Empirical Directions

Here at Jimbob Towers, there has been, as ever, a lot of hobby going on. After my previous post, I was in the throes of a Napoleonic Russian froth and, as ever, this meant purchases almost galore. My intention was to make my Black Powder brigade commanders stand out a bit more on the tabletop and while I waited for my purchases (another box of Perry Russians and a few Russian command sprues) to arrive my attention wandered and my gimlet eye fell upon another neglected project; my Warhammer Fantasy Empire Army...

a force to be reckoned with....

You may or may not recall that I acquired this army back in February of this year like the big, wargaming magpie I am, but had no idea of how or what I was going to do with it. So, last week I decided to give the employment of this army on the tabletop some deeper thought beyond "cooo, shiny! Bright! Pretty!"  I had the notion to use them in an Italian Renaissance setting so I dug out various rulesets that I thought might work and, lo, I found employment for them in three different rulesets; too whit, Warlords of Erehwon, The Pikeman's Lament and Pike & Shotte. Using this army for these three rulesets meant breaking down the units into 12s (10s for WoE) and 6s for foot units and 6-8 figures for mounted units.

So now that I had some idea of what I was doing (a rare occurance, let me tell you) I made a start, in no particular order, repainting them or at least touching up the paint jobs they already had. Although my bigger aim is for P&S Italian Wars I didn't plan to stick to strictly historical paint themes as I find the WHFB armies of the 5th and 6th edition era (mid Nineties to the mid Naughties) very attractive so I started to look to the Warhammer Empire books that I own for inspiration and was soon rewarded

The army, I was told, had been put together in a rush by some chap or other, who used it to play WHFB with his son and it certainly showed in the detail. The paint job was certainly done for mass effect and it works however I wanted to raise the standard a bit so I chose six figures from what I think are supposed to be Knights of the Panther and did a wee bit of surgery, a wee bit of repainting and got carried away...

Original standard of painting on the right, pretty
slapdash, and a repainted knight on the left; just
pretty...

The 5th Edition book of the Empire contains some beautifully painted miniatures done by the GW 'Eavy Metal painting team of that era and they inspiired me to push my painting abilities...

...especially the Elector Count of Averland figure....

...and his wonderfully painted warhorse armour

So, suitably inspired, I set about painting something similar on one of the knights; my first, real attempt at freehand painting of heraldry...

...and I must say I am very pleased with the results...Not only did I tackle painting freehand but I also swapped the heads of all of the knights as they were, originally, all the same. I added a variety of helmeted and non-helmeted heads so that I could give them a bit more personality. 

This fellow will be one of the generals for my bigger games and I will mount him and a small staff;; herald, trumpeter and standard bearer,  on movement trays when it comes to P&S...

...so I did another, though a bit less grandiose but with lots of character....

...and here's a group photo to finish off with. 

This was a really good start for my Italian Wars force which countered the really poor start I made when trying to paint over a unit of halberdeers; they had been thrown together and very roughly painted/washed. And the more I tried to cover up the mess the messier they got till I threw them into a bath of Dettol and stripped them.....but more about them later.

I have obviously got a way to go with this army. My intention is to write out a 1500 point list for WoE and work on getting that force painted up to a better standard; about which more anon. In the meantime, there's even more hobby going on; WoE orcs, Man o' War, Napoleonics etc etc..it's pip pip for the mo, though

Pip pip 

G of J

ps. Apologies that the first paragraph is in a black font whilst the rest ins in white; can't seem to remedy it ...

Back with a Bang: End of the interlude

Big Black Powder Wargaming Weekend

Well it's been a wee while since I last wrote up my blog and that gap has been due to life and some of the stuff that it throws at you. I'm not going to go into any detail about the causes of my lack of writing; stuff happens, some worse stuff than other stuff and I know other people have to deal with even worse stuff but suffice to say it, my stuff, led me to suspend my blogging; I hope you enjoyed the break but now.....<cue dramatic music and equally dramatic flourish> I am returned!!

And I am back with an eye watering feast of pics from a weekend's worth of Napoleonic Black Powder. Now those of you who have very patiently followed my blog (you few, you gallant few; you merry band of etc etc) will have seen me post batreps about big games of Black Powder before, and usually from that Scottish Mecca of wargaming, Common Ground. And this is no exception; well it is and it isn't as I'm not going to write up a narrative for the game. Instead I am going to explain briefly what it involved and leave you to enjoy the photos, most of which I will attach a comment too. 

