I’m in the middle of the five-week field assignment for work, so away from most of my usual gaming habits and my workbench. All is not lost, however, because the co-worker I’m on this thing with is also a miniature gamer and we decided to bring our Blood Bowl teams along and have an “Exiles Micro League” of two players and four teams while we’re away. It’s something to do other than watch terrible TV during evenings in the hotel suite!
I brought a new 30mm fabric BB pitch along, made with felt. This isn’t the dark brown one seen here previously, this one is tan felt and a significant improvement over my first attempt at a BB pitch. I’ll get photos of it at some point, probably after I get home at the end of February.
Along with the pitch and teams, I realized we needed a tracking sheet, as I haven’t brought along my tracking scenery due to lack of luggage space. I broke out the ever-reliable Inkscape and worked up a basic tracker – space for two sides to track phases for two halves, re-rolls and score, as well as the two scatter templates.
Thumbnail of my Blood Bowl tracking sheet. Full PDF file below!
As we played we added a few things with pencil – quick reference notes, mostly, as well as a shared dugout space for players in Reserve, KO’d or Casualties. I’ve gone back into Inkscape to add those to the tracker sheet, and added some colour and graphic flourishes as well. Hopefully someone else finds this useful!
The Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 is a short (May-August 1919) and often forgotten war, and an interesting product of both the aftermath of the Great War, Afghan domestic politics of the time, and ongoing issues along the North-West Frontier of India (as one might guess given this is the Third Anglo-Afghan War…). The Wikipedia article is a good basic rundown, but more specialized material is available online, often for free.
It turns out the Khyber.org article I first found is republished (with permission) from King-Emperor.com which has more good NWF/3AW stuff.
I was somewhat surprised (but pleased!) to find the British Army’s 1925 Manual of Operation on the North-West Frontier of India on the US Army’s CARL Digital Library website. It’s obviously post-3rd Anglo-Afghan, but the NW Frontier really didn’t change that much in the inter-war decades. (Indeed, you could argue it hadn’t changed much since the expansion of British India in the mid-19th C created the Frontier in it’s familiar form… you could probably even argue that it hasn’t changed much today, but I’m not a modern-era wargamer and I’ll stay focused on the WW1/Interwar Era, thanks…)
There’s also Mountain Warfare on the Sand Model via the Internet Archive. Date of publication unknown, mid-1930s is the best I can do given the references and other publications mentioned in this one. Designed as a series of tactical exercises for junior officers; the application to modern wargaming should be obvious! The other “Useful Publications” by the same publisher mentioned in the book don’t seem to have made it online, which is a pity. I might well be doing a more detailed post here about this book at some point later, actually. It’s a neat series of exercises that could be easily adapted to gaming.
“Passing it On: Short Talks on Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier of India” (1932) by Sir Andrew Skeen is mentioned on several websites and in contemporary publications, but it doesn’t seem to be online. At least one Amazon listing claims to have it available, but I have my doubts about that sort of dodgy-looking Amazon listing… Given that military operations in the NWF/Afghanistan area are back in the news this century, there is an edited and republished version of this book from 2011, with some new material. I might have to add this to my long-dormant Amazon wishlist!
“Operations in Waziristan 1919-1920” is an official history by the British Indian Army’s General Staff; it’s available as PDF on both the US Army’s CARL site and or via the Internet Archive.
The full “Official History of the Third Afghan War” doesn’t appear to be online anywhere, but it is available for £18 from Naval & Military Press in the UK. I have severalother NMP facsimile reprints, and they’re very good quality books. NMP also have Lessons in Imperial Rule, originally published 1908, which sounds fascinating.
Wargaming Resources
Lots of companies have suitable Great War British figures in the famous tropical-issue pith helmet – in 28mm, I really like Brigade Games, and have heard good things about Woodbine Design’s WW1 in the East range. Copplestone Castings’ Brits are nicely sculpted but very, very large and bulky figures.
