Sunday the 29th of May we got together to do a four-player 1,000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance battle; this was bigger than had previously been attempted and was my first actual game in this period.
I badly bent a rule I’ve held to for more than a decade, and fielded unfinished figures (a lot of them, in fact!) to get a force on the table. I had an allied German army of two units of standard pike-and-shot foot, a field commander, and an oversized technically-illegal unit of really good-quality horse (six bases instead of the usual four, all Superior Determined Horse, for the other FoG:R players out there), the rest of our side (centre and other wing) was all German Catholic. Opposing us was a French force, with one wing of allied English New Model Army. An a-historical mashup, to be sure, but a good game. The two allied wings wound up facing each other, my German Prods vs the New Model Army, while the two larger armies fought the other wing and the centre.
As discussed in my last post on entering LAF‘s LPL5, here’s all ten of the images from my 2009 LPL3 entries. I finished somewhere in the bottom third of the pack, but certainly didn’t enter with any expectation of doing much better — I entered to give me incentive to work on my painting and photography, which worked out just fine!
LPL3’s bonus rounds were “Germans” for Round One, which I botched; the German WW1 stormtroopers I did for Round 7 were supposed to be my Round 1 bonus entry, but I ordered them too late. Round 5 was “Cavalry”, which I managed with my first 15mm fantasy unit painted in years. Round 10 was “Lost Worlds”, bonus points for an exploration team, a “native” team and “monster” or similar — pegged max bonus points there, and a photo I’m still proud of!
Another revival from the old Brian’s Wargame Pages version of the site, and one that I should have brought forward ages ago! You can see the Esquimalt Drydock on Google Maps for a sense of scale that wasn’t available ten years ago when I first posted the photos. — Brian, 22 Feb 2011
In the summer of 2001 I was roommates with a guy who worked in the drydock here in town. He turned into a real asshole after being laid off, but while he was still working he gave me a tour of the yard. I brought my camera, and these pics should inspire people looking for new industrial modern or SF scenery projects!
One thing that would be very difficult to reproduce on the gaming table, except maybe in 6mm, would be the sheer scale of the place. I didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I didn’t even try for some real area photos. The drydock itself is 1100 feet long; the two big cranes pictured below are several hundred feet tall. There were two fair-sized ships in the drydock when I was there, and they could have accomodated a third with no difficulty. And this isn’t even that big a drydock, by maritime engineering standards. The ones that can accomodate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are even bigger…
Wargamers interested in industrial scenery or future-tech industrial landscapes (Necromunda style) should find plenty of inspiration here! Even if you can’t reproduce the scale, the clutter, details and fixtures should provide some ideas.
Click any image below for a (slightly) larger view. Keep in mind these are refugees from the Old Web, when 600px wide was a Big Image.
The blue-and-yellow tower in the centre is one of the two massive cranes; this photo is also impressive for the amount of clutter visible!
One of the massive cranes alongside the drydock; the two big cranes are similar, but the details differ.
Workshops, office cubicles, supplies and random equipment and parts compete for space alongside the drydock. Great, colourful clutter for scenery ideas – lots of cover for skirmishers.
When they need to section off the drydock, the big cranes lift these huge steel bulkheads into the dock. For scale, those yellow railings along the top of the photo are about waist-high on a person.
Ships are big too – this guy is spray-painting the primer along the hull of that Russian deep-sea fishing boat. The travelling lifting-basket truck he’s working in actually looks pretty cool too.
The pale blue crane is the second very large one at the yard; the ship at centre is a Russian deep-sea fishing boat in for overhaul. Again, lots of clutter and stuff filling the place up…
The two big cranes ran on these massive railroad-style track assemblies. To give you an idea of the scale here, each of those big blue cylinders (brake machinery) are about five feet tall. (1.5m or so) These are seriously large machines….
The other crane. Made by Krupp of Germany, at least in part.
Inspired by my brother’s Fake Pulp Adverts post, I thought I would share one of my projects. Over the past few weeks I have been working on a series of old signs for pulp-era 28mm gaming. Designed for any era from the 1900’s to the 1940’s and in any part of the English-speaking world, these signs are fairly versatile.
You can also download the PDF version (Old Signs for Pulp Gaming) if you want a vectorized copy for scaling. As usual, these are designed in the superlative Inkscape, an Open Source vector editing program. The fonts used largely come from DaFont, which has a large set of free and Open Source fonts for use.
Where did the idea come from? The initial inspiration was this image of a locksmith shop in Winnipeg by one of my Flickr contacts:
Old locksmith shop in Winnipeg. Picture by rpaterso
After that I started to dive into the Shorpy image archive and came up with some gold. Images such as the one below are great for mining for re-creation:
Old Corner Bookstore: 1900 on Shorpy
The files are currently licensed for non-commercial, personal use, largely because not all the fonts used allow commercial publication.
I’ve posted these on various forums, but never collected them into one place before. For your amusement, a batch of fake 1930s ads – grab the full size versions off Flickr to reproduce for your personal use on the sides of buildings, on billboards, or whatever! Continue reading Random Pulp Fake Adverts.→
I’ve created a number of simple colour gradient backgrounds that I’ve printed out for use in miniature photography, and recently decided to bundle the most useful of them up in a PDF and make it available.
Eight smooth gradient backgrounds included; on North American 8.5×11 paper by default, but they’re all vector-based so they should scale to whatever size paper you can print them on.
The list:
Pale Grey
Grey
Dark Grey
Black (shades to grey)
Blue
Sea Blue
Blue Grey
Tan
These backdrops MAY be used for commercial uses (photographs for a webstore or similar) but the file & printed backdrops MAY NOT be sold on any medium.
More old photos resurrected – this time a few from a Fantasy Rules! 2nd Edition game we played years ago. Human medieval knights & footmen vs orcs and goblins with necromancer help. I’m pretty sure this was the first outing of Tony’s undead; years later he’s finally got enough to field an all-undead army without help from my figure collection. Continue reading Photos from a Fantasy Rules! Battle→
15mm fantasy figures, based for Hordes of The Things (HOTT) or Fantasy Rules! (FR!). Many of the figures are long-out-of-production Ral Partha 15mm (from when they held the AD&D license, before WotC bought AD&D from TSR and started producing plastic crap); the rest are a mix of Reaper & Ral Partha 25mm monsters and Chariot 15mm (now produced by Magister Militum/Navigator. Continue reading Fantasy Gallery #1→
Photos from September 2003 of GZG 25mm & 15mm United Nations Space Command troopers (in Martian Legion camo) and Alien-movie aliens from FreiKorp. Continue reading SG2 Gallery #4 – UNSC & Aliens→
