Mahoosive Camels!

Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a Monster ?

Or is it a Museum Miniatures Midianite Bedouin Camel?

Having bought a dozen of the aforementioned creatures recently to flesh out an allied contingent for my Assyrians my plan was to use some old Essex bow-armed camel riders I had kicking about as the Light Camels and use the double-crewed Midianite ones as the Medium Camelry with bows in the core Early Bedouin ally.

Museum figures are made of a really strong but pliable metal compound, so tweaking one of the bowmen's arms and cutting off his bow to turn him into a flag holder to create a Commander/General figure was fairly easy to do;

But just have a look how these beasts compare size-wise to the Essex camels !

They are great figures, even allowing for the single pose - but boy are they huge!

Rug-a-dub-dub

Here's another refurbished Ghaznavid/Arab elephant, this time with an added printed rug:

The print quality isn't perhaps as good as it could be as I printed it with a relatively low resolution printer but as a test of concept I am still quite pleased with it.

The rugs can be found on my Pinterest page

Clogging Hell - We're all going Dutch!

A recent one-day event in Oxford gave me a chance to wheel out some almost forgotten FoG:Renaissance troops in 15mm scale to take part in a tightly themed C16 competition for the armies involved in the Great Rebellions of that era - the French Wars of Religion, the 80 Years War of Dutch Independence and the many Peasant Revolts across Europe.

Given the multitude of choices - and because no-one had bitten at my incredibly well crafted attempt at a joke on the FoGR Forum along the lines of..

• "How big is your army?"

• "It's Huguenot.."

..I ended up taking the 80YW Dutch, with a vague plan to batter my opponents senseless with artillery whilst reducing my opportunity to make the sorts of mistakes that someone who hasn't played these rules for ages might do by having a plan that didn't really involve moving my troops at all. 

The armies duly swept back and forth across the tabletops in textbook checker board formations and much Dutch courage was taken by all sides. And I used a ship! 

Read on for the usual rubbish-packed and ship-tastic reports to see how the Cloggers managed to do in these 3 FoGR battle reports

The Venetians @ The USTT 2019 - a Madaxeman.com Podcast

The USTT L'Art de la Guerre event is one of the bigger North American tournaments which in January 2019 attracted 40 players in teams of 4... including Henry "Tucker" Saglio who was kind enough to agree to be interviewed about his 5 games on the Madaxeman.com Podcast.

The interview was conducted over Skype, so there are moments where the audio is a bit patchy, but hey, it's not like you've signed up to this on Patreon or anything now is it?

His own write ups of his games also appear on the ADLG forum, and the lists he played against can be found on the Madaxeman ADLG Wiki



Tucker's Venetian Italian Condottieri list was as follows:

C-in-C (Gattamelata) (Brilliant)
-2 Heavy Knight, Impact, Ordinary
-2 Crossbow, Ordinary
-2 Medium Swordsmen, Heavy Weapons, Ordinary
-2 Light Infantry, Firearms, Elite

Command 2 (Sforza) (Brilliant)
-3 Heavy Knight, Impact, Ordinary
-2 Crossbow, Ordinary
-1 Light Horse, Crossbow, Ordinary
-1 Heavy Artillery

Command 3 (Ordinary)
-3 Heavy Knight, Impact, Ordinary
-2 Light Horse, Javelin, Elite

This podcast is also available on YouTube, with pictures of figures that "could" have been in the armies involved playing on rotation in the background, and it should also soon be available to download from iTunes

The Paphlagonians survive a varnish experience

Much to my relief, the ink-washed Xyston figures did come through a spray varnish this morning unscathed.

If anything it seems to have helped highlight the definition and texture of their silk-effect uniforms.

As you can see from the left shoulder of the chap in the front left corner of this base, there has still been some colour-bleed between the different inked colours, but whether it's something which is worth (or even possible) to touch up without making it look worse is questionable.

Now all I need to do is steel myself to grab a very fine brush and paint in their headbands...

15mm ADLG Arab army on eBay

Downsizing my oversized 15mm ancients collection means I have realised that I enough spares to sell on eBay a whole "Arab" army, using figures from various manufacturers to make up armies for many of the "Arab" forces in the L'Art de la Guerre rulebook. 

That means that on eBay right now is an army made up of the following ADLG-based units;

• 3 Generals

• 1 Elephant 

• 2 "Dailami" Medium Foot

• 6 Ghilman Bow-armed Cavalry 

• 4 LH with bow

• 2 LH with javelin/Impact

• 1 LH Javelin

• 2 LF Bow

• 4 HI Spearmen

• 4 "DBx" bases of Bow + 2 "DBx" bases of Swordsmen, plus metal sabots to base them as bow-only or as mixed units

• 3 Knights

• 2 Spearmen

• 1 Crossbow unit

• 1 LF Bowman

• Army Baggage Train 80x40 base

Allied "Christian" contingent of

The figures are mostly Essex, but also include Outpost (most of the Arab cavalry) and a few others. They are all based and magnabased.

