A blog that used to be primarily about adventure / war gaming with 54mm / 1:32 and thereabouts figures and vehicles but now leans to more 28mm/32mm and hex-and-counter gaming
In the comments, I mentioned I had some medieval chaps of the same Russian-made sort, but featuring Teutonic knights and Russian knights. As there's no easy way to share pictures in comments, here we are.
Before continuing, I feel I should acknowledge that I suppose it's possible the Teutonic knights are in fact, Livonian, but that's neither here nor there.
I acquired a few packs of these several years ago and other than a few test paint jobs, which I never completed, they have languished, save for a few undocumented games of Songs of Blades & Heroes. Neither force is large enough presently for much else.
Without further ado:
The two armies.
The only painted figures of the bunch.
The Teutonic knights
The Russian knights.
There is a lot of action in these poses despite being flats (or are they semi-flats?) and I think they make quite a nice visual display, even in their Christmas-colored underwear.
The figures are a very hard plastic, have no flash, and quite minimal mold lines. Only the injection point serves to blemish them.
I was unable to find identical sets for sale currently, but there are similar sets floating about.
I had really wanted to do more posts this month, but Friday, I took a trip up to Philly to meet up with some friends to go see a band I had only seen once before, in 1994 or 1995 and which broke up shortly after but which was reuniting to play a special show. Sunday, I flew back to Atlanta (boy, are my arms tired).
As a word of warning, if you don't care for travelogues, there's not much else in this post.
Of course, Philadelphia is full of history, but I lived there for 13+ years, nearly all if it in the city proper, and much of that, within a few blocks of some of the most historic sites, so taking pictures of them seems a bit unnecessary from my perspective.
That said, the ubiquitous Independence Hall picture is a personal requirement.
This statue ("The Crier", I think is called), pictured below, is often overlooked by tourists (it's just a statue in a small park/garden after all), and as a result it's a nice quiet spot where you can enjoy your Philly soft-pretzel and a Wawa coffee (as an aside, perhaps my tastes in coffee have changed, because Wawa coffee tastes pretty terrible to me now, but I still drank it because tradition).
The greatest candy in the world was invented as a ration bar for soldiers in WWI and was manufactured in Philadelphia for a long time (now it's made by a Bethlehem, PA company): Goldenberg's Peanut Chews. Original dark is the only kind worth getting.
It has only recently made it's way to Atlanta at some convenience stores, as individually wrapped pieces, so by and large, I must eat my body weight in peanut chews whenever I visit Pennsylvania.
Finally, a picture of the omnipresent blue signage used by the city to denote historical locations and the personages who lived there. Why this one? No real reason other than I lived in this neighborhood when I first moved to Philly in 1996.
I've been home a few days but aside from sorting through my unpainted plastic pile - perhaps I'll ramble about this in a subsequent post - nothing gaming related has occurred. I look forward to getting some painting in tomorrow night however and possibly a game of some sort this weekend.
Figures are a mix of Airfix, Matchbox, Classic Toy Soldier (MG), Dragon (MG), and 21st Century/Ultimate Soldier (mortar crews). The Ultimate Soldier mortars are delicate and in my ham fists, they have all broken. The mortars pictured are from BMC. They aren't great but what they lack in detail and accuracy, they make up for in durability.
Here's a closer picture of the mortars and their crews:
One of the the mortar crew has a non-uniform base color. They will be dealt with accordingly.
One thing I have yet to decide on is how to handle the LMG teams for both sides. I can base them two figures on a base, like the HMGs, or I can base them with three figures(either three prone, or two prone and one kneeling) like the rest of the infantry and use them as regular infantry bases.- which sort of makes sense given that the LMG is just assumed when the bases represent sections/squads and above.
I'll let that sit on the back burner.
Next up, figure-wise: finish painting the next three-base German infantry unit and assemble and paint the two Soviet HMG teams in my to-do pile.
As part of my celebration of Halloween ('The most wonderful time of the year"), I decided to combine my love of WWII movies with the horror movies I tend to watch this time of year.
