Rebasing the 15mm Scots for ADLG-R

 I've been systematically rebasing all of my Renaissance figures over the past could of years to play them under ADLG-Renaissance rules, and this Scottish Contingent represents the end of that process, with all of my Renaissance armies now re-done.

This is the full set - less than half a "FoGR" army (which means I managed to sell the other half to fund some more purchases of other stuff!) but still a chunky force with 25 units to choose from when making up a list. 

One of my three commanders is this Highland Gnome, bought from the edition of Cold Wars just before Covid. 

There is also a rather more Jacobite-esque 28mm leader in there too

A good chunk of the figures are these very old Minifigs castings which I picked up in a Bring & Buy back when Roll Call was held in Dunstable - and they are still going strong even now!

There are also a few Peter Pig Highland Rebel warriors in there too - just the one base, as I used many of the rest of the Highlanders I had to pad out the Pike & Shot formations.

Two Peter pig Frame Guns provide the "non-generic" artillery for the Scots , with crews from all sorts of places. 

The bulk of the Pike & Shot units are Peter Pig figures, painted quite simply with a grey base coat, some bits of colour added and then a wash to dirty them up for campaigning in the Highlands and Lowlands. 

The one unit of "better quality" Strathbogie (or similar) Scots are the Minifigs musketeers plus some compatible Donnington Pikemen. 

The cavalry are all Peter Pig as well - again easy to paint up, if a little limited in poses. 

They are a little too small to use with other ranges I think.

Plenty of grass tufts in blue-ey purple to represent heather. I could have gone with actual purple, but the purple tufts I had a very vibrant, to the point of being almost a "space alien" intensity, so these seemed a better bet.

And that's the full set all ready for some ADLG-R action! 

(I have a playlist of "how to" videos on my YouTube Channel that show the basics of ADLG-R if you fancy listening to me waffle on for a while about how to play the game). 

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Assyrian Attack!

 With the same lightning-fast speed as an Assyrian chariot racing across the Mespotamian plain, 4 fully-featured, text-based old school battle reports from the recent Attack! competition in Devizes have now made it to this website!

The 4-battle campaign sees my 28mm Assyrian army taking on:

• the Indians of Donesh Mukhu, 
• the hat-obsessed Hittites, 
• my army's own futuristic 3D printed ancestors the Sargonid Assyrians, and.. 
• in another Assyrian Civil War, the Queen Semiramis-inspired "disguised camel" madness of another Assyrian army commanded by King Dickaleth-Hashdod (Cunning Vizier of the Nineveh Left Hook).

As has become all too usual, all reports feature possibly untrue historical facts, poor quality humour, deeply inappropriate comments from the participating soldiers themselves, and extensive post-match analysis from both the Assyrian Commander and Nasty Hannibal. 

So, put on the kettle, open a packet of biscuits, roll out the carpet, pop on your favourite hat and get ready to be mind-boggled by the Tales of Ancient Assyria at War in The West Country!  

More Almughavars

 Having test-done some Lurkio Almughavars a while back, the "test" painting clearly worked as I managed to drum up enough enthusiasm to tackle the full 70+ figures who had been waiting patiently in the "undercoated" box for quite some time. 

The last lot got their photos taken outside, but for this batch the Lightbox got rolled out - so here they all are:

The Lurkio packs contained a couple more than the 72 figures that were supposed to be there, allowing me to make up 11 bases fo infantry and these 4 bases of Light Foot javelinmen.

These guys got some serious love from the box of random tufts !

Knowing they will be used in a 3-command army at some point I took the decision to mostly go with  a variety of monocolour paint schemes to allow units to be easily allocated to different comnmands, but also mixed up the hues, tints and trouser colours to still leave them vaguely "irregular" looking.

The painting was again a mix of Speedpaints, Contrasts and some of the new Warpainter 6-part "Triads" from the Fanatic ranges. 

Reds and Blues as well as Greens. 

And some "Mustardy Yellows" as well. 

Almost all of the shields have a "Barcelona FC" Catalan-esque palette 

There are a few mixed up units who can be added to either the Reds or the Blues to tweak numbers more flexibly. 

I was even sufficiently inspired to repurpose a couple of units of "generic" Essex medieval cavalry as Catalans, rather clumsily cutting down their lances to turn them into javelins and adding some "Catalan" paint schemes too. 

Here's the guys being painted as well - just to show I did actually do it myself..

Just need to find an excuse to get them on the table now !

The Northern Crusades - with added Tanks!

 Earlier this year (OK, June) I headed up to Helsinki to take part in a "Northern Crusades" ADLG competition.

