The Reds Are Coming!

There’s 43 Bolsheviks off my painting table and ready for action, finally! One Maxim MG crew, some officers and NCOs and a whole lot of ragged, barely uniformed riflemen. Almost entirely Copplestone figures, and I mixed freely from the regular rifles, greatcoated rifles and the partisan packs to get a suitable ragged look. I had just started painting (and thinking about organization) when this marvelous Lead Adventure thread opened, with all sorts of great contemporary photographs of both Red and White uniforms.

Red Horde!
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force, finally marching off the painting table

24 more Bolshies to finish basing and then paint, at which point it’s on to the 60-some White Russians that are in the mail to me as I write this. All that painting will give me the core of two good-sized RCW infantry forces, nominally configured as platoon-sized forces for Through the Mud and the Blood but obviously configurable for other games as needed.

The Russian Civil War has well and truly taken over my painting schedule, and starting in November I should even be able to get some games in again, as a screwy work schedule settles somewhat and once again frees up my Sundays for gaming, which is of course the best possible use of that day. I’ll probably try to push hard to get enough Whites finished for a first Mud & Blood RCW outing by the last Sunday in November… we shall see!

(More photos of the Reds in the next few days, as daylight and weather allows…)

Pulpish Links of Interest, 13 October 2011

A miscelania of links, just so I get back into the habit of posting here!

Adventures of the 19XX is a pulptastic webcomic, full of zeppelins, giant airplanes, mystical oddness and villainy. Good fun, great art, and quite likely to inspire pulp gaming scenarios! (Warning: autoplaying music when the site loads…)

Need a World War One or Russian Civil War force? For the next 24hrs or so from the time I write this, Brigade Games has a great bulk deal, 7 packs for the price of 6, which works out amazingly cheap per figure. Nice figures, too — check out my White Russian riflemen from earlier this year.

If you’re looking for inspiration for Great War/WW1 terrain, check this amazing Lead Adventure Forum thread out – thejammedgatling’s First World War Terrain Boards – it’s a long thread of a project that’s been a year+ in the running so far, but well worth it.

Also via LAF, these amazing fake fur grasslands by Elledan. He’s got more on his blog, and also a small tutorial on his fake fur terrain. I badly want to do more fake fur terrain, done well it looks great!

I’ve finally got my painting bench set up again after moving at the end of September, so more original content should be landing on the Warbard shortly!

Unofficial .45 Adventure 2nd Edition Character Sheets

These are my unofficial draft versions of character sheets for Rattrap’s .45 Adventure 2nd Edition; they use a vaguely period typewriter font for a somewhat pulpish look, and while the layout is still a work in progress they take up less space than the 1st Edition sheets.

.452e sheets thumb
Part of the Grade One character sheet.

The PDF is 3 pages; there’s two Grade 3 & 2 characters per page and six Grade 1 spots.
Download the PDF right here (73Kb).

Feedback, suggestions or comments below in the comments area, as always!

(Legal Garble: .45 Adventures is copyright Rattrap Productions. These sheets are copyright Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design, permission granted to copy for personal use only.)

Jurassic Pulp II: Rex Stomps Back!

Back in October 2009, near the beginning of this pulp craze of ours, I ran a game I called “Jurassic Pulp”, inspired by that T Rex vs SUV chase scene in the original Jurassic Park movie. We used Model Ts instead of SUVs, though, and they’re just a bit more fragile than a modern SUV. T Rex hasn’t changed, though!

A fairly complete report on that first game can be found over on Lead Adventure, including some post-game ideas from both Corey and I.

When we were kicking ideas around for a new .45 Adventure convention game, the idea of reviving Jurassic Pulp came up. I’ve started to run with it, Continue reading Jurassic Pulp II: Rex Stomps Back!

Messrs. Clarke & von Clausewitz

“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies has written a fascinating post over on his Lard Island blog about friction in games and in reality. Short version: real war is full of things going pear shaped; most gaming systems aren’t. Go read the full article, I’m doing it a terrible disservice with my one-line smartass summary!

Should you want to read old von Clausewitz yourself, Project Gutenburg has an English translation of On War, Vol. One free to download. The short chapter Richard refers to in his post is Chapter VII. Friction In War — even for those of us with short attention spans, well worth a read!

This counts as another prod to get more figures painted for Through the Mud and the Blood, too!

Greetings, TGN!

The excellent editors of Tabletop Gaming News have just added The Warbard to the TGN Blog Network!

Assuming the TGN feed works the way I think it does, this will be the first post out over the TGN feed. So what’s on The Warbard? Mostly pulp and pulp-flavoured historical gaming, some science fiction, some fantasy, a lot of terrain, and some painting, among other things.

We’ve talked Inkscape and designing for gamers (once, twice, thrice). Being into pulp gaming, naturally we’ve talked zeppelins. Recently, we discussed some Online Resources for WW1 Gamers. A lot of the older material — most of it, in fact — is still around and still useful too. How about pizza boxes for skirmish terrain?

Who is “we”? I started this website in 1998 (!) as “Brian’s Wargame Pages”, then when I relaunched it in January 2011 as The Warbard I invited my brother to help out.

Have a look around, make yourself comforatable, comment on anything that takes your fancy! Glad to have a chance to reach a wider audience!

Pulpy Painting & Prep

I generally do figure prep (taking off moldlines and flash) and basic basing in fairly large batches, prime the whole batch, then tuck most of them away and bring them back out 5-10 at a time for painting.

It’s a good system for me; it gets the gruntwork of cleaning and prepping done efficiently, but avoids the “Primered Legions” paralysis I get from having hordes of unpainted figures staring at me from the corners of my painting bench. Instead they’re out of sight in in a spare figure case, to be brought out in small enough batches to actually paint.

This evening’s batch is pretty close to typical, and an amusing snapshot of the breadth of my current interests. Continue reading Pulpy Painting & Prep

Historical Gaming page

Created a new Historical Gaming page, which has replaced the ECW/TYW page in the top menu; there’s also a matching Historicals category now to populate the page.

With my interests wandering into the Great War, Russian Civil War, English Civil War/Thirty Years War and elsewhere recently, a new catchall page was needed. I’ve retroactively added old posts to the new Historicals category as well.

There will, of course, be a lot of overlap with my long-standing Pulp interests, which is only natural as most of my developing historical interest grew out of the quasi-historical pulp games we’ve been playing for the last several years! Expect strongly pulp-flavoured history, as well!

Wargaming & Such (formerly Brian's Wargaming Pages)