Gripping Beast (& others) Dark Age Horse

To round out two armies (don't ask...) for the upcoming event in Devizes I picked up a box of Gripping Beast plastic Dark Age cavalry recently, and added a few more figures to them as well. Here are the results:

Three Gripping Beast cavalry. They go together well, but you can't help feeling they have missed an opportunity to really load up the sprue with different weapons and arm poses - a bit like the Roman Infantry set I did a couple of years ago.

A mix of round and oval shields. Some of the arm poses are a bit ungainly, and I had t cut the base of one arm to get it to work at a reasonable angle. 

This base has a Warlord Games Romano-British cavalryman added in the middle. Its not a great figure to be honest, but gives another guy with armour on the base to make them more obviously Heavy Cavalry, as all of the GB ones are in tunics. 

The horses have that slightly weird "seahorse" neck of the GB horses in this set, but once they are charging straight at you it's not so obvious.

 Another Warlord figure. They are all mounted on metal horses, as they didn't mix and match at all with the saddle shapes on the GB figures.

They do take an ink wash extremely well.

I also picked up these Alans/Huns unpainted in a bring and buy.

I think they may be Foundry, but could also be Old glory due to the variety. They are split at the waist. 

If you look carefully you can see some heads attached to the bridles...

And finally a fortified camp made with kebab skewers

A bit of baggage from Ainsty Castings 

And a General - I think this one may have been from Warlord.

Saga - > ADLG, the Light Foot Sabot Basing Trick

With a mostly-plastic Gripping Beast 25mm Arab army in the planning phases, I've been toying with what to do with my 25mm Saga Arab army.

After dithering about rebasing them all into an ADLG force, the new edition of Saga persuaded me to keep them as a Saga army and duplicate quite a few of the figures for the new ADLG army - after all, plastic figures are pretty cheap and paint up easily too.

But, even so, having so many duplicates is still a little irritation, so I have been casting around for some 60x30mm sabot bases to at least get dual-use out of some of the "based on a new, magentizable 2p piece" Saga figures to use them as Light Foot in ADLG as well.

After emailing Warbases they pointed me to the ideal thing, a "2x1 Regiment Tray (2p)" which was hidden away on their site and listed without dimensions (erm...why do that for rectangular bases?)

And here they are, together with Rare Earth magnets (the bases come with pre-drilled holes for them) to hold the figures in place, and some sand/wood stain/drybrush & static grass to match the rest of my basing scheme.

These are the rather wonderful Perry Miniatures metal Naffatun figures (much nicer than the GB or Footsore ones I think, but they do come in a 6-pack which is quite a few more than you need..)

You can see just how strong the rare earth magnet is, as I'm able to hold them up by just one figure (but shaking them around is probably out...). For plastic figures like the GB bowmen and javelin-armed infantry I will use for other Arab Light Foot they will be even better.

Having ordered these I'm now considering whether a similar 60mm x 60mm base would work for holding 4 infantry as a "Javelinmen" unit in ADLG - perhaps I should have thought of that sooner and saved on postage!

Projects You Probably Shouldn't Start...

Cheap Gripping Beast plastic Arabs are really cool - I have a load for a Saga army that I painted up a couple of years ago.

So... it's then only a short step from there to "Wouldn't it be easy - and cheap - to make a 28mm L'Art de la Guerre generic Arab army mainly out of plastic figures?"

The maths is actually not too bad..

• 2 boxes of cavalry = 24 figures, which is 6 bases of HC/MC and 3 bases of LH

Add in a box of Foreforge Mongol Cavalry for variety and you're at 10 Cavalry + 6 LH for the mounted, which is more than enough for most 200 point armies.

So, the foot...

• 1 box of infantry = 44 figures, which is 4 LI and 6 more Medium Foot sword/spear/bowmen

That brings you to about £80 (if you get a good price on eBay for the Gripping Beast Arab boxes) for 26 units.

Add in a few Generals from GB, Footsore and others and it's the core of a solid 28mm Generic Arab army for just under £100.

But... then you realise that the GB boxes (foot and mounted) both have more heads than figures, so you then think about using these spare heads to add to...

• 2-3 more sprues of GB Vikings and Fireforge Byzantine & Russian infantry bought separately off eBay = another 20-odd armoured figures that could be kit-bashed into more elite Arab warriors, or mixed in with the others anyway for more variety.
• And then, why not buy some metal foot for even more variety in the BTD sale ?   

So... a project is born.

Of course, the starting point is not the simple stuff. You pick up a Fireforge Byzantine warrior, add in a GB Arab head and shield, and fashion a longer skirt out of Ronseal wood filler.

Here's what that guy looks like right now...

And again, after a lick of paint

It's the point at which you start thinking about adding in a couple of Victrix elephants, and replacing the howdah and crew with Essex Arab elephant crew that it starts to get silly...

28mm Late Roman Casualty Markers

In a sporadic burst of painting, I've finally gotten round to adding some colours to a pack of resin Late Roman casualties from 1st Corps that I picked up at "Derby" last year.