Last night, I watched the first such film this month: The Devil's Rock.
warning: the trailer might be a little on the gory side for some viewers (not any worse than Saving Private Ryan's beach landing. Well maybe a little, but that's the ball park).
The setup: On the eve of D-Day, two New Zealand commandos arrive on the shore of a small island near Guernsey to cause some havoc and distract the Germans from the Normandy invasion.What they find ,besides the big gun they are to blow up, is tortured screams and mutilated bodies. The cause of this carnage? Why, the end results of Nazi occultism of course!
I'll leave it there. Between my warning about the trailer, the trailer, and the setup you probably know already if this movie is for you.
I tend to prefer my horror movies to be vintage - not later than 1970 something, primarily because modern horror seems to love blood and gore and I do not. This movie was released in 2011, so vintage it is not. Still, this isn't that gorey a movie and I could stomach what there was and no nightmares resulted (always a plus). Why watch it if it's not the kind of movie I normally watch?
The main reason is that WWII movies with a supernatural element seem to involve zombies. With the exceptions of Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland, I don't generally like zombie movies (I find them too disturbing), so for that reason alone this movie made my list to watch. Also it's free if you have Amazon Prime (it's amazing how often that factors into my decisions).
It helped too that on Amazon, it has fairly decent reviews. Certainly it rated better than a lot of war movies from the 50s and 60s and I have suffered through those 1/2 star debacles so why not this?
Indeed, it was entertaining - even if at times I was distracted by what felt like anachronistic language (and hairstyle for the female lead). I felt they did an excellent job conveying just how diabolical a demon might be, not just physically powerful as they are often depicted, but capable of powerful deceptions. There is also some interesting manipulation of the audience (had we been deceived too?) that I don't want to detail so as not to spoil it for the one or two of you who do watch it. The resolution was clever, but I felt its impact was undermined by the very last shot, where we see the D-Day invasion getting underway. Rather than any kind of import, it felt underwhelming and unnecessary.
As a war game scenario, it would be pretty hard to pull off, unless you're using a small skirmish pulp set like .45 Adventure, or maybe Achtung! CthulhuSkirmish. You'd probably want to take some license with it and expand the forces - as I understand it, this was a fairly low budget movie and the general lack of cast members confirms that. You only need two commandos, a German solider, a German officer, and something from Hell to field the characters from the movie as written. Dungeon tiles could work for the interior of the fortification.
Almost certainly, however, the setup/plot is ripe for use with RPGs based around cosmic horror / supernatural / occult horror (Achtung! Cthulhu comes to mind, this time the RPG not the wargame)- assuming the player characters are able to shoot and brawl, and don't have a ton invested in skills like anthropology or art collecting.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, for my average reader, this movie is probably of little interest. But if you're looking for something to watch for Halloween, and you prefer sten guns over chainsaws, ritual magic over science labs, and demons over the animated dead, then it it's not the worst way to spend 86 minutes.
Is there anything more terrifyingly tedious than rebasing?
I'm sure somewhere in the not distant past I said something to the effect that I had finally decided on magnets and sheet metal as my be-all-end-all basing. What I meant to say, was that it I was having a moment of temporary insanity and that thinking I had decided on basing was just a sign that I was delusional.
Well now I really have decided*.
And so, Saturday night, I spent a lot longer than I thought it would take rebasing my WWII Soviet infantry - which involved the usual prying them from their existing base, cutting out new unit bases from mat board, gluing the figures down and then painting the figure bases and mat board.
Six units of infantry, 3 leader types and a commissar.
The German infantry have been glued to their new mat board unit bases, but painting of the bases is on hold until I can get a suitable block of time. Heavy weapons and LMG teams for both sides will come after that.
The motivation for the rebasing came from a review of my 54mm WWII collections, and deciding to dedicate different figures to different types of games.
The painted plastic Germans and Soviets will be based as per the photo above, for rules where a base is a section or platoon. I may or may not base my painted plastic US WWII figures this way. My Britains / Conte metal figures ( US / British paras / SS ) will be used for Mediterranean and NW Europe 1:1 small skirmishes with a squad or less per side while my unpainted plastic TSSD Germans and Soviets will cover the same on the Eastern Front and mostly in the winter (as they are clad in winter gear).
