The Gathering Darkness

A recurring and much loved topic of discussion amongst the gang is that of  "Edition wars", the endless and near pointless back and forth over which version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle was the best ever.  It was during one such conversation that Rick declared he really liked "the one that had the lizards in it" and that we should play a big game of that edition.  Nevermind that none of us had played 5th edition for decades, and that it was never the quickest system ever to fight a battle to some kind of conclusion, we agreed a date and to bring every model we had within certain parameters. We ended up deciding on a Chaos V Undead bash, with a few allies.

Chris and I would ally our Chaos armies together. Mine was a bit on the small side so I decided to invite my Orcs of the Skullsmasha Legion to the party.  Rick and his sprog Ben would command the Undead. My own undead army was added , and allies came in the form of Skaven!

We decided to play everything more or less Wysiwyg, with only a few "counts as" for some of the more obscure stuff that hadn't existed in 5th edition. Some stuff was simply ported in "as is" from 4th and 6th editions, and this didn't appear to cause any problems!

Little attempt was made to make sure the sides were even, and both forces were simply plonked down. At a guess I'd estimate the forces to be around 10000 points but they were very different forces. Ricks undead were somewhat character heavy, almost as many Vampires in his army as we had any sort of characters!  I counted at least 4 special characters amongst the ranks, including both Von Carstein and Nagash, By contrast we had almost no heroes, and only a few big hitting monsters, but the quality of our infantry was somewhat higher overall.

We let the special characters keep their allocated magic items, and decided to randomly distribute the magic item cards from the 5th edition boxed set. I forget most of who got what, but my Orc Warlord on a Wyvern got the Blade of Ensorcelled Iron for a +1 to hit, the Boarboys got a Warbanner and the Hero leading my Marauders got the Blade of Leaping Bronze for +2 attacks.

Took a few pics, so I'll let them do the talking...

My Orc and Chaos combined armies.

Ricks Undead and Skaven

The Forces of Chaoticness...

The Undead forming up properly .

The battle lines arrayed!

The four biscuit-loving Champions of Order and Chaos put their game faces on...

And the ref blows the whistle, and their off! With just 6 hours of game time to go!

The massed undead lancers look for an opening on the flank whilst a vampire on
Zombie Dragon gets the drop on my Chaos Dragon!  The chaos dragon was badly
wounded, but managed to eat the Vampire, causing the Zombie Dragon to take to the skies.
Our Victory was short lived when the Vampire "escaped!" and returned to hunt down
and finish off the Chaos Dragon later in the game!

The Lancers on the Edge of Time get the better of the Skeleton Horsemen,
 the Giant heads to the Pub

The Slannesh Priest on his panaquin (counting as a chariot today)
gets bogged down by rats, who dismantle his chariot...

The Orc Warlord takes the fight to the plague monks!

The Chaos centre as the zombies approach, the thugs using their bows to
good effect, and nearly killing one...

The battle lines vie for the charge!

My orcs get fed up of waiting for the Chaos knights to get our of the way
and maneuver around them.

The giants pubcrawl is disturbed some annoying little twerps. So he jumps
up and down on them for a bit to teach them a lesson...

The winds of magic just arent blowing strong enough for Nagash,
who is struggling to Raise Dead fast enough to replenish the thinning ranks

Two units of mounted wights caused panic in the chaos lines , with unit after unit
routing, but the undead were too slow to capitalise on this, and the counter attack
defeated both attacks. 

The undead horde is reduced to a mob of unkillable vampires who roll nothing but ones...

The Giant spots more victims!

