Making roads on Saturday

Roads, rivers, trees, hills and buildings are the very basics of war-game terrain. They are the elements that can transform a table into something attractive that spurs the imagination, or can make it look childish and amateurish. Mine have looked ordinary for decades.

Finally I found the answer to one of the problems. I found the download for printed roads from Drive thru RPG from Lord Zsezse Works. The full set is here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=82406

These are very attractive flint-style roads, straight, with right angle turns. This is

somewhat of a dampener but is a practical response to the problem of getting simple modularity. And at the end of the day in 28mm scale the idea of a meandering road is probably not realistic. In the scale we are dealing with the road will be close enough to apparently straight as far as the models on the table are concerned.

The following images show how I built them. Using the image set I printed a full version, and then 10 extra straight sections. Luckily the World Cup just ended and I found an advertising poster stuck to dense foamcore. It had been thrown out, wasteful society that we are.

The prints came out in slightly different because we do not use US sizes here. We use A4. BUt this did not matter to me as I did not need to populate a whole board and I do not use the printed grid.

Simply, I cut out the paper and the plastic card, spread ordinary glue with an offset, then made sure the bond was tight by using a rubber roller. I cannot over emphasise this last bit. It made all the difference both to getting a nice flat finish, and for making for that ordinary PVA adhered to the gloss surface. I rolled from the centre to the corners, then on angles outwards down the sides. This squeezed the glue out, and I had to wipe the roller with a wet rag every swipe to prevent it from smearing the surface and ripping up the areas already covered.

Tekumel Songs

Played a game last night using vanilla Song of Blades and Heroes. Greg wanted to show off his new piece of Ziterdes terrain, so naturally it was the centre piece. The figures were all Eureka, from the Tekumel range and also classic fantasy Greece – Amazons and Satyrs.

We played a two part mini-campaign. At a remote temple, a priestess had been conducting pagan ceremonies. The central government wanted this stopped and her returned to the capital for trial. In the first scenario, the snake molesting priestess was conducting her foul rites along with a few of her repulsive hand-maidens (actually, they looked pretty sweet). Guardsmen attacked from two sides: one group up the central boulevard, the second through the back streets of the city. Protecting her, Amazons, alerted to the abduction, sprang from the encroaching forest.

This battle had a classic feel of charging up steps while being picked off by vengeful sylvan archers. However, after a bloody climb, the guardsmen did manage to carve their way through the protectors and grab the priestess. First game to me.

In the second scenario, the guardsmen, now reinforced, were resting at an inn in some out of the way village. One squad was inside, the other out patrolling. The amazons quickly reached the walls and climbed, but a single well placed bow shot felled the leader and the rest fled. This set back upset the attack, even though they rallied the tried again. The second group of pagans tried the main door, but were similarly repulsed. The guardsmen suffered no losses.

Two nil to me, another success for Songs, fine terrain and beautifully sculpted and painted figures (thanks Nic and Kosta at Eureka).

28mm Late Renaissance civilians – where are they?

It is the law of this hobby that whenever you find a particular era and scale that you want to build, there will always be a gap in the figure ranges that just drives you nuts. For me, the Thirty Years War (and French Wars of Religion, and 80 Years War, and ECW) has been a long standing fascination. I have attempted to build forces in several scales over the years. Now I have settled at the skirmish scale in 28mm. Call me mad, but it’s settled.

Skirmish games are about individuals. A quick glance around you will draw to your attention that there are lots of people hanging about. A skirmish might take place miles away from civilisation, in the hills or the forests, with only the professionals banging away at each other as they manouevre for position. But it is just as likely – more likely, I reckon – that the action will be taking place in and around villages, if not proper towns. At this scale there can be skirmishes happening right inside buildings – just like our d20 D&D cousins play.

So where are the civilians? There has to be villagers, farmers, butchers, blacksmiths, bar tenders and whores. If I were playing Wild West I would be fine. This era is well provissioned. Some really nice ones come from Foundry. But Renaissance? Not so much luck.

Here are a few sources that I am investigating. Unfortunately at this stage I cannot do a size comparison to see which will fit with which.

Postage from the US is typically ruinous. Blue Moon, for example, charge $USD43.45, regardless of weight or quantity. It’s cheaper to buy from the UK in £. 

Mega Miniatures, operating through eBay, on the other hand, quoted postage of $USD4. I dropped Johnny a line and asked him if this was for seamail or airmail, and he replied that it was airmail as the USPS no longer uses seamail. Four dollars versus 43 with a <10 day turnaround? What a hard choice. 

Now the Blue Moon site claims that it will use the lowest genuine cost and refund the extra. But do I want to trust that? I’m going to give you $43 for a $4 job and hope that the choose to refund me the $39? Even then, the minimum at Blue Moon is $9. Try harder, Blue Moon. I like your range of figures, but your quotes smack of either laziness or contempt for the customer.

Redoubt

Redoubt

Redoubt

Redoubt

Mega Miniatures

Blue Moon

Bicorne

Voila – a bar

Just picked up a couple more of the Paizo maps, and also a couple of the D&D modular terrain. Using the Harrowing Halls set I overlaid the Bandit’s Outpost to make a tavern. Here it is:

Flashing Steel – attack at night

Last night Greg and I gave the draft 4 version of Flashing Steel a more comprehensive workout.