They are still needing a coat of Army Painter to tone them down a little, but anyways, here they are, all ready to sit behind the near-identical Gripping Beast Late Roman infantry that I finished some time ago.

It's a rather extravagant use of LBMS shield transfers I admit, but lets face it you always buy too many of them and it's and even bigger shame to let them go to waste.

I'll use the varnish rather than the wash version of Army Painter on these, as it will harden them up for being chucked in a box with the other casualty markers I have.

I've colour coded these chaps, into "Green", "Yellow" and "Red", mostly based on their shields. This makes them compatible with my usual ADLG hit marker scheme, with Red as 3 hits, Yellow as 2 hits and anything else as the first hit.

Three dead guys all in red - 3 hits!

Derby 2017 - time for the big toys to come out to play!

Having been painting, making and generally faffing around and not quite finishing my 28mm Patrician Roman army for the last 18 months, the annual Derby competition suddenly hove into view and offered up not one, but two opportunities to put the figures on the table.

The end result are 5 well-packed and imposing L'Art de le Guerre battle reports featuring sumptuous imagery of troops that are actually big enough to be able to see with the naked, unaided human eye!

Across the weekend the army from the tail end of the Roman Empire fought its predecessors, its contemporaries, its allies and it's mortal enemies - and even, on one notable occasion, itself - on a series of 6x4 tabletops in an aircraft hangar in the East Midlands.

See for yourself why the fall of the Roman Empire may actually have been FAKE NEWS, and why the 28mm game might well prove to be the absolute real sweet spot for Ancient wargaming with the L'Art de la Guerre ruleset.

Yes, these reports are possibly your gateway drug to mainlining the seemingly almost daily releases of plastic multipose 28mm ancients figures now on the market. Read on with care...

With a spare 28mm figure or two....

.. from my Gripping Beast Plastic Late Romans still lying around, I decided it was a good time to add a 25mm "Heroic" Commander to my Late Roman 15mm armies... and here's the evidence.

This is the in-box Gripping Beast plastic commander figure, together with a standard bearer on a 40mm round base to act as an L'Art de la Guerre General

The standard bearer looks especially glum today for some reason...

He is clearly somewhat lacking the exuberance of his boss.. but he does have an LBMS transfer for his flag, so it's not all bad.

Usual Army Painter technique with matt varnish to finish and a very light pale drybrush.

Here they are with some Later Roman/Byzantine infantry from Strategia et Tactica

Leading from the back in textbook style

Or from the front, making the standard bearer even more unhappy... and showing off the LBMS transfer on his bosses shield as well.

(unusually, these pictures are all clickable and give you a much bigger version)

These Romans Are Not Far Away!

Posts to Madaxeman.com have been on a bit of a hiatus recently, but that's not to say that wargaming has been taking a back seat.

No, I've actually been painting and basing some serious quantities of figures, including some new 28mm Patrician Romans built on the core of a couple of boxes of the new-ish Gripping Beast plastic figures.

Of course, the project expanded and soon included some Foundry and Footsore metals, and a huge number of Old Glory not-quite-historical hairy barbarian foederate foot and mounted to pad out the army.

But, they are here, and have even had at least one game so far too - where they beat the Huns at L'Art de la Guerre. All of the figures are based for ADLG, on 60mm wide basing with 2 ranks for all of the non-skirmishing infantry. 

The Auxilia in particular who are on 60x60's really suit this basing, with some even being based in a dangerous-looking wedge formation.

There's as a result now a huge page of pictures of these excellent figures for you to browse and enjoy!

25mm Late Romans still underway...

With Christmas just around the corner, here's some not particularly festive WIP shots of my Patrician Romans for ADLG in 25 (8?) mm.

They are a mix of the Gripping Beast plastics, some Old Glory mixed barbarians (that I think might be mostly Scots from a slightly later era, but seem to do OK as generic Gothic foot types) with a few Foundry and Footsore figures sprinkled in to make the variety greater.

 Romans prepare to take on the (as yet un-Army-Paintered) barbarian hordes

12 units of barbarians.... let;s hope the Romans are Elite!

Auxilia, with obligatory LBMS shield transfers

The man holding up the shield is one of the "far too many in the pack" Gripping Beast archers, but converted to hold his shield up to cover his colleague from archery

Some of the "far too many" archers acting as, well, archers. I went away from the textbook red colour scheme to make them more exotic.

Still awaiting Testors Dullcote varnish on this lot

A Degenerate Legionary unit with an old-school standard

I think the officer may be a Footsore Miniatures Romano-British figure

Cloaks at the ready...

Foundry armoured cavalry. Probably able to play as Cataphracts as well at a pinch. I used some spare GB plastic spears as their lances, as they are pretty robust and the Foundry metal ones are far too bendy. They don't yet have Army Painter on them

More LBMS shield transfers....

Warlord Games 'Unleash Hell' General and Dog

Again, needing a coat of Dullcote. His skintone is just a wash with Peat Brown ink.

Hopefully I will find time to put a big dent in getting them all table-ready over the festive break...