Well that was a lot of fun, with a convincing victory for the Forces of Chaos!  So what went wrong for Nagash and his minions?  Well, Rick, as the commander in chief of the undead forces was happy to take all the blame and dump it on his son Ben for rolling nothing but ones for the entire game, and doing all the actual dice rolling to boot! We fully expected the Vampire to take a heavy toll on our infantry as we had little capable of taking them in a unit v unit melee, but every time one stepped up to fight they promptly dropped their swords, fell over their own feet and were generally useless. Even Vlad took 4 rounds of combat to deal with someone he should have been able to kill with his little toe!  Apart from killing my Dragon (at the second attempt!) most of them barely landed a blow! Ricks other primary excuse was the pitiful winds of magic rolls. Before the Game I had suggested we make it a 4d6 roll, but Rick was concerned that might allow magic to dominate(!) too much, and eventually we compromised on 3d6+1 cards each turn. He did have a pretty low turn with a mere 5 cards rolled at a critical point of the game, but I thought we had plenty of magic to go around the rest of the time. I felt he was tending to try and power up single spells too much and would have been better with more less powerful spells to draw out the dispel cards. As it was my own Chaos Sorcerer pretty much had Nagash sewn up for the entire game, dispelling almost everything that came his way and planting a few good doses of Soul Drain on key units , which they were unable to recover from before a general melee ensued.

At the end of the game our mass of infantry was engaged with almost none of the skeletons, most of whom were already destroyed but were generally facing a scattering of vampires, wraiths and wights. We had been very luck with the Vampires poor showing thus far, and had only held our own by virtue of skeletons being really squishy! In a hypothetical next turn, with no more skeletons to hit, and with some decent rolls on the vampires and wraiths (being too tough or too ethereal for our infantry to hurt) the out come could have been rather different. 

Anyway that was great and I hope we can do it again soon!

Warmaster 2! Warmasteryier...

Last night I played my first game of Warmaster!  My order from Pendraken had arrived and had been painted and this (with some borrowed bears and a few magical toys ) brought my army up to near 1500 points.
My Force consisted of:
General with Orb of Majesty
Hero with sword of might
Hero with Bear
Wizard with dispel scroll
3 units of Lancers (1 with a magic banner)
3 units of Horse Archers
2 units of Archers
2 units of Axemen
1 Warwagon
1 unit of Borrowed Bears

These faced Geoffs High Elves!
2 Units of Silver Helms
2 units of Reavers
2 units of Chariots
4 units of Spearmen
3 units of Archers
1 battery of bolt throwers
General, hero and wizard

The General and the Kislevite centre

The Elf centre.  

The Elven Right .

The Kislevite left,

The Lancers 

The Kislevite Light Cavalry Brigade mix it up with the Reavers and Silver Helms. They destroyed the Reavers, but only bagged one stand of silver helms before the brigade was lost. Still, their charge caused Chaos in the elven lines...

In response the rest of the Elven wing went and stood on a hill for a bit.

Last stand of the Horse Archers

The Lancers try out a lance formation. They'd lost three stands when they got
charged by the chariots, but they destroyed the chariots in turn. Pity they spent
most of the game just standing there.

My left flank- at this point with a briagde gone, and still outnumbered I
moved the lancers closer to my centre for mutual support

Meanwhile in the centre- the Kislevites have taken their time over laagering,
luckily the elvish brigades here were taking orders from an wizard, and spent
most of the time just faffing about.  The Bears are sent in to cause more chaos.

The Elvish archery eventually deals with the bears and they steady their lines only
for the Lancers to arrive, coming down the hillside (and presumably with Sabaton
providing the soundtrack...), and were driven back, despite the Kislevites only being
armed with rubber lances....

The game didn't quite end there - The silver helms managed to catch my two under strength lancer units unawares and destroyed them. This should have ended the game but I miscounted and didn't realise I'd reached half strength! Pressing on, my remaining lancers charged the two spearmen units that had survived their previous charge, and wiped them out , breaking the Elf army as well...whoops!


So whats the verdict? It was a great game, though I need more units: I was a bit out numbered, and even just 4 units less in such a small game meant I was somewhat stretched. Need to get my General to where the action is as well, the first half of the game was all about the cavalry engagement on my left, but the general was miles away, and the two heroes commanding Brigades there were out of their depth!  And wizards are no substitute for a proper commander.  Never got to see what the Infantry could do, once they'd laargered they were rather static! They shot up any elves that came near quite well, but we never got to test Geoff's assertion that they were unassailable once formed up. But the fact he was reluctant to engage them suggests more warwagons might be worth it. 