Over on the Afghan side, for Afghan regulars in 28mm we’re currently out of luck, which is unfortunate. For tribal Afghans Empress has the best figures in their slowly-expanding Jazz Age Imperialism line – and they’ve talked about adding Afghan regulars to that line, I believe! Old Glory Miniatures has a line of Afghan/Pathan tribesmen amongst their varied ranges. I’ve not seen them in person but apparently there are many nice figures in the lineup; I’ve heard it described as OG’s best-sculpted group of figures. They’re technically for the late-19th C, but from 3rd AAW-era photos I’ve seen, tribal dress didn’t change much.
If you have any further links, please stick them in the comments below!
The Guardian’s Pictures From The Past feature for Jan. 23 (yesterday) featured a photo of the former German Kaiser with his family in his well-known post-Great War Dutch exile — along with the note that “On 23 January 1920, the government of the Netherlands refused to extradite the former Kaiser of Germany, Wilhelm II. His aggressive foreign policy and support for Austro-Hungary in 1914 led to the first world war. After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, he was charged with “a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties” and the allies demanded his extradition. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands refused and granted him political asylum.”
I hadn’t realized until then that, just like the much more famous post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials in Germany and similar trails in the Far East against Japan, there was an attempt at similar trials post-Great War – the Leipzig War Crimes Trials (Wikipedia link). The Dutch refusal to violate their neutrality and allow the extradition of the ex-Kaiser was part and parcel with the generally dismal performance of these trials – see all the details at the Wikipedia article.
I love finding new details about the post-Great War/Interwar era like this. Too many people (and textbooks…) rush straight through Great War/Versailles Treaty/Hitler/boom WW2 and ignore all the oddities of this fascinating era.
Why yes, the bachelor’s degree I never finished was probably going to be in History. Does it show much?
Doing some shopping last week, I found a batch of LED tea candles for sale, 6 for $5.95. I’ve been meaning to pick some up to play with them for ages, as I’ve seen some neat stuff done with flickering LEDs on the tabletop!
The first thing I whipped up was a pair of large fire & smoke markers, big ones suitable for a building fire or big bonfire! The LED tea lights are about 1.5″ across, 5/8ths of an inch high at the base, and 1.5″ to the top of the “flame”, which on these ones is just a white bit roughly flame-shaped.
The bases contain the LED, battery and switch and unscrew easily from the upper part of the base, and the flame pops easily out of the upper part. I eventually want to get my soldering iron out and do various sorts of more advanced work with the flickering LEDs, but for now I just used the stock base and setup.
Using hot glue, I glued a doubled-over length of soft iron hobby wire around the rim of the base and up past the flame to support the smoke plume. The smoke plume is just cotton batting I salvaged from a pillow I was throwing away – waste not, etc!
Fire & smoke markers in progress, and complete LED tea light to the left. Click for larger, as usual.
I speared the cotton batting on the wire, then used more small beads of hot glue around the LED base to fasten the batting down. I added more hot glue on the wire, then pushed the batting up against the wire to secure it. As I pushed the batting against the wire, I gave the whole piece of batting a twist with my hand, to make the smoke plume more interesting.
Spraypainted smoke plumes with LED bases. Click for larger, as usual.
The plumes got grey then black spraypaint, and might get a second coat of spraypaint – I’ll see what they look like after they dry. The LED lights still work (the switches are on the underside) and if I ever need to replace the battery, it’ll be easy to tug the batting aside and then fix things after with a bit of hot glue.
The whole project only took a couple of minutes, and should look good on the tabletop in the ruins of a building or as a bonfire. Here’s a short (11 second long) out-of-focus phone camera vid of the two smoke plumes and one original, unmodified tea light all flickering away.
Finally got a can of green spraypaint at the local hardware place and laid my fabric BB pitch out to blotch green across it, just to break up the brown fabric. It looks a lot better with green on it now, and the dot grid that lays out the field is still visible.
