Leader 2), SMG, farm boy fighting for the folks back home (little brothers and mom's apple pie)
• M1

Pvt. Austin didn't have a name, but I needed one for the narrative, so he earned his. He got Austin because he's Stone Cold. 

Squads in Five Men in Normandy earn a new skill after each mission. I gave Austin the Inspiring trait from One Hour Skirmish Wargames since he recovered Sarge from the bridge.

The final unnamed Private will earn his name next mission.

For the record, the Germans had 6 men - 1 SMG, 3 Rifles, 1 LMG assistant, 1 LMG, and four of them were KIA.

This mission was generated using the campaign rules from Five Men in Normandy. Normally they'd have had time to rest, but the event they rolled was no rest and an immediate mission. The mission was randomly generated. It took me a bit to come up with something for them to retrieve. I think it had a suitably comic book / adventure movie theme.