Devizes 2024 - the Battle Reports !

In a truly surprising development, 4 "traditional format" read-along battle reports are now available for anyone who wishes to follow the varied exploits of a deeply smelly and unwashed Ilkhanid Mongol army in stunning hyper-colour  and (mostly) 28mm plastic, as they take on the Samurai, the Ghaznavids, the Burmese and finally the Mongols of Timur the Lame down in the heart of the West Country at Attack! 2024's ADLG competition.

Thrill as the Armenian-supported Ilkhanids send waves of fragrant dancing cavalry, eager unwashed knights and reluctant yet deeply sweaty spearmen out to fight a variety of almost equally colourful foes, including Mighty Shrew Elephants dressed in patchwork duvets ...

 

..bare-chested Burmese jungle dwelling tribesmen who can wiggle all of their toes independently, and...

.. the "I can't believe it's not Seleucid" Elephant Corps of Tamerland the Great and his horde of partly undead warriors and cannon fodder. 

Yes, this is a possibly welcome (YVMV) return to the old-school of battle report blogging, with rubbish captions, a probably unhealthy focus on the Mongol's poor personal hygenine, ridiculously OTT descriptive sentence structures, and the musings of both the Ilkhanid Khan and (of course) Nasty Hannibal himself  to reconsider all of the action at the end of each game. 

These battle reports are accompanied by the "Melksham, Don't Mind if I do!" edition of the Madaxeman (Video) Podcast.

 

Ten Kingdoms 3D printed Sung Chinese

 In my ongoing dabbling with 3D printed figures the latest test batch is a sample set of cavalry and a few infantry from Ten Kingdoms, as produced under license in the UK by eBay seller Micks Bits.

These chaps are - as printed - slightly large for 15mm, but Mick seems to have found a very good quality resin, robust but with just enough flex not to be as snap-liable as some of the earlier 3D prints I've tested the waters (or resins..) with in the past. 

They are really, really crisp figures, seemingly with more detail emerging the more time you spend trying to paint them properly (!) - another sign that 3D printing even for small scale miniatures continues to come on in leaps and bounds. 

The cavalry even come with pre-printed 3D shields (only one design I think) which you can ink wash and add a bit of paint to and come up with a classic Chinese dragon-face thingy fairly easily.

There is a hard-to-pin-down difference between these CAD-designed sculpts and "normal" sculptor-carved figures, which is perhaps best articulated as these being somehow "cleaner" - but this range at least seems to have managed to get in quite a bit of the artistic elements of "character", with even facial expressions being visibly different on the individual figures. 

Here are the archer and crossbowman stood next to some Lurkio metal castings I bought and painted up at the same time. 

At tabletop distances they are not noticably different in height, but the 3D prints are more well-fed and the difference in amount and sharpness of detail is very noticable. 

I'm working through a fairly major pile of "undercoat these figures outside before the weather turns" at the moment, so quite when I will get around to turning this sample-sized initial purchase into a full army is anyone's guess, but the more time I spend looking at these guys the more convinced I am that I will end up with a Song / Ming / Khitan army using Ten Kingdoms sculpts (designs?) at some point in the near future,. 

 

2024 Kegworth Codgers Midweek Challenge: Runners & Riders

 We now have a near-full list of Runers & Riders for the upcoming Kegworth Codgers Midweek Challenge ADLG competition, with a rather astounding 32 players finding time from their busy retirement and part-time work schedules to attend plus - I believe - one chap who was so desparate not to miss out on a couple of days in an unbranded Premier Inn-equivalent motel just off the M1 that he's booked 2 days holiday to play too.

The event is themed for Kegworth's great transport links and proximity to the Fosse Way, inspiring a Roman Roads theme of "armies valid in the period when the Romans were building roads across the Britain, 43-407AD" and that has resulted in a pretty decent spread of options, with 21 different lists represented including 7 Roman armies and a further 7 hailing from outside the Roman sphere of influence.

In a week and a bit therefore the mighty halls of the Kegworth Hotel & Conference Centre will echo to the sounds of warfare, as the battle is joined to see who is the Codger of the Year 2024.  

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Future Islands ?

Having a strong Guernsey connection has made me rather enamoured of Martello Towers, and so when I saw that Brigade Models did Black Seas-sized Martello Towers it was inevitable I would have to buy some. 

And here they are in all their teeny tiny glory!