Most of the rules of the game I very much like, but  I was a little dissatisfied with the melee mechanic were you keep fighting round after round till one side is defeated. Theres something funny about it, but I can't quite decide what it is. More testing required.

Anyway, heres some random shots of the whole force.  Think it needs more Horse.  A lot more Horse...

Warmaster!

This post should have probably been the Gauntlet18 report...a rundown of the huge and epic and massively overly complicated game of Frostgrave... and I'll get round to it one day, but this hobby butterfly has seen something shiny...

The other week at the club, whilst my Orks were giving Phils Imperial Guard a good going over, I espied in the corner of the room, a game using tiddly little figures- Warmaster!  I'd long coveted this game that has been described as one of the best wargames ever written, and I already loved its cousins (Hail Ceaser, Black Powder and Pike and Shotte), and golly, did it look fun. So I decided I was in, and that I would collect Kislevites!  With the only slight hitch that they didnt make 'em anymore, I headed for ebay, took one look at the prices and headed for Pendraken Miniatures to buy a bunch of their Renaissance Polish!  And Whilst I was awaiting their arrival I started work on terrain!

Pretty much my entire terrain collection is for 28mm scale so I'd be starting from scratch and needing everything.  Firstly I went looking for buildings. Attempts to scratchbuild were unsatisfactory, so I turned to the internet and looked for the free stuff that could be downloaded.
 I found this castle : http://www.toshachminiatures.com/castles.htm  which is very nice, and an easy build, and this model village  https://www.grundschule-pretzschendorf.de/Werken/Weihnachtsberg/weihnachtsberg.html.   The buildings in the latter are a bit modern looking but I copied them into MS paint and modified them a bit before I printed them out.
A visit to the Works turned up 50 small fir trees for a mere £10 and all they needed was quick brush with green paint. I also remembered I had already bought one piece of terrain, many years ago with 10mm gaming in mind, and it was gather dust on a shelf. It was a model of an ancient ruined temple, bought whilst visiting the Parthenon on my honeymoon, for a mere 2 euros. This was given a scenic base and a coat of paint. A cardboard tube became a wizards tower, some foam board became some hills, and then the figures arrived, a small packet to see how things went, and enough to make a unit of Winged Hussars, 3 of Horse Archers, and 2 of Axemen. A Bear was found in the spares pile to provide a lancer with a mount. And thus in a mere 2 weeks I've produced a pile of terrain, and 600points or thereabouts of Kislevites, ready for battle. Reinforcements are already on their way...

PS:
After writing this I was looking for something to do with my day when I realised I didnt have a wizard!  Well there was only one thing for it...I would have to make one!

Reinforcements have arrived...

So some stuff has gotten paint on it, so I thought I'd best put some pics up quick.  Not been getting a whole lotta gaming in recently but the previously mentioned Dinotanks saw some action in a big game of 40k, and the Laserburn boys got a kicking in Necromunda becoming outlaws, and having to give up a bunch of territories to make ends meet!  My strategy there could do with a rethink...

Recently I gave Warhammer another go- this time 6th edition with nowt more than the Ravening Hordes Supplement . We tried a lovely 3 way game with Empire V Skaven V Bretonnia, which turned out to surprisingly fun. I got shot to bits at first, stuck in the crossfire of the Skaven and Empire gunlines, but the Bretonnians were not dismayed (well, ok quite a lot of them ran away, but at least 2 werent dismayed!) and the last of my knights charged the length of the table scattering unit after unit or Ratscum and Imperial lacky, accounting for some 90 enemies! Two true Bretonnians! And with that we called it a draw...
But it seems there is desire for more- Ive been asked (or told ) to rewrite RH more to the groups taste...


Anyway, here we have the Inleigh Regiment.  At phalanx17 I picked up a dozen broken Heroquest Henchmen, and a few Imperial figures for about a fiver. At Phalanx18 I finally found some suitable weapons for them!  Would very much like a few more for this unit. The device is the Golden Rabbit of Inleigh, borrowed from the film "Watership Down"

 Some BTD\Harlequin Orcs now, another command group, and a stone thrower!  I like the stone thrower, and might get some more...