My 40mm BB pitch, laid out on garbage bags on the porch to spray with green for a turf effect.
I’ve got an Amazon BB team on the painting table right now, as well.
Been fairly quiet around here lately – blame all the usual holiday business – but the holiday season was a good one for gaming around here, too.
Early December saw my long-promised Russian Civil War game over in Vancouver at the Trumpeter Club’s gaming night finally happen, about eighteen months after we first discussed doing it. I never did write that battle up here on the Warbard, but it was good to get the Russians out again after a long break, run a long-promised game, and spend a weekend over in Vancouver – even if that weekend was the coldest of the year, with daytime highs around -5 C!
We’ve also had our first two games of Blood Bowl, now that my Sarcos croc team is finished and Sean’s humans are assembled and mostly painted. Unfortunately for him, both games have been fairly resounding wins for my big reptiles, 3:1 and 4:0 respectively. Better luck for the humans in upcoming games!
Crocs (Lizardmen) vs Humans Blood Bowl game – Sean tries to figure out how to keep my Skinks from scoring yet again, while a wall of big green crocodiles stomp his humans!
My home-brew Blood Bowl pitch is coming along slowly, although it’s in a playable and usable state now. That’s the fabric field under the figures in the photo above; it needs a lot of work to look good (I want it to look like a muddy, weedy patch of jungle) but is thoroughly usable in it’s current form!
Onward and upward in 2014! I’ve got a mountain of pulp figures to paint, another BB team that’ll get primed this week, and some Russian Civil War bits to fill in on that project! Then there’s always the unexpected new stuff, or the old projects that capture your interest again… it should be a good year, in any case.
Here’s a nice Christmas present for those of us interested in the Russian Civil War, the Great War and related events: siberianexpedition.ca is a huge digital archive of photographs and other material related to the little-known Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, specifically the 4200 Canadian troops sent to Vladivostok after the RCW kicked off.
There’s over 2000 photographs (although some are duplicates) and it’s all fully searchable in English, French and Russian. Some of the photos are actually modern photos from Siberia of some of the locations depicted in the original 1918/1919 images, which is kind of cool. There’s also a brief history of how exactly a bunch of Canadians who’d volunteered to fight in Europe wound up in Vladivostok and Siberia, and some learning materials for teachers at different levels.
This isn’t a completely new site (started in 2012, it looks like) so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops — it looks like they’re trying to do some map-based stuff and a few other developments. Further bonus for me, there’s a local angle here as most of the Canadian Siberian expedition left by ship from Victoria, and it’s our local University of Victoria who are behind this site.
I’ll be mining the photos and other materials on here for inspiration for RCW scenery and such for a long while!
In the meantime, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and such to all readers!
Quick late night workbench photo of my Impact Miniatures Sarcos crocodile team for Blood Bowl. They’re 99% done, with only the hook-hands of two and a few other details to finish off.
Sarcos Crocs nearly finished. Click for larger.
I’m quite pleased with how these figures have come together, they’re really nice sculpts and well cast, and it’s been great to get back into painting — these are the first figures I’ve actually gotten paint on since May of this year!
I’m out of town for a while visiting family so it’ll be sometime around Christmas before I can get decent daylight photos of these guys, but I want to get photos of them as soon as I can.
Being a completist, when I decided to get into Blood Bowl there was no way I’d just leave it at a team or two and nothing else! Besides, although there’s a lot of other players around with BB pitches of various sorts, from the basic card field from the box set to very elaborate homemade ones, I wanted a setup of my own so I’m not dependent on other players to provide everything needed.
For this BB pitch, I had a couple of goals. I wanted a jungle ruins theme overall, to fit with the Lizardman & Amazon teams I’m starting with, and the whole thing had to be transportable, probably in a boot-sized shoebox. I do almost all of my gaming away from home, so portability is key. That meant the actual pitch was going to be fabric, not hard panels of some sort, and the various accessories and decorative elements had to be modular and not really oversized. Light weight would also be nice. I also wanted to incorporate a bunch of BB’s play aids and things like turn & re-roll tracking right into the scenery, to minimize the amount of clutter around and on the table.