The auction ends around 8pm on Sunday 20th UK time. 

WW2 15mm stuff - going on eBay

With my 4 Bisley 15 drawer filing cabinet (eBay link) figure storage solution rapidly approaching "full" status, rather than test the floorboards (and my domestic harmony) with a 5th cabinet it's become time to have a bit of a new year clearout.

The end result is that onto eBay rumbles a 15mm WW2 Russian army (well, probably more like a company with armour support) as well as some excess 15mm German armour.

The Russian figures - and there are nearly 200 of them - are mostly original Battlefront metal Russians - well fed little chaps with those cute big round heads. 

Originally collected and based for Peter Pig's PBI ruleset, there's also a host of casualty markers included.

The accompanying armoured support is eclectic and numerous - T34's, KV1's as well as some more exotic bits of machinery as well.

PBI bases its LMGs and AT rifles as separate teams, as well as officers for each platoon and company HQ.

The tanks are mostly (but not all) Rocco plastic ones in 1/87th scale. That makes them a smidge larger than normal 1/100th 15mm vehicles, which I feel fits better with the slightly oversized 15mm infantry that Battlefront make.

They are also better proportioned than many of Battlefront's supposedly 15mm-scale AFV's, which seem to be stretched vertically to scale with their infantry too.

And then, in a separate listing, the German armour.

Two Forged in Battle Tiger 1's, and a couple of (I think) Skytrex metal PzIV's both is late war cammo schemes.

(this is the one out of the FiB 3-pack that I'm keeping - the ones on sale are identical, but are numbered 201 and 213)

Both lots are on eBay now and will end next Sunday evening (20th) around 7pm. A %zge of all sale fees go to SSAFA, the armed forces charity. 

All the links in this post will take you to eBay to bid for them if you wish.

15mm Xyston Paphlagonians & Takabara

There's plenty of early classical era armies which have a handful of "Persian Takabara", "Paphlagonian", "Arachosian" or other "Generic Eastern-ish Minor Nation" Medium Infantry, armed either with javelins or spears.  These guys are never vital, but often "nice to have" - especially as Javelinmen in L'Art de la Guerre to give an army a nice little anti-elephant force.

In the same Attack! purchase from Damian at Donnington as the recently-finished Egyptian Marines now come some Xyston Takabara and Paphlagonian infantry to fill that particular gap.

These figures have Thracian-style shields which need to be glued onto the figures (using my standard 2-part epoxy liquid metal).

The shields were close enough in shape that I was able to dig out some unused LBMS Thracian transfers - sadly I only had 4 left, meaning I had to actually paint the other ones myself (nightmare!)

The uniforms are done almost entirely in inks - not even washes, proper Windsor and Newton ink (amazon affilate link) on a white base coat.

This is a technique I've used on Persians in the past, as it gives a distinctive "silks" effect. There are only a handful of colours in use, namely Blue, Vridian, Deep Red and Peat Brown (the latter being on the leather gilets some of the guys are wearing, which were painted either leather brown or Skeleton Bone as a base colour).

The end result is a pretty bright and cheery set of unit, and with shields which don't look too badly out of place even with a few LBMS ones in the front rank as well.

The challenge with using ink as a main colour is that it doesn't fully dry - painting anything next to an inked area leads to the ink bleeding into the new, liquid colour.

That also makes applying varnish by brush almost impossible too - hence these not (yet) being matt varnished, and also not (yet) having painted leather straps as headbands on some of the figures.

My aim is to use a spray varnish instead of trying to brush one on, but at the moment it's too cold outside to risk spraying them.  After that they will look more matt, and be easier to handle.

Museum Miniatures Assyrian Army

Having been rather light on Biblical armies, ADLG and its easy-to-collect army size has allowed me to turbocharge this previously neglected part of my collection.

First up were the Myceneans, and then the NKE ended up being rebased as well. But now, finally, and after 30 years of collecting and gaming I now have an Assyrian army as well!

As with the Myceneans, my choice was to go with Museum figures. They are a little static in their poses and stylized, but for Biblical era I feel that this style works really well.

The Assyrians are a ruthlessly efficient army and so the regular poses of most of the men also feels right. Many of the colour choices were inspired by (but sadly not particularly closely copied from) the fantastic 28mm Foundry range, which have provided three Generals elements for this army as well.

The highlight is of course the Chariotry - which I've tarted up using a common or garden cheap printer and some Google-fu to search for "Assyrian Patterns", downloading and printing out some images to paste onto the walls of the Chariots to surprisingly good effect.

There's a full page of pictures of all of the figures, together with paint selection details (and links to eBay to find the paints) to browse now;

 

There is also a video of all of these photos on Youtube