"Come on then, General Jim Bob, what's it all about?" I hear you cry....or type..well it was a two day, multi player game based on the 1813 Battle of Liepzig organinsed by a chum of mine, Martin, who spent a lot of time, energy and printed resin in setting up the battle. As a local and regular attendee at Common Ground {which as you may or may not know, is situated in the heart of Stirling up here in Bonny Scotchland...but I digress) Martin is good chums with Steve, the owner of the aforementioned establishment and spotting a gap in the usually very busy Common Ground events calendar he had, very gently so as not to hurt him, twisted Steve's arm and talked him into allowing us to hog a large part of the gaming area over Saturday and Sunday for our big game of etc game etc Powder and Steve, through manfully gritted teeth, agreed. Now it may have happened like that or I may have slightly made that bit up but the end result was the same, we got to play a big blah blah blah of blah Powder (trying to avoid repeating myself there folks. If I keep writing "big game of Black Powder" you'll soon get fed up seeing the words "big game of Black Powder" every time I write "big game of Black Powder"....got that? Good, okay let's get back to this post about the big game of Black Powder 😀).

Martin then went to town; in this case Leipzig, and keen to show off both his commitment and 3D resin printing prowess (oooh, who's that with a resin printer?), produced some magnificent buildings (see photos for proof), Wurtemburger infantry, a brigades worth ("what's a brigades worth?" About 3 shillings and 6 pence in old money..boom boom) as well as sketching out a scenario, putting together a very retro map (circa 1990s I think) of deployment zones etc as well as painting up both French, Wurtemburger and Russian units in time for the you know what....you know; big.game.Black.Powder...

Anyhoo and in the meantime he coerced.I mean invited (I am making Martin sound like a right bully boy, aren't I. In fact he's one of the most genuinely nice people I have had the good fortune to meet. I'll PM you my bank details later, Martin 😉) a fair few folk to join in but due to the gaming dates clashing with real life stuff (similar to the stuff that I mentioned previously though, perhaps and thankfully, not as serious) there were only five of us who could attend over the weekend, so it fell to Martin, Ben and Andy to command the French and their allies against Riis and yours truly commanding the Russians, Austrians and British to refight the battle of Leipzig. This is how it looked over the two days...  

Set up and waiting for the storm to break and
the coffee to cool to drinking temperature

The French and their allies do a bit of pre-battle shopping
whilst assembling at the market square in Leipzig

The Russians advance..don't let those
cannon get too far ahead there, chaps

And the Austrian forces, under Herzog Von Der Listlezzli,
amble onto the field of battle in true Hapsburg style

Austrian Grenzers settle down for an easy shift garrisoning
the farm. Hope the farmer has counted his chickens

The British try to out-amble the Austrians

Some concerned locals...looking concerned...

The French cruelly taunt the Russians by shooting at them
knowing the Russians have difficulty working out one end
of the musket from the other (the Russians aren't very good
at shooting in Black Powder); the Gallic fiends!!

Ah, this is more to the Russian infantry taste; fisticuffs
is what they do bestest...

Busy Russian gun bunnies

Austrian Line shooting at and, occasionally,
hitting the French

In every game of you know what that I play, there is always at least one unit that defies the odds and punches above their weight. In this case it was a Tiny unit of Austrian Jaeger, led by Leutnant Reinhard Sharf (you figure it out). They got right up into the face of the French and just annoyed the hell out of them...and they survived too! They did have to retire back to their own lines eventually for coffee, bagels and medals.

The Russian right wing; very, very busy

Classic cavalry shenanigans. 

"For the Emperor!!" "Which one?"..."I don't know,
the script wasn't very specific"

The end of play, day 2 and a conclusion is reached. Sorry,
you'll need to carry on to the end to find out who won 😀

The British Heavy Cavalry did sterling work in
confounding those Frenchies. It wasn't all one
way traffic though

Front and centre; Captain Dumas-De Winter, sometime
star of my Sharp Practice battle reports. He has come a
long way in the service of the Emperor; from the
Peninsula to Saxony and all on a captain's wages...

So there we have it. I make no excuse for all the photos as with games of this magnitude and epic quality you end up with a lot of eye candy so I might as well spoil you, dear reader. I must say that the 14 or so hours we spent pushing about 3000 (Martin's estimate; I counted as far as 7, at least, then lost track so it's safe to say somewhere between 7 and 3000) very nicely painted figures around on a 7 foot by 16 foot gaming area heaving with excellent looking terrain over the course of the weekend were great fun. Made even more so by the quality of my fellow gamers who proved excellent company and fun to play with...play against 😊 so thanks again Andy, Ben, Martin and Riis but especially Martin, who put all of it together; the man with the dream, the vision and the bushiest beard of the five. Oh, and the3D printer 😁. Looking ahead, and I am not going out on a limb by making this statement, but with Common Ground being so handy, there are already plans afoot...eh?...for more of this kind of thing...and sooner rather than later...but that's all for the moment..

pip pip,

BGJ

Oh, by the way, the British, Russians and Austrians won with the French and their allies a close-ish second 😀