Charlemagne in a Shed: The Carolingians at Warfare 2023

In a near-miraculously quick turnaround I've now conjured up all 5 battle reports from last weekend's Warfare 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition, featuring the on-table debut of a post-lockdown-painted Carolingian army under the command of the one and only Charlemagne himself.

The reports all feature a wildly aggressive approach to gameplay, hurling lancer-armed almost-Knightly Caballeri against pretty much anything that stands in their path and sitting back to watch the results unfold in the usual full-contact cinemascope fashion.

The reports as usual come complete with army lists, commentary from Hannibal, random speech bubbles which bear little if any relationships to the action going on at the time, dreadful cod-French, and some tenuously connected music videos too (including one from Christoper Lee - yes, that one!).

You can also see some close-ups of the Baueda and Forged in Battle figures themselves, and find links to all of the army lists of my 5 gracious opponents too.

Read on to see how Charlemagne's campaign of conquest ended up !   

 

The Kyivan Rus on the M4 road to Reading

 One of the great beauties about L'Art de la Guerre is the way the shorter game time (about 2.5 hours) means you can fit 3 games into a day. It sounds fairly minor, but a 3-round Swiss Draw tournament is just, well, a lot, lot more "meaty" than a 2-round one would be - but without imposing so many games on you that a poor army design could leave you cursing the protracted pain of facing a series of lengthy drawn out defeats either.

The recent Reading-based 1-dayer ticked all of those boxes with a theme of "the World of the Rus and Vikings" - armies with a connection to either of these peoples, in the form of a historical antipathy or conflict, a mention in the army list notes, or an allied contingent of either of the two. 

I however went full Zelensky on this one, and chose a Rus army with no allies at all, a simple list chosen mainly as it was as close as I could get to using all of the lockdown-rebased Rus spearmen I owned all on table together whilst not totally ignoring the "good" options in the overall design.

That did mean a lot of spearmen - an often-unloved troop type who are nevertheless superb in the right circumstances. And, of course, how could I forget, a chance yet again to deploy the age-old groan-inducing Rus Abbot punchline against three unwary opponents!

All three Bella Emberg-free reports from this event are now online as the Rus take on the Carolingians, the Vikings and the Thematic Byzantine Empire in these fully illustrated and statistic rich reports. 

Charlemagne - The Emperor has Arrived!

 A Carolingian army has been sat on the to-do shelf for a couple of years now -  I bought it partly to see what Baueda figures looked like in the metal, and partly as I had already bought 1 dozen of their mounted Carolingian archers with a vague thought of adding them to some generic Gothic cavalry and cobbling together a morph army at some stage. 

Digging into it a bit more I had soon realised that the whole army needed to be, well, "Carolingian-looking" though, hence the purchase. 

Over the past year I'd added some more Forged in Battle cavalry through a few eBay purchases, and that had both bulked out the army and made it harder to begin to paint as well.

However after a road trip to Aachen, seat of the Carolingans and interment place of Charlemagne himself I became inspired enough to pick up the spray can, and to give them a quick and colourful (mostly Contrast) paint job to get them table-ready, in part as I had to paint something to get away from rigging more little ships, and in part as Aachen Cathedral is so fabulous that I convinced myself I didn't need to paint the soldiers all in Middle Ages style duns and tans, as this dude had some style, and also some money to splash around. 

The end result is a fairly over-enthusiastic and colourful army with all of the possible options;

These are Baueda - their horsemen don't mix with FiB's very well as the Baueda ones have very narrow horses and V-shaped riders legs to fit on them, and the FiB ones are chubby beasts with suitably arch-shaped riders legs - so the two manufacturers provide (mostly) separate parts of the army

This is the same unit from the back. There seemed a lot of red and blue in some of the contemporary depictions of the Carolingain military I found, so I felt comfortable giving these "better quality" guys a bold uniform red cloak look. 

FiB horsemen in leather armour, as Medium cavalry. Of course, LBMS shields.

The Horse Archers - a Baueda special, painted ages ago and now rebased to the same scheme as the rest of the army

Armoured cavalry from FiB (maybe a couple of Baueda boys sneaking in there too)

Baueda infantry, apart from the unit in the centre front, who are FiB with the more distinctive Carolingian helmets. Because the Baueda chaps are fairly non-specific they may appear as Saxons or something at some point in future too.

From the back the Contrast Paint style really shows up well. 

FiB Light Horse. I only needed 2 bases, so mixed in a few of the other riders with the Medium cavalry

Javelin skirmishers. Fairly weedy dudes, not sure how long their ankles will survive in-game handling TBH

And, the whole set - 38 bases including Generals. I suspect some Vikings will also freelance as mercenaries at some point when they finally get on the table too.

There are even more photos in the 15mm photo gallery of these dudes.