The islands are irregular MDF bases I picked up at the Attack! show from Products for Wargamers, and will soon be providing challenging obstacles for my two navies to try and avoid running aground on! 

28mm Velites

 I've got a Foundry early Roman army in the lead pile at the moment, but in the interests of getting rid of some left over sprues of the mostly-Victrix Hellenistics I decided to repurpose some of the Victrix skirmishers as Velites - as after all, it's just some dudes with a javelin in a skirt, right? 

And here they are - the vanguard of a 28mm Roman army! 

I have a suspicion these shields are from some Dark Age viking types that have languished in the plastic bits box for a while. They may stay transfer-free as well.

The white tuunics are a base coat of white, then Warlord Holy White, then normal paint white  highlights 

I picked a variety of heads, some bear headed, some with generic Hellenistic/Roman heads

With a few more bases of Light Infantry I already have, this should be enough of a screen for the  armoured Legions of Rome!

Bring & Buy .. & Rebase and refurb!

At the recent Attack! show in Devizes I sort of accidentally managed to buy a 15mm Feudal/Medieval Russian army scaled for L'Art de la Guerre.

It was a bring and buy purchase, and I thought it looked close enough to my own painting style to be compatible with my other Eastern European armies, and also that it looked like it was great value - something I immediately rushed off to tell Jason, who I'd travelled to the show with.. only to find that it was one he'd put on the Bring & Buy himself! 

So, with a transaction which could have taken place in the boot of my car managing also to financially support the DDWG club fund, I now owned a Medieval/Feudal Russian army from Essex minis that only needed a bit of rebasing, a few dabs of paint and the addition of some paper banners to become quite an impressive complement to my existing  Hungarians.

And here they are:

Commanders on 40mm round bases

Heavy Cavalry 

Spearmen

"Guard" cavalry - the elite of the army

Follower cavalry - less well armoured than the others

Light Horse javelins or lancers - these will also appear as Serbian Hussars in other armies I think? 

Steppe horse archers

Russian army infantry bowmen

Axemen (foresters)

The cheering peasants who follow the army

Lesser armoured Medium cavalry.

The flags mostly come from Martins Vexillia site plus some from Alex Flags site

I'm dead chuffed with them, however you’d perhaps be surprised at how little I’ve done to them. 

The main visual differences are adding a few flags, and repainting the spears and bows in a much paler) Vallejo Ochre Brown 70.865, then adding a little black line to delineate the metal and wooden parts of the spears, plus the rebasing.

For some reason (that I don’t quite understand), making the spears and bows really stand out with a pale colour makes a big difference - the spears stand out against what are generally darker figures, and the effect of making them "ping" that results is wildly disproportionate to the fairly limited effort involved.

I've already gone back and done this to a good few of my own armies that originally had dark or dull brown “wood” colours for spears and in every case the visual impact is far more than it feels like it should be.

 

Oh My God! It's a POD!

 After an unfeasible hiatus a new edition of the Madaxeman Podcast has just dropped ! 

In this new episode titled "Melksham? Don't mind if I do!" a part new, part old crew head down to the West Country for a bit of Hard Rock, a lot of beer, pubs and food, and (eventually) some rather eclectic analysis of a variety of unsuccesful army lists used by us all at the recent ADLG competitions held at the Attack! show in Devizes.

The cast are me Dave from The Podcast, Another Dave (technically "the Dave formerly known as Pants"), Jason and Steve, and all of us can now take you on an audio journey way down Melksham Way. 

• The lists we discuss are available on the ADLG Wiki
• The ADLG Army list content starts about 22.45 into the audio version, or a smidge later on the special YouTube "Talking Heads" edition, so if you aren't interested in pubs and the Avebury Stone Circle (really?) you can either start, or stop listening around then as you choose.

Listen on Podbean:

View on YouTube:

The Big Little Ships

 Having sworn blind that I'd not get suckered into buying any more ships for Warlord Games Black Seas game (after all, as long as you have a handful of ships for each side, does it really matter how big they are?), I of course cracked recently after seeing a good deal on eBay for two of the biggest ships in the roster, some 1st Rates.

The pair I got were a French and British "Generic" 1st Rate - it seems if you buy a "named" ship (ie Nelson's Victory etc) then it costs another tenner or more than a generic 1st Rater, and frankly neither me nor any of the people I occasionally play this fairly beer-and-pretzels game with would know the difference anyway. 