Friday was rather productive and less tedious - I updated Company G with some clarifying details and a QRS. The updates aren't live yet - there's a few more things I need to do - but I'll announce when they are available.
I also worked on what will be the last batch of German infantry for awhile but then I randomly decided to finish up this birdhouse church that I have had forever and had never gotten past basic black primer.
Toy soldier-y church
I''m rather happy with the result - nothing fancy, but effective.
The blue-grey roof / grey door / white walled color scheme was taken from a Russian Orthodox village church image that I found online. At least that's the search I entered into Google.
Monday will bring more work on the rules and possibly a little painting if I'm lucky.
It doesn't look like much, but the picture below is a demonstration of one way I play test without going through the trouble of setting up a full table.
Two platoons of Germans assault a Soviet MG position, variously treated as cover and really really hard cover, i.e. a pillbox, across open ground.
In the above picture, I'm checking the relative weight of an MG vs infantry stands (in this case a single infantry figure represents a squad/section for the sake of testing). It was pointed out to me that in G Company, the MGs might be worth at least two infantry stands for designing your own scenarios. As I had been relying on someone else's fairly balanced scenarios, this issue hadn't happened on my table.
Because I didn't get out my cloth and terrain, and used figures at hand (the Germans were right there on the painting table), setup time was minimal and I could leave it setup because this small grid barely takes up any space on my desk, as opposed to taking up most of the kitchen table.
Admittedly, the squares were cramped and fitting two squads and a PL into one square required a stretch of the imagination - I could have used paper counters just as easily, but I wanted to see what using a single figure for a squad felt like. In any case, I was able to play more than a dozen games in order to see how things might work out and was also able to try different variations (adding a second MG, adding an MG to the attacker, etc.).
Expect to see the both sets of rules updated and available for download by the end of October.
Speaking of...
Plans for October:
Finish painting those eight Germans in the above picture.
Tweak, test, and make available the next version of G Company and Company Fire (I am considering combining them into a single document containing both rule sets, rather than pointing players of G Company to see Company Fire for terrain rules, for example. If you have strong feelings either way, please let me know!)
Since Halloween is this month, watch some weird WWII movies - you know, the kind where there are supernatural elements inserted into the WWII era. Usually these take the form of some kind of Nazi occult experiment.
If this is something that interests you, then you probably already saw it when it was in theaters - unfortunately, it wasn't playing at any convenient date/time for me when it ran locally, but it's currently playing on HBO. I had a chance to watch it last night.
Even if you didn't see it, you probably know something about it.
If you're on the fence or missed it in the theaters, I highly suggest watching it.
You probably won't learn anything new in the larger sense, but this is not a documentary about the war as a whole or any particular battle. It's simply about the life of the British soldier on the front line. Consequently, what you learn are facts about how they lived (and what the British will do in order to make tea! And how many underage soldiers there may have been) and what they felt (or their recollections of such - the audio is mostly from BBC recordings and Imperial War Museum interviews, but i don't know how far after the fact they were conducted) and how they felt about it after. Individual names, dates and place names were purposely left out of the film to convey the "every-soldiers' experience".
There are some absolutely breathtaking sequences - not in the, "What a lovely sun rise over the mountains." manner of breathtaking, but of the "HOLY S***!" kind of way - like men and horses coming under artillery fire or the heaving of the earth skyward as explosives are let lose underground (around 1:42 in the trailer for example).
Technically, the film is a marvel - the colors are vivid and natural looking and images are mostly quite clear, something that could not be said of much of the footage prior to restoration by Peter Jackson's team. There were some weird things, where the people in the background were moving but the foreground seemed static - I'm not sure if that was an artifact of the digital restoration, the change in film speed, or a production trick done for emphasis (the background motion in these cases often wasn't of any particular interest, the camera was emphasizing the faces of the men).
Honestly, I think my only criticism was that it wasn't longer - while it didn't feel rushed, they had over 100 hours of footage, and the film run time is less than two hours.
