I am a man of extremes

In addition to my love for the 54mm figures, I also love the 6mm and under crowd (although I've never had anything more than a sample pack's worth).

I have been toying with the idea of an Imagi-nations campaign set in Italy in the 1790s, between two Italian states, perhaps with French, Austrian, Prussian, and other involvement. I have no Horse & Musket era forces and thought that theater/time period might be a fun one to start with.

However, I have little time and even less money to start a new project.

As a long time member of the punk scene, I have a predisposition to appreciating D.I.Y. approaches to just about everything (not surgery though!). Hair roller armies and granny grate armies have always appealed to me aesthetically, perhaps do to the D.I.Y. ethos that surrounds them.

Given recent austerity measures I put into place and the subsequent freeze on purchasing any new figures, it seemed like a good reason to try my hand at "granny grate" figures.(The granny grate was already on hand, and costs around a $1.00 USD so I'm not too put out to acquire more if need be)

Here is a test unit based on the Sardinians to prove the concept.

Obligatory close up of the chaotic/impressionistic paint job. Yes, I tried to paint the lace on their hats.

 

The base was scavenged - and had dried glue on it that messed with the paint's ability to cover in one coat and frankly I was excited and impatient to see the result. 

Perhaps it does the figures no good to be on a sloppy base, but I can see the potential.

A company? A battalion? All I know is that it's 36 "figures" and looks the part.

The Prussian blue paint is not untenable, but is a bit dark, even over a white base, and so an experiment with a lighter shade might be worthwhile. 

Although I based 36, I painted 48. Total time was something like 20 minutes including time for the paint to dry.

The greater effort is cutting the figures out.

I made an effort to remove a small v-shaped wedge between the figures to enhance the differentiation, but at a distance, it's arguably not noticeable. The other issue is the height of the head. 

I was doing this roughly without a ruler. I think in the future I'd aim for a specific height or the head section. It's a small thing (pun intended) but it might help to prevent excessive numbers of giraffe-necks or the appearance of someone with their shoulders hunched over their ears.

Again though, those issues are not really noticeable at gaming distance, but I know they are there!

Experimenting with cavalry and the "Van Pelt" cut is next.

Shiny Happy People

Well, I don't know about "happy" but definitely shiny. 

The first three Res Publican soldiers have been completed - the painting has been done for a week or so, but I finally got around to sealing and glossing them.

I wanted a look that would be at home in the jungles of Venus but not out of place on an arid plain either. I think this works.

And maybe it's just me, but I get strong Mesoamerican vibes from this color scheme.

Just another 17 hastati and 10 triari to go!

I've been keeping an eye on eBay and boxes of cavarly for them as well, but that's a problem for future me.

Training Camp Opens!

 The first of the Reikland Reavers have arrived at training camp for the coming season of Blitz Bowl!

Total paint time wasn't very long, but other things conspired to make it take two weeks to complete them.

I followed a YouTube tutorial, albeit with considerably less skill (and one paint I don't have). None the less, I am satisfied with the results, despite it being distinctly not-toy-soldier style. Though, I'd hardly call it realistic either. 

Numbers would be nice, but the box set doesn't include a decal sheet(though if you buy individual Blood Bowl team boxes to expand, they do) and I am not going to attempt hand painting them.

I see lots of things in closeup that bother me, but at gaming distance, they look good and it's easy to tell which positions they are. 

I have three more to assemble and paint, then onto the Skaven. I have a Nurgle Blood Bowl box as well (so I can field two teams of Nurgle if I feel so compelled), but I need paints for them that I don't have and money is tight to be buying Citadel paints right now (to put this in perspective, I spent more on paints for the Reavers and Skaven, than I did on the Blitz Bowl box).

As a reminder, for those unfamiliar with Blitz Bowl, it's the lower figure count / smaller pitch size / lighter ruleset version of Blood Bowl - just six figures per team and games play in 1-2 hours. 

Hoping to complete the Reavers over the next week or so.

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.