 Aha!  An Orc General on a Wyvern! 
The Wyvern is classic Citadel lead picked up cheaply on ebay, but with a BTD\Harlequin Hero on top, cos I didn't like the citadel one, and it didn't fit my armies style.  The one-legged stance is a bugger, there are a ridiculous number of bits of metal holding this thing up!

 A knight!  In order to play the aforementioned game of WHFB I had to paint another knight (cos it turned out I was bit short of knights!), and this is a proper oldhammer Bretonnian!  More Knights for my Bretonnians are waiting for their turn on the painting table, and some of them are properly oldhammer!

 GCPS Troopers!  These chaps were a Xmas gift from the inlaws, and I decided to go with a fairly standard green and yellow camo scheme, and a less conventional blue skintone...Genetic Infantry perhaps...

Thanks for looking!

Sumerians and Dinotanks

I've been fascinated for years with ancient history...no, not those Johnny-Come-lately Romans and Greeks, really ancient history- The dawn of civilization, the first cities and city states, the first written records, the agricultural revolution, the oldest stories that we know of and inevitably, the first wars.  I am of course referring to the Sumerians!

And there just so happens to be some lovely figures available for the Sumerians, and after reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, how could I not want to put together the army of  the city state of Uruk, with Gilgamesh and Enkidu at its head...

 Gilgamesh and Enkidu lead the Men of Uruk into battle.  These two are from Eureka.  Most of the infantry is from Wargames foundry, though there is a couple of Newline Designs figures in there.

 These young ladies are from Foundry's Amazon range with a few modifications- they had sumerian style kilts greenstuffed on in my usual skilless way, and the incense burner thingy was replaced with Snake, which I thought was a bit more appropriate.  The Eureka Humbaba is skulking at the back...

 The infantry consists of 12 Javelin men, 12 Slingers (converted from spare javelinmen) and 36 Spearmen.

For the Spearmen I um'ed and ah'ed for a while on how to paint their cloaks. There are two schools of thought about these- some say they are simply cloaks made from the skins of some sort of spotted animal, probably a big cat. Other reckon its more like a form of composite armour, with a fabric cloak covered in metal presumably copper or bronze studs or plates sown in. After scrutinizing the Standard of Ur (a part of which is shown below) I decided that the catskin cloak option was the most likely, though I am aware that someone found some copper studs from the period I think I'm correct in saying nobody has demonstrated they were part of any kind of armour.

When you look at the whole of the Standard of Ur you can see its creator has been pretty consistent with colour- copper or bronze weapons are all shown in a light colour, but the spots on the cloaks are black...so, as much as I like the idea behind the copper studded cloak, I can't agree that it is the correct interpretation.

I've arranged the army units of 12 as I expect it'll see most use with the Dragon Rampant rules, which is fine as it suits the heroic nature of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and I don't think anyone else around here has an army from the period!  All I really want to add is a unit of  Battle Carts, and some Gutian mercenaries, but, whether another city state attacks, some timber needs stealing from Humbaba, or if some jilted deity unleashes the Bull of Heaven to lay waste to Uruk, the Men of Uruk are ready for battle!

Ive made some other stuff recently too; Some very old school space-cacti made from cocktail sticks and polystyrene balls, and then painted bright colours. Very handy for Ghost Archipelago too...

 And My Ork army wanted some heavy support.  I couldn't find a tank I liked the look of , but I had a pair of Dinosaurs on the shelf waiting for howdahs, and I decided gun turrets would be much better!

 And they have even seen a bit of battle recently, with this three way game between my Orks, Ricks Nid's and Chris's Spikey Gits.  Naturally they both decided the Dinotanks had to be dealt with and I was attacked on both fronts!

The game looked great, and was great fun, and da boyz even claimed victory, a victory only slightly marred by Rick and Chris claiming victory too...


Thanks for Reading!