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.
 

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. 

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;

Generals & Valkyrie

Medium Axemen

Medium Warriors

Beserkers 

Huscarls

Spearmen

Huscarls again

And again...

Rus

Rus

Rus, featuring The (legendary) Rus Abbot in the centre of the line

10mm WW2 - The Allies

The "refurbish and replace" campaign for my WW2 Blitzkrieg Commander collection is now gathering pace. 

Or, put another way, painting stripes on German tanks is a right PITA so I have given myself a break and instead managed to bash out the entire allied contingent in a week or so as they have no cammo at all!

The end result is a force containing models and figures from Pithead, Pendraken, Victrix, Butlers Printed Models, Minifigs and Arrowhead, all of which have been painted in a fetching and thankfully simple Bronze Green + drybrush scheme and based using my new basing system of stained sand on mdf bases. 

There are loads more photos of these models on the Madaxeman website as well as a whole page of the Germans too

(I did cheat a little by using the Vallejo German Track colour, but hopefully no-one will notice....)

Victrix Shermans

Victrix, Pithead and then Pendraken Shermans

Arrowhead Cromwell

British Para support units 

Arrowhead infantry with Pithead motorcyclists added in

Pendraken Priest and Sherman Flail

Minifigs Bren Carriers

Recce units from a variety of sources

Pithead British Para Jeep

Butlers Printed Models British trucks and Quad tractor

Staghound from Pithead

Churchill Crocodile from Arrowhead

Pithead Artillery Observer up a ladder strapped to a truck (!)

There are loads more photos of these models on the Madaxeman website as well as a whole page of the Germans too
   

It's A Battle Report !

OK, it's a video of a battle played online on Tabletop Simulator... but in this world of global gaming Lockdown I'm afraid this may be as good as it gets for a while longer!

So, for those of you missing the clatter of dice on cloth-covered chipboard here is a game of L'Art de la Guerre played on Tabletop Simulator between two very different Justinian Byzantine armies, both previously featured in the Madaxeman Justinian Byzantine List Building Podcast.

Thankfully (as anyone who's actually watched any tabletop wargame before will know) the gameplay has been speeded up significantly such that the whole battle plays out in only about 20 minutes of onscreen time. 

As well as all the action (hah!) the video also features a running commentary provided by me and Dave (the players) in which we attempt to explain what is happening, and to provide our respective hastily constructed post-hoc justifications for what we thought we were trying to achieve at the time.

Finally, to round things off there's a short discussion of the lists being used and a mercifully brief post-match chat as well where we deconstruct all of the "tactics" and gameplay.

You can watch the original podcast in which these two lists were put forward on the Madaxeman YouTube channel where you can also watch this video on YouTube as well as embedded here on the Madaxeman website / Blogger site.  

You can also replay the game yourself, as the two armies have been set up on a virtual tabletop as a Steam Workshop Item for Tabletop Simulator.

10mm WW2 - the refurbishment project begins

Almost exactly a year ago, at the PAW show in Plymouth I picked up a handful of 10mm WW2 AFV's from a company I'd not seen before - Red 3 Miniatures - kicking off a long-thought-about plan to replace my eclectic and randomly painted collection of WW2 10mm stuff for BKC. 

A year later, some more purchases from a variety of companies and some eBay sales to clear out the old stuff and the new toys are finally starting to make it onto the table, and also to appear in the rather neglected 10mm Photo Gallery on Madaxeman.com as well. 

Here's a Red 3 Hanomag - a really crisp casting with well designed separate crew who are cast in 2 strips and just slot into the back of the cab. The gunner is cast as a 3rd drop-in piece tother with his gun and mantlet making this a very robust bit of kit

Top down view

I now have a half-dozen of these, and some Engineering variants are no doubt going to be ordered soon too - but I'm waiting to see if any more variants get released so I can put in a bigger order. 

The numbers are from Pendraken. I know they may well not make sense as s system, but they are all different and they look cool to me so that's basically OK I reckon! 

250's for Recce, one is a 250/11 with 28mm gun, but could easily be the 250/9 with 37mm I think. 

The crew and gun drops in as one pre-cast unit, but I've added an extra perching Arrowhead Minis tank rider crewman for more variety 

This is an old Pendraken StuG, originally an infantry support version with a short barrel gun but I managed to mislay the barrel when I stripped the old model down for a repaint so ended up adding in a rather large Arrowhead Minis long barrel gun, as their StuG's come with two barrels with different mantlets. 

The guys on the back are Arrowhead tank riders. Huge variety, really detailed castings

Here you can see the variety of poses and weapons. 

Butlers Printed Models resin print Opel Blitz. 

Opel Blitz Command from Red 3, and Butlers standard Opel Blitz

Repainted Takara kit of a Marder. 

StuG and a Takara pre-painted Panther.  I might end up repainting it to better match the cammo on the rest of the force, but it's pleasingly close to what I've managed to do myself. 

There will be more of these to come in the next few months and weeks !