Roman Army Museum & the Vindolanda Fort

 The final tranche of photos from the epic trip to (and from) the Sighian Dubh competition in Irvine are now up and posted on this website, and feature a run-through of some of the key Hadrians Wall-adjacent history sites in the north of England

In plain english that means the Roman Army History Museum, and the nearby Vindolanda archeological site and museum on the northern border of the Roman Empire.

All of the photos we took are online on my website here , but hhere is a small smattering of them as well to give you a taster of the site.

You've already seen the "How big is that ballista" photos, so now is a chance to immerse yourself in the rest of Rome's northern border's history !

Painting 28mm Successors from Victrix: The Light Troops

I've finally managed to get some of the 28mm Victrix Successors I previewed in a half-painted state a few weeks ago finished, and into the light box for some professional-grade (ahem) photos. 

The context to this is that I'm building my first ever Successor/Alexandrian 28mm army, and so with a huge range of troops to choose from in Successor armies I didn't want to do my usual "try and make and spray the whole army in one go" thing, but instead break the task down into manageable chunks that I could stay motivated to complete - hence deciding to start with the "light" troops

That ended up meaning that my first (OK second - I have completed and taken photos of some test bases before now) batch of figures for this army ended up being Light Infantry, Javelinmen, Peltasts and a couple of bases of Galatian crazy heavy infantry (because, well, they are really cool figures.)

And, the results are now in, with this smattering of photos plus a whole lot more on the website :

The Successor painting page on the website has all of these and more, as well as some commentary on how I approached painting them in a "Contrast-plus" style.

RAF Cosford Museum: The Photos

The drive from London up to Irvine for the recent ADLG event was way too long to attempt in a singel day, so Dave from the Podcast and I headed out on Thursday evening after work, stopping just north of Birmingham (in Ironbridge) overnight to break up the journey.

Ironbridge is also - rather conveniently - very close indeed to RAF Cosford, the Midlands branch of the RAF Museum, and a place I'd long had on my to-visit military museums list.

So, after a hearty breakfast it was time to hit the halls for some aircraft (and Cold War AFV) action, the full results of which are now all online in the RAF Cosford section of my Museums Gallery pages. 

Here's a brief taster of some of the highlights:

The near legendary TSR-2, the great "what if" of British post war military aviation 

This Ju88 "defected" to England during WW2

The museum is the only one in the world with all 3 V-bombers on display

Yes, there are some tanks too...

Best way to display a Lightning - going straight up!

If you thought your wargames cupboard was disorganised....

This is actually an Airfix plastic kit in 1:1 scale from the BBC Richard May series!

 The museum website can be found here

Smoke me a Sporran, the Ottomans are heading North to Scotland !

 Finally, after many years of dithering, I at last was now about to add yet another country to the roster of places where I've played ADLG (a list including England, Ireland, Wales, France, Greece, USA, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Spain..) - in the shape of Scotland!

Yes, an epic drive to the West Coast border town of Irvine, famous for being the site of Scotland's 12th century military capital and, at the time of David I, Robert II and Robert III, being one of the earliest capitals of Scotland.

But all of that military history was about to be wiped from the slate by the advent of the first edition of the long-running Sighian Dubh event to take place outside of the suburban combat zones of Glasgow, and also the on-table debut of a long since painted Ottoman Turkish army as well!

The event was themed for Late armies - post 1066, which inevitably would mean a lot of heavy metal. I disregarded this entirely and picked an Ottoman force on the basis that I had painted the core of them a while ago and then added some of the scraps of Clive's collection of many Ottoman armies to round my handful of Legio Heroica purchases and Old Glory hand-me-downs up to a complete force, and because they also looked really pretty.

Read on for the usual heady mix of garbled nonsense, inappropriate Scottish-themed GIFs and videos, vaguely witty captions attached to pictures of little soldiers in action, and yet more cutting post battle analysis from Medieval Hannibal ! 

28mm Successors

 Last year at Warfare I turbocharged a rather slow-motion project to collect and paint a Successor army in 28mm by picking up a load of mostly-Victrix plastis figures to give me more than enough to cook up most Successor armies.

I'd already done a couple of test bases (elephants, some Thracians and a slinger unit) but with real life getting in the way for much of this year I'd really struggled to make time and desk space for painting and assembling the rest of the army... until quite recently when I made a stab at getting most of the lighter units ready to put on table. 

This meant some kitbashing with the plastic spares box, mostly working with one of the original Victrix boxes of Hellenistic Skirmishers - a 50+ body box with plenty of javelin and other light troops in it - together with having a bash at the couple of units of Galatians that every self-respecting Seleucid army needs to have in the middle of their line.

I decided to go for a "Contrast First" painting style for the army, starting with a matt white undercoat and then doing all of the flesh on these skirmishers and Thracians in Darkoath Flesh. 

This was almost good enough just for me to go with it for the army, but with the Galatians in particulat warranting a little more effort I then decided to add some rather rough and ready "impressionistic" musculature to the figures in an effort to see if I could do this to a decent enough standard that it wouldn't look totally rubbish!

This was the first real pass at it, using Vallejo Dark Flesh to pick out muscles on the figures. If you zoom in you can see its fairly basic stuff, but I did find these Victrix figures were ideally sculpted to help you identify which bits to pick out and highlight.

I then added a mix of mostly subdued colours to the skirmishers - the white is actually a Warlord Games paint called Holy White that seems to give a good effect without going "too" grey.