Various Blood Bowl accessories in progress. See text for details, and click for larger.
The photo shows where I’m at after a couple of hours over a couple of evenings. The main construction material is half-inch pink insulation board for all the stonework. Turns out this is 14mm thick, so if you slice 14mm wide strips off then cut those roughly 1 inch long, you get a nicely sized “stone” block. It’s like Hirst Arts plaster blocks, without the weight, fragility or the mess of dozens of casting sessions! The square tiles are 20mm by 20mm cubes cut from the same styrofoam, then sliced into thirds, so each tile is somewhere between 3mm-5mm thick. A hot glue gun was used to glue everything together; the bases are just mattboard, the good quality card used in picture framing.
The two foreground pieces are a pair of Re-Roll & Turn Track markers, one for each team, made to look like some sort of temple plaza/stone-paved roadway setup. You can etch/carve insulation foam with a pencil, so the wide stones on the left have the name of each track (“R-R” for Reroll, “First” and “2nd” for first half/second half turn tracking) and then the numbers 1-8. I used Roman numerals for the 2nd half numbers, just because, although looking at it again, using those for Rerolls to make it different might have been cleverer. Not too late to slice off the name label tiles and put new ones on, I guess.
Top left and top right is a dugout for each team, with the 3 areas in each needed for Reserve/KO/Injured.
Top centre is the base for the scoreboard. I haven’t quite finalized the design for the actual scoreboard, but magnets to hold some sort of placard with the score number on it will be used. The 3×3 square of paving at the front of the scoreboard will be pencil-etched with the BB scatter template for reference, and I might actually extend the front of the paving by another row to put the 3×1 throw-in template there.
Everything will be painted in stone, then various vegetation, vines and such added to make it look jungle-like without hampering the functionality of the various Blood Bowl game elements being built into the scenery. I’m also wondering what other game elements could be carved into the stonework to add to the utility and bump the decorative level up a bit, too. Given I currently lack proper bash dice, I might put the d6 conversion table for them along the top of the back row of each dugout, one on each of six stones… any other ideas?
I’ve got a piece of brown cotton flannel big enough for a 40mm pitch, which I’ll turn into a muddy jungle field with the aid of fabric dye, ink and a black permanent marker. I might actually put a standard-size 29/30mm pitch on the back, just because, and the offcut should include a piece of fabric big enough to put a BB7 pitch on, possibly in 40mm even. The actual fabric pitch will probably be my Christmas holiday gaming project.
Up next, some last carving and details, then paint! Not sure if I’ll go with basic grey paint, or try for the tan sandstone look so many of the Mayan buildings down in Mexico are made from.
Work continues on the Impact Miniatures Sarcos crocodile team for Blood Bowl, and I finally got a photo in daylight before I went off to work this morning.
Impact Sacros crocodiles, getting painted up for Blood Bowl. Click for larger.
The big Leviathan croc on the extreme right of the photo is closest to done, just a few details like his eyes left. The remaining sixteen, eight Salt Water Crocs (Saurus, in BB terms) and eight Baby Crocs (Skinks in BB) are all in various stages less finished than the big guy, but they’re progressing, at least. I am going to be doing a fair bit of highlighting and such on the base colours, especially on the Salt Water crocs, which are mostly too dark and monochrome right now.
It’s been great to get back into painting, too; this is the most painting I’ve done since early May of this year, which is way too long ago!
I’ve also got some accessories and such for Blood Bowl – team dugouts and other functional field scenery – in progress, and will get a post up about that in the next few days. Friday I’m off to Vancouver, though, to run a Russian Civil War game for friends there. This is a game I first started talking about running nearly two years ago, so it’ll be good to get it run finally!