Flashing Steel is the title of our set of skirmish rules for 1560 to 1660 for the Ganesha Games Song of Blades and Heroes. The rules themselves are largely stable now. We probably only need a couple more tests to really iron out the last details.

This game used the Paizo Flip Map of the Bandit Outpost. Greg’s men were bandits who had intercepted a coach and stolen some papers (possibly). My team had to make entrance to their hideout – an old disused fortress on the border – in the middle of the night and get them back.

My mission started to collapse as soon as my team reached the walls. The Captain fell and broke his leg, leaving the Sergeant to lead the team. Like true professionals he led them up and over the top, silencing one guard in what would have been an unpleasant silent murder. The team then split: one heading along the battlements to silence each guard in turn, the other dropping into the courtyard.

Without a blow by blow account the battle flowed around the buildings in a realistic-feeling manner. Morale checks and intimidated fallbacks happened in dramatically appropriate moments. The firearms performed as I had hoped, proving to be almost lethal at close range, but effectively one-shot.

The Paizo Map, too, fulfilled its promise of livening the table and giving focus. For a skirmish game especially (but then, that’s what the map is scaled for) it concentrated the action in the middle 60cm x 60cm, confirming my belief that that is the used area in any game at the best of times. The detailed map gave structure to that concentration in a satisfying cognitive way.

It was a good and successful night all round, with some editing to come on the rules.

First 4 groups

Here are the first four completed groups in More Escarmouche organisation. The figures are Renegade.

More Escarmouche design issue

How to achieve a mass fire effect, but still have hits against individuals. This is the problem of tactical, but not so personal that they are really role-playing, miniatures games.

The goal is to allow the volley, because ten men could actually get together and do that. But at the same time we want to allow sharp shooters. Just because the matchlock had a low rate of fire and short range, there is no reason why some men would not have chosen to master the weapon and get the most out of it. Most would not, of course, but at the individual level it is only reasonable that we make provision for the individual shot.

It’s easy enough to have one man shoot at one man. It’s easy enough to have a mass of men shoot at a mass of men when at the end you are removing abstract homogenous casualty figures. But if you have a mass fire effect, say from a volley of muskets, when every shooter is a known individual shooting at a group of targets who are also known individuals, the problem of hit allocation rears its head.

Guerra Floridas apportions the hits according to the target ranks – an automatic assumption that cannon-fodder get it first.

Avalon Hill’s Up Front applies a base number for the volley, and then adds a random modifier and inflicts this on every target figure. But in this case they are modelling potentially high rates of fire.

But then again, to talk of rate of fire is to talk about time. And what is the time scale for More Escarmouche? Certainly a personal scale, measured in minutes. But is it so short that we are addressing individual discharges of matchlock muskets, as we are in Escarmouche?

These thoughts have been chasing themselves in my head over the last 48 hours. The main cause is my natural revulsion at the idea of a table. The idea of table implies a slowing down of the action. Tables have gone right out of fashion. The second is the fear that the dice economy will either level out differences so greatly that any talk of individual differences in the characters is simply window dressing. Or worse, that individual differences become so strong that the dice roll is irrelevant: “Sgt Cleft never misses”. Or, even worse still, that the whole thing becomes too luck driven.

These are normal considerations, and they only really come out at play test time.

More Escarmouche, squad level action

Like every gamer that has ever lived, I have become fascinated with periods, researched them, bought the figures – usually in more than one scale – experimented with several rule sets, and then moved on to a new interest. My shelves are stocked with rule and reference material for many periods. My storage drawers are overflowing with unpainted and only half based figures, and graveyards of terrain in a multitude of scales.

The most recent frenzy of activity concerned WWII, a period I’ve always considered to be in bad taste because of my personal experience of the direct cost in my own father. But with his passing the idea has become more palatable. My friend Simon was the driver for this. He decied to do this period and dragged me along. For some reason I found myself with a German company, and I could not help looking at the 15mm figures and wondering which of these little voodoo men had taken pot shots at my father and uncle – particularly since I had constructed a Fallschirmjager company of the sort that bitterly contested Italy.

But anyway, to cut a long story short: after this flush of enthusiasm in which I built the requisite force and decied that Poor Bloody Infantry was by far the best rules to play with the usual shift of interest occured. For a start, Simon has never suggested that we play in this period, so my assumption is that he has moved on leaving us both with a pile of untried lead. I decided that what I’d really like to play is French. Primarily because I am disgusted with the way these all-too-human people have been maligned for being steamrolled.

Then I looked over my colonial 15mm figures, where I had built a respectable force of French colonial and their desert opponents – Foreign Legion romance, I admit it. These had been based in perparation for Piquet and I did play a few games with those rules. But Poor Bloody Infantry now seems so much better. So I began rebasing to play colonial with those rules.

But all of this had become forgotten as I decied to create a new incarnation of Escarmouche for my 30YW gaming. 28mm pike and shot skirmish forms the cornerstone of my interests. Escarmouche was for five or six figures a side and was one small step away from role playing. Now what I wanted was ‘squad level’ action, even though the term is anachronistic.

Another friend, Greg, recently introduced me to Up Front, that classic from Avalon Hill. And so the circle was closed. Squad level WWII action. Now I have many clues on how to create the rules I want for More Escarmouche, squad level pike & shot wargaming. But it has also sent me back to 15mm WWII and then to colonial gaming as well. Just when I thought I had come to the point where I could sell some of that stuff off as I would never play it again…