So, here's one of the two beasties in pre-priming mode:

Unlike all of the others I have, this is a resin hull with metal masts - which does cause a bit of concern about whether they will be more bendy than the plastic ones in the other smaller ships.

Speaking of which, here are all 4 of the sizes of ships I now own - left to right is 1st Rate, 3rd Rate, Frigate and then Brig.  Anyways..

And here is a ship painted up on it's own before rigging. I did the colours much the same as the previous ones I have made, so the key colour here is GW Contrast Yanden Yellow, which gives that great golden hue to the hull. 

And here is the finished (British) article in all its glory.

Given these were such big ships - and also due to my concerns over metal masts possibly bending - I did add some "extra" rigging to this one too - to make it look more busy, and to actually try and use rigging to hold the masts in place (which is what I think it was used for in real life too - which is reassuring if true).

This rather disturbingly annotated picture shows the main extra bits of rigging. Essentially I added two more sets of double-rigging going forwards from the top of the Main and Mizzen masts to the holes in the sides of the ship which the Warlord guide suggests are used for rigging going up to the rear of the Main and Fore masts. 

This sort of anchors the 2 big masts at the back with cotton rigging both fore and aft, which should surely be more secure?

I also found this great guide on JJ's Wargames Blog from back in 2019 which gave me a guide to adding a sort of spiders web of rigging at the back of the ship, which also anchors the Mizzen mast to the horizontal bits that stick out at the rear - so again its structurally beneficial as well as deeply psychologically traumatic and borderline insane to add this stuff to the basic Warlord Gide rigging arrangement. 

Frankly having even as many of these things as I do own is ridiculous given how infrequently we play, but they are just so cool I am sure I will end up succumbing and buying some more .. maybe if eBay throws up some bargains ! 

  

Here's all my Blogger Black Seas content:

• First Steps
• The full how-to guide with tips and tricks
• Third Raters
• Adding a resin-hulled First Rate, and some extra rigging ideas 
• A whole page of these, together with some info on how they were painted and some tips I picked up on how to do the rigging as well.

A small handful of small Samurai

Quite a few years ago I got a Samurai army painted up professionally by Simon Clarke's Lurkio painting shop - the only army in my collection to be painted by someone else. This was mainly as I really didn't fancy (aka didn't think I was good enough) to paint up a Samurai army and do it justice.

In the process of deciding what figures to get painted though, I did buy a few different ranges before finally settling on Old Glory - and in a recent trawl through the spares box I happened to come across a few baggies of Essex Samurai that I'd considered and then rejected for the army. 

Having succesfully added some much easier to paint Light Infantry Ashigaru archers to the army last year, for some reason when I found these actual Samurai I decided that I might actually have a go at these figures too, and see if I could now paint them to a standard which was something even vaguely close to the pro-paint job on the rest of the Samurai in the army. 

And here they are - almost finished, apart from I am still waiting on some transfers for the large banners.

 

From a distance they actually look reasonable IMO - although its one of those "trick of the eye" things that if you zoom in, or blow up the picture too much they can look rather ropey.

The key techniques I used here were;

• Black undercoat, with the armour being done with a coat of Contrast Blood Angels Red straight onto the black. This seemed to give a good simulation of the red lacquer effect that you can often see in Samurai armour in museums
• The "dots" have been done in Skeleton Bone - which has the advantage of not being anywhere near as harsh as a flat white dots would have been. 
• I have also done a few stripes as well to break up the effect, and not tried to do every dot either - often it is just around the edges of a plate of armour rather than at every piece.
• The uniforms are done in solid normal colours to get a good coverage, and look different to the armour effect of contrast on black. 
• I also snuck in a few minor variations of legging and sock colours to make them slightly less uniform - the handful of "military green" belts also helps a lot with breaking things up too IMO.

As long as you keep at tabletop distances the impression is much better as your mind sort of assumes the dots are in the right places as there are too many of them to take in individually I suspect.

Here are some Ashigaru with naginata and a Samurai commander - again waiting for a transfer for his banner 

I followed the "mostly red" theme with them as well.

Here's a base next to a pro-painted base of Old Glory figures. 

The OG 15's are far heftier, as well as being better painted - so you'd really not want to mix them on a sngle base.  But for a couple of units of different status (in a different command maybe?) I'm still happy with how these have come out.