Madaxeman's Wargames Blog

14 Mar 2021

Persians, Thracians and ...10mm Barons War?

The last week has seen a bit of a flurry of activity as a few purchases from the Museum Miniatures sale have made it to the top of the pile, together with some more Xyston Persians to go with the Cyrus' Mobile Towers of last year.

These are sold by Museum as Scythian horse archers, from their recent "Z" range of releases.

I'm using them as Thracians, by painting them in a similar style to some rather venerable Xyston Thracian infantry which were bought as a couple of FoG AM units, but which I have recently worked out could almost make up an entire ADLG army with a bit of extra stuff added to them.

As is usual with these new Museum figures, whilst the 15mm scale castings aren't (of course) quite as sharp as the 3D renders on their website would suggest, they do paint up nicely and have a pleasing amount of variety in the poses and clothing of the figures in each set too.

Here I've mixed in a pack of Greek Light Horse (the javelin-armed figures) with mounted Scythian-style archers to create some Thracian cavalry who could serve both as Getae horse archers or as normal Thracians.

I've also complete another 4 units of Persian cavalry, with the eventual aim of making up a "loads of poor quality mounted" Achaemenid Persian list for ADLG.

These are Xyston castings, superbly detailed which I have painted up in a rather irregular paint scheme.

Most of these figures have some sort of scale armour, so I've done a few with metal and the rest with leather effect on the scales.

These are Thracian light horse javelinmen gain from Museum - the bear-headed Greek Light Horse from Museum making up much of the unit, with some hand-made shields added cut out from stiff card to "Thracian-ize" them.

Again they come with a good variety of poses even within each pack.

This is a head-on comparison photo showing the Xyston cavalry on the left and the Museum Z range ones on the right. The Xystons are two-piece castings and here it really shows how this allows their figures to be "wider" whereas the one piece casting Museum ones are a little "linear" by comparison, with the rider's pose very much in line with the horse.

Another comparison shot, this time with the Museum figures on the left.

This weekend I also got a parcel through from Ryan McKnight (admin of the very useful Wargames Events and Shows page on Facebook) who is producing them through a kickstarter at the moment under the banner of Apocalypse Miniatures

It's many years since I painted up any 10mm medievals, but these look really sharp (and I'm a sucker for a freebie!) so when I was offered some I couldn't resist!

This coming week I'll be divvying up the sample pack Ryan sent across and arranging a clandestine meeting (probably at the Hangar Lane Gyratory System) with Dave from the Madaxeman Podcast (Frumentarius23 on Instagram) so I can share them with him, and we will both have a go at painting them and see how they come out in the next few weeks.

5 Mar 2021

Refurbished Teutonics & Medievals

With a massive stack of bases from Pendraken's Minibits offshoot in my possession I've been taking a short break from painting and instead doing some upgrade and refurbishment work on a whole load of under-loved and slightly tired looking older figures recently.

It not only makes a change from painting, but upgrading the basing and tidying up long lost figures does mean you can achieve a result really quickly!

The latest batch to into the ankle-deep water bath are some medievals, from Roundway and Fighting 15's Gladiator Games ranges (more of which later!) which I have rebased and added a few extra bits to as well.

These figures are mostly (all?) from the Gladiator Games Crusades ranges, listed as "Frankish" crusading dismounted knights and spearmen.

Rebasing them allowed me to go over some of their clothing which had gotten a little faded in the last, erm, 20+ years !

These are also Gladiator Games crossbowmen - some are in the Frankish Crusades range, others in their Feudal and Medieval sections.

The pavises are home made.

I used 2 glued together business cards to get a pavise of the right thickness, then added a further thin strip of business card, over which I glued printed off pictures of some "real" reneactor pavises I found on Pinterest.

The central added strip of card gives the finished pavise some depth and 3D-type effect, as a simple flat panel just doesn't really look right somehow.

I added in a few spearmen and officers to make the pavisiers a bit more, well, combatitive-looking too.

The level of detail you can get with a fairly normal modern printer is way beyond what I could manage myself with a brush - these ones did have a few blobs of gold and bronze added to them though, so there is some artistry there on my part!

These are halberdiers from Roundway - originally they were based on 2 DBx bases 4 men across, but in transferring them to ADLG double-ranked bases I've put 7 figures on each base as it still looks like a close formation unit but with a bit more space to see the figures - and swing a halberd around too!

These are my go-to generic "medieval halberdiers" for mamy armies.

They are also almost colourful enough to play as Swiss if needed.

Basing them as 7's left four spare figures, so adding in a couple of spare Essex halberdiers also gave me an extra Medium Foot halberdier - who almost certanly will be Swiss at some point!

Here's the double-double ranked version of all 28 of them.

19 Feb 2021

10mm Paras - US Rebased & British 17pdrs

Entering the home stretch of the rebasing and replacing of my 10mm WW2 forces now, and leaving me with "only" (laughs maniacally...) a load of German late war 3-tone cammo tanks to do it's the turn of the US paras to be rebased, and also for three Pendraken 17pdr guns to come to the aid of my British Paras and British Army troops.

I now have two Para-crewed 17pdrs and one "British Khaki dudes" one

I'm not sure why I didn't have any of these before to be honest - I seem to have loads of 6pdrs though

The sloped front plate is really distinctive.

I also managed to get plenty of the para crew in red berets, which Podcast listeners will be pleased to hear no doubt.

These are mostly Arrowhead Paras, although the guys with mohicans are Pendraken "pathfinder" figures.

As with my rant about berets, I am still puzzled as to why there aren't more mohican-sporting figures in the Pendraken range ! !

These are now quite old - I have pictures of them on their previous basing dating back to at least 2009

These are on 40x30 bases, so sort of mini-FOW sized really

I also based some figures up as spotters and a recce platoon - and there are some prome HMG teams too to round out the force.

13 Feb 2021

Rebooted Vikings & Rus

With plenty of time on my hands I've been systematically rebasing some of my older armies, shifting them from DBM-era basing to ADLG double-basing, and in the process reorganising the figures as well to make more coherent ADLG armies and troop types.

One of my largest DBM armies was a huge almost-all Two Dragons Viking/Rus force, with 80+ DBx HI bases, loads of medium foot and a ridiculous 44 LI with bow, allowing me to field full rear support for all 80-odd double ranked infantry when the army took to the field as Rus.

ADLG armies being considerably smaller than this has allowed me to not only update the basing, but to reshuffle the figures so I now have separate Rus and Viking warriors, and also separate bases of Vikings to appear as Spearmen, Swordsmen and axe-wielding Huscarls instead of the previous "Tonight Matthew, these figures will be appearing as..." hodge-podge of mixed bases I had before.

I have also tarted up all of the spears - repainting them all in a lighter colour in line with my latest style, and added some basic blacklining on the spear tips and hands to give them a bit more "ping", and added some new banners using glued-together brush bristles to create "crosses", and then hanging (aka gluing) small vertical banners to the crossbars using graphics from a computer game which I found on Pinterest.

Now this project is complete I've taken a load of photos of the refurbished collection using my cheapo China-bought lightbox and my cheapo camera with a 400 ISO setting, and uploaded the full set of photos into the 15mm Gallery on Madaxeman.com where you can find them all in the Viking and Rus galleries

I've also posted some here too;