The Galatians got a bit more demarcation of their musculature as well at this stage, with some Sunny Skin Tone from Vallejo for additional highlights

After the usual rigmarole of white / gloss varnish / waterslide transfer / gloss varnish with a bit of Microsol and Microset thrown in for good measure the Galatian then had Battle Flag shield patterns too. 

These are the "Thracians" - they are Victrix Hellenistic Skirmisher bodies with added cloaks left over from various figures, some Gothic and Davian heads, and 2-part "falx's" made from the (over-) long curved sword blades from the Fireforge Arab Cavalry box glued onto one side of a figures fist, and a cut-off bit of spear (I think from the Gripping Beast Romans, as it looks pretty thick) glued to the other side. 

There are also plenty of javelinmen and archers - the guys with extra spears behind their shields are soaking up some of the excess javelins in the Victrix pack which have been snipped in half and glued either side of the fist holding the shield. 

The Galatians look particularly jolly with their shields all finished (with painted edges to match the transfer in most cases).  I just about managed to fit 7 on a standard 60x40 base, which gives a very dense formation feel IMO.

And here are the rest of the guys, with sand + woodstain basing, just now waiting for some touchups in bronze (post-matt varnishing) and for me to find and apply some static grass and grass tufts - which are somewhere in the house but are yet to be found! 

Once they are done I'll put some lightbox photos up of the finished articles 

  

 

   

The Fatimid Empire extends to ... Winnersh!

 Back in the mists of time (OK, June..) a mighty Fatmid army took part in the 1-day Southern League ADLG event on the outskirts of reading. 

Or, more accurately, Winnersh..

The theme was The Normans and their Enemies, and having already fielded a Norman army earlier this year in, erm, Normandy I opted to take another never-before-seen force out of the lockdown painting locker and put the little-fancied Fatimids on table for the very first time.

This allowed me to field a number of new-ish units all painted during Lockdown - foremost of which were the possibly spurious Al-Sariyah Pikemen, together with some Medium Infantry Arab Clubmen as part of a rather mixed bag of  one of the lesser-seen Arab armies. 

The event saw the Fatimids taking on a range of thematic opponents, including the Konstantinian Byzantines, North African Arabs and finally the Kingdom of Sicily

Read on to see the reports in all of their Al-Shearer glory! 

How big is that ballista again?

On a recent gaming trip to Scotland, Dave ("from the podcast") and I dropped into the Roman Army Museum, which is near the Vindolanda fort and is part of the same group of museums allowing entry with a single ticket.

There's a fair bit of stuff to go through from this trip, most if not all of which will make it to this site eventually - but I thought these reconstructued ballistae were pretty interesting in wargaming terms, mainly due to their (small) size.

The one on the left is apparently a millimeter-perfect reconstruction based on an actual ballista frame discovered at Xanten-Wardt in North West Germany in 1999 - and it is very clearly man-portable and designed to fold up, to the extent that you could almost imagine Roman soldiers using it in pairs with one offering his shoudler as a tripod as if they were a WW2 German MG34 team! 

OK, that may be pushing it a bit, but bottom line is this is a pretty small weapon, which got me thinking as to whether we wargamers have been somehow hypnotized into thinking ballistae were all much bigger than this simply because the many small-scale metal castings we own of ballistae are, well, 'bigger' than this too.

Looking at how small and delicate the real thing looks however, I started to wonder if a 15mm sculptor and caster might struggle to make something with these proportions - the legs look almost too spindly to confidently reproduce in metal at that scale for starters - so instead might end up designing and casting a bigger, cruder version that actually works on the tabletop without breaking at first contact with a wargamers thumb and forefinger. 

So, taking this train of thought further, are our wargamers mental images of tactical ballistae are in fact much bigger than they actually were because of the technical limits of 20th Century spin-casting technology - not the limits of 1st Century wood and metalworking?   

Looking at such a small and portable device it was also very easy to imagine a Roman legion or auxiliary unit setting up a few of these and pinging off a sustained barrage of bolts at a distant enemy, either encamped or even just gesticulating angrily at them from the top of a nearby hill. 

In terms of a "mass battle" of many thousands that we wargamers often simulate the effect of this still may not have been all that significant, but walking through the countryside near Hadrians Wall, and seeing the size of the garrison at Vindolanda you can easily imagine that the norm would have been much smaller actions - where a sustained volley of well-aimed long range bolts may indeed have had a quite dramatic effect on the morale of a tribal warband numbering in the dozens, rather than the tens of thousands.

So, some idle speculation to accompany these pictures of torsion artillery - but, even if its nonsense it did make me think, and make me also realise that no matter how well read you may be, it's still always useful to get out there and walk the course occasionally!

And now for something a smidge different : The Battle of Trebbia

 This website is unashamedly a bit competition-gaming orientated (no sh-- Sherlock!) but occasionally I do play other sorts of games, and with Dan H from the US putting out a series of Punic Wars scenarios on the ADLG Facebook group using pretty standard sized armies, the opportunity to do a club-night refight using some little-seen classic Roman figures was too good to miss out on.

Just to prove it happened as much as anything else, I also brought along my camera and took a load of photos to cook up a battle report as well.

The battle features a Roman army with lacklustre leadership and questionable morale against Hannibal, who has the advantage of choosing his ground, laying an ambush, and having a full head of thick luxurious hair (resulting in a post-match analysis from him delivered in the style of a Pulp Fiction era Samuel L Jackson).

In this game I commanded the inexperienced, wet and tired Roman legions in a game where setup was entirely pre-scripted and the first turn saw both sides pictched straight into battle - meaning I was hoping from the off that the martial skills of the Legions would help me change history and confound Hannibals cunning plan!

Read on for the report