I blame Norm

Norm’s recent informative article on the Sword & Spear ruleset made me wonder if my current lukewarm feelings towards it could be because I’m basically a jerk who never gave the set a proper chance? 

They’d arrived here at Broom Towers in amongst a whole lot of other hobby stuff and apart from a quick whisk through, (which left me a bit doubtful about some of the mechanisms) they’d been put on the shelf of doom…to gather dust…forever.

Anywhoo it nagged at me a bit so on the strength of Norm’s endorsement I decided to dig them out for another look, but it was while I was passing the army storage cupboard - on the way to get them, that I heard a definite low level muttering in old English. 

I quickly gathered that the Anglo Saxons were unhappy about their lack of recent activity and this was not being helped by the taunts of the Vikings in an adjacent box. The poor buggers were of course the last units to be used in battle on my old blog and they, like the old blog, have hardly been thought of since. 

They were mostly painted and based during a very lean financial patch in France and it shows. The cost of getting materials sent from the UK was almost as much as the cost of the product itself back then, so when I ran out of flock I resorted to an innovative sort of paint and grit porridge by way of a replacement. 

Yeah it was nasty. 

They’ve needed rebasing ever since, but given that re basing occupies a position lower even than painting horses in my world view it wasn’t going to be a priority. 

Vikings on the razzle. 

Anyway, I digress. I couldn’t find the ruddy Sword & Spear rules of course, (I suspect the Broom Towers poltergeist may have had a hand in this), so I went on the Sword & Spear forum website to check out a few play throughs…and there I found… “Warband” an earlier work by the self same author. It covers dark age warfare on hexed terrain and is card driven, making it very solo friendly. 

I’d previously tried to convert Dux Bellorum to hexes but the conversion and various fudges to resolve turn sequence disadvantages saw it abandoned as just too much trouble. 

I’ll do another post on Warband when I get a game in, but for now I’d describe it as the illegitimate love child of C&C and SAGA (without the silly bits).

The down sides to it are the 60 activation cards required per player (now done) and the need for figures to be separately based (very old skool) - which I’m doing in between other projects. 

Note - Given my skin allergy to some brands of flock I wanted to originally title this post “flocking hell” but I suspect the more dignified members of my readership may have found this a tad  too vulgar for their refined tastes.

15mm Peter Pig chaps now individually rebased and “pointed” on the underside.

I’m pretty sure the effort involved in all this Warband kerfuffle will be worth it, but I’ve definitely committed myself to yet another project when I’ve already got a plateful to be getting on with. Of course none of this increased work load would have occurred if I hadn’t dropped in at Battlefields and Warriors - so I’m definitely blaming Norm for all that followed.

You see it wasn’t the only time I went off piste that day, and prompted by Norms article and my discovery of Warband I visited the Old Glory UK site to look for some more 15mm dark age figures…and bought this…

The 20cm long resin Hull of the Santa Anna 

Yeah it’s a ship.

Definitely not dark age in any way.

I’d wanted to do naval gaming in a pre Napoleonic setting for a while and had previously purchased all manner of early Tudor vessels with a view to doing the 1512 conflict with France and Scotland. Sadly the only ships I could find on the interweb in this period were all way too small for my liking and eventually the project stalled. 

As you can see the Old Glory ones don’t suffer from this issue and might be best described as ruddy massive, but the bonus is they come with pre moulded metal ratlines that will finish the model off nicely. The picture shows the Santa Anna, a Spanish Carrack, next to a Peter Pig 1:450 ship (of comparable volume in real life). To save you getting your scale rulers out, the big ones 20 something centimetres long!

So, do you see what you’ve done Norm…do ya?! If I hadn’t read your article I wouldn’t have visited the Sword & Spears forum, wouldn’t have discovered Warband, wouldn’t have spent hours covered in flock and wouldn’t have ended up buying a ruddy big expensive ship…talk about the blooming butterfly effect. 

Okay jokes over. We all know Norm should actually be knighted for services to gaming and that it’s my own weak will that’s really the culprit here. I hope his lawyers will accept my postal order (its in the post) for any damages accruing from such a cheap attempt at an eye catching blog post title. Lol. 

As a bye the bye here’s a few project progress photos to document everything else I’ve been labouring over in the last two weeks.

On the VSF front we have these jolly Jack tars manning a Gatling.

Ahoy there mateys. Fighting 15’s Gatling and crew. 

Followed by these chaps from the Royal Artillery with a 12lb breach loading cannon - which I reckon will rattle the huns dentures a bit.

Royal artillery wallahs getting ready to rumble.

Then we have a young artillery officer demonstrating the (totally scratch built) heliograph he’ll be using to call down fire from the big guns off board. Not sure how well he can see what he’s doing through his breath preserver, but better safe than sorry eh! Peter Pig do a heliograph…but it’s 15mm and looks really small next to these 18mm boys. It should be manned by a crew of three, but the other two lads are off getting a brew going.

Dot dot dash…erm…oh bugger.

Next up is Captain Bailey-Paget giving a Martian the coup de grace with his Webley. Stirring stuff eh! That’ll show those Martian Johnies!

Take that you swine! Click…click…Oh damn it’s jammed.

Unfortunately some of the buggers have developed the ability to fight back.

“Gak, gak, gak” as I believe the Martians say.

I’ve only 40 Victorian civilians and eight British lancers left to paint now before I can can get on with a bit of gaming, so it’s nose to the grind stone again.

Oh yeah there’s these boys too…

The 18mm Sergeant on the left most base gives an idea of the tripods size.

TTFN