Admittedly the competition aspect was somewhat secondary to just grabbding the chance to go to somewhere new in the far north in Summertime, so as to find out how late it would stay light, and exactly how expensive a pint actually would be in a place like Finland.

Even so, I did manage to squeeze in some gaming, using (of course) a Feudal Scandinavian army in a medieval-themed 5-game event. 

And now, with the magic of YouTube, here are all 5 battle reports from the games I played in the event, taking on 2 Later Byzantines (nope, no idea how they fit in a "Northern Crusades" theme either..), the Hungarians (erm..), some Medieval Germans (yep, that probably works) and the Teutonic Knights (back of the net!).

All of the videos are also on YouTube in a playlist you can save and watch in fullscreen (if you so wish).

I then took advantage of having a Monday evening return flight to pop up the road to the Parola Armour Museum, one of the more unusual tank museums in the world, to see a load of really unusual Finno-Russian WW2 and post war kit they have tucked away in a forest near to a lake (OK, that's most of Finland to be fair).

 So, in a "metal-on-metal" kind of synergistic development, there is also a video of all of the photos I took at Parola which you can also access either at the end of the battle report page, or directly on  my YouTube Channel too. 

South America Inbound

 Having been a great fan of the Fighting 15's / former Black Hat ranges for ages, I have had a South American army on the to-buy list for a long time - and with the closure of Fighting 15's, and hence the potential loss of these excellent ranges (unless Ian sells them on) I decided now was the moment to invest in a new 15mm army.

Given some of my clubmates already have Aztecs and others, the one that looked a little left-out at CLWC were the Tlaxcallans - and the ADLG list has some interesting options for the list, even without the Cortez alliance so Texcallan / Tlaxcallan it was.

I've actually bought a shed-load of them, giving me all options (and probably more). but as has been my habit of late I've started with just a handful to try and get a feel for how they will paint. 

 I've ended up with a bit of a mix in real paints and Contrasts, starting with Contrast Darkoath Flesh for the flesh parts giving them a darker skin tone than the usual "Flesh" on my European figures.

These all have white loincloths, and a palette of bold intense, real paint colouurs in reds, greens and yellows (plus the odd blue).

The "armour" is a speedpaint though, the ever-reliable Aggaros Dunes, with a drybruch to pick out he texture even more.

The feathers were basecoated yellow, and they I gave them a "wash" of Contrast Yanden Yellow to give them more texture than the rest of the "clothed" parts of the figures. 

For basing I have opted to only use grass tufts and foliage on my usual Rustons Woodstain'ed Builders sand + drybrush basing, as they won't appear alongside any other of my troops (who all have static grass) - aside from a handful of European Spanish of course.

The aim overall was to make them colourful, but with a predominance of red as this was apprently a Tlaxcallan colour. I may go harder on this approach with the basic warriors I think.

This lot are now intended to be Otomi mercenaries/allies, which may or may not be correct as now Fighting 15's have essentially closed their website its gotten rather hard to identify the castings and match them to what they are supposed to be.

Anyway, pretty much all of these guys have obsidian-edged 2 handed weapons, so they will work as a coherent and discrete set of figures compared to the rest. 

Very pleased how they have come out, and this test batch has made me look forward to - rather than dread - painting up the rest of the army.

Great Big War Wagons

 Having posted some pictires of some rather large 15mm War Wagons earlier this year, now is the time for something genuinely massive - a 28mm War Wagon. 

The orgins of this beastie lies in the game I played against Mark Fry at Beachhead earlier this year, in which he mentioned that he's accidentally acquired far, far too many pro-painted 28mm war wagons and was now looking to offload some. 

A few quid via PayPal later and I was the proud owner of two handily generic wagons, painted far better than I could ever hope to do myself - all they really needed now was some crew!

The solution to that was a couple of sprues of Perry Medieval Mercenaries from a box shared between me and Dave from the Podcast in my ongoing efforts to tempt him into painting 25mm. 

This was enough for two wagons, and these are the first lot of crew, stuck to a couple of sawn-off lollipop sticks to give a genuine wood effect ont the cab floor (yeah sure..).

And here they are in the first wagon:

 Matching the style of the wagon meant eschewing Contrasts for these guys, and it has shown me that perhaps I need to invest in some proper "triads" of paints going forward as the different reds and yellows I own don't seem to have too much difference once they are layered onto the crews' clothing. 

The next wagon is kinda green, so to match that I am definately going to by some new paints as all my own greens are either rather WW2, or are super-bright for painting Chinese and Eastern/Asiatic ancient troops. 

But, for now, I'm pretty happy with how well my guys match the pro-painted wagon.