Take a deep breath...

... because I'm about to upgrade to the new version of MT.

Hope to see you on the other side

Please wear hard hat and ear protectors at all times

Over the next few days, I'll be upgrading TTM to a new version of the blog software (Movable Type). This might mean some inconveniences as well as periods of downtime in the near future.

The reasons for this are many:

* There is apparently a new generation of comment spam software out there, that scans the blog and looks for the comment URL, so my earlier ploy of changing the name of the comment script is no longer effective. MT3+ has a number of other spam prevention features.
* MT3+ is now free for personal use
* MT3+ has a number of Technorati Tags plugins that I intend to make use of

So, if something weird happens here in the near future (well, weirder than usual), you'll know what to blame.

Vietnam Game

I almost forgot to mention we had a quite enjoyable Vietnam game last week. Rules were hex-based, as is usual these days when I'm hosting games. Instead of writing a lengthy battlereport, here are the pictures, thanks to Bart and Eddy:


[http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4124492&a=32239015&f=](http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4124492&a=32239015&f=)

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157594203571487/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157594203571487/)

Wargaming video

For those who haven't seen it yet:

http://www.hmgs.org/wargamevideo.htm

A very well made video promoting the hobby of wargaming.

Hyperborea turn 2

What? Another new post? Another miracle, I suppose ;)

Anyway, for those of you who are interested, we had a quiet turn in Hyperborea. Just assassination and barbarian raiding to report. Have a look at the latest edition of the Hyperborean Times for details.

Download file


Alan

Building a Carolingian army

What, a new post?

As I've stated before, posts around here would be thin on the ground for a while, as we dealt with the effects of having a colicky baby around. I wasn't kidding :).

The last couple of days, I've been getting back into things as Ruben seems to be getting a bit better (though that could change in a heartbeat), having had time to paint again in the evenings (working on Carolingians and Celts), and having some time to think over future plans.

On of those plans was to do a Viking vs Carolingian game at Crisis this
year - a (sort of) recreation of the Battle of Leuven in 891 where Arnulf of
Carinthia, King of East Francia and later Emperor, came over to our parts to
beat up on a part of the Viking host that had earlier besieged Paris and was
now wintering in Leuven. Events have transpired against this game being
finished before Crisis (backup plans are in motion), but I am continuing to
work on it. The first part is building a Carolingian army, and that is what
the rest of this post is about.

The idea for the Crisis game is to do a skirmish level game, but I am
building the Carolingian army as a 'normal' WAB army to use in WAB games.
As long as I base the Carolingians individually, that will not be too much
of a problem. So, what should the army look like? Let's say I'll aim for
around 1000 points initially, just to have a goal to paint to.

First off is army list. The most suitable list would be the 'Late
Carolingian or Capetian' list in the Shieldwall book, though you could
probably build something from the 'Germanic barbarian' list in the Beyond
the Golden Gate book, or just assemble your own from various other profiles.
For simplicity's sake, I'm going to use the Shieldwall list, but I'm not
really going to bother too much with the percentage limits, especially not
at 1000 points. For this, I'm following Phil's lead, who thinks of army
lists as an inspiration only, if even that :)

Anyway, on to the army. Arnulf of Carinthia was King of East Francia
(Germany) at the time of the battle, with his heartlands to the extreme
southeastern side of it, in current day Carinthia. I assume that he mustered
part of his army there, or at least in southern Germany, and moved with it
to Leuven from there. That would probably mean that most of that part of his
army would consist of _miles_, the 'professional' warriors of the age. A
more general levy would probably not have accompanied him on such a long
trip. So the core of the army should consist of a (relatively) small number
of professional warrior types. The _miles_ profile, mounted or dismounted,
from the list should match this perfectly. For the general list, I'll take
these as mounted (can't have a Carolingian army without cavalry :) ), but
for the actual Leuven battle, where the main push was through a swampy area,
they would probably have dismounted. So that's one part of the army: a
number of mounted milites. The figures for them will be from [Artizan Designs](http://www.artizandesigns.com)
[Carolingian range](http://www.artizandesigns.com/catalogue.asp?sub_range=19).

Next is Arnulf himself. He would obviously have to be the 'Rex' character,
but as this is only a 1000 points army, I'm taking him as Comes and assuming
that one is the Army General. He is of course mounted. As to figure to
represent him, I'll be waiting for Artizan to release their mounted
Charlemagne. No harm in going for royalty :) I'll also be including an army
standard, bearing a huge banner depicting some saint - Arnulf was at this
point aspiring to become Emperor, so anything that would have put him on the
Pope's good side would have helped. The banner will be of the 'impossibly
huge' variety that looks tremendous on the tabletop, but would be
exceedingly impractical in reality, bowling the standard bearer over at the
slightest gust of wind.

The second part of the army will be infantry, and would represent the troops
raised locally. Arnulf might have sent _missi_ (military messengers) over to
the noblemen of the Leuven / Flanders region telling them to raise an army.
These will form the infantry component of the army. They will consist of a
number of spearmen units and some archers. Although the army list does not allow _liberi_ (freemen) for the Late Carolingian army, I'm going to blithely go ahead and take them as such anyway - these would be the freemen of the Flanders region rallying to defend their country from the Vikings. The figures used will be a mix of
Artizan figures and [Chiltern Ancients](http://www.chilternminiatures.co.uk/).

As to painting them, I'm going to try an assembly line method again, even
though I've had bad experiences with them in the past. I'm going to follow
up on one of Phil's suggestions of doing 'matrix painting'. I've constructed
a little box holding figures on their paintin corks in a 4x4 pattern, and
will use that as a 'matrix' to distribute colors across. If, for example, I
am painting a green color, the green will go across the matrix, with one
figure having its cloak painted green, the next his trousers, and so on, and
that for every color. I'll see what happens.

Anyway, putting it all together, this is the army list I've come up with so
far:

1000.0 Pt - (SW) Western Franks - Carolingian French Army list - Arnulf's Carolingians

1 Comes @ 116.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Light Armor; Shield; Throwing Spear; Warhorse
1 Warhorse @ [0.0] Pt

6 Mounted Milities @ 183.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Leader; Light Armor; Musician; Shield; Standard; Throwing Spear; Warhorse
1 Warhorse @ [0.0] Pt

6 Mounted Milities @ 183.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Leader; Light Armor; Musician; Shield; Standard; Throwing Spear; Warhorse
1 Warhorse @ [0.0] Pt

24 Liberi @ 159.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Leader; Musician; Shield; Standard; Thrusting Spear

24 Liberi @ 159.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Leader; Musician; Shield; Standard; Thrusting Spear

17 Liberi @ 117.0 Pt
Hand Weapon; Leader; Musician; Shield; Standard; Thrusting Spear

8 Coloni @ 40.0 Pt
Composite Bow; Hand Weapon

8 Coloni @ 40.0 Pt
Composite Bow; Hand Weapon

Battle for Rohtang Pass

In the sequence of 'Schild en Vriend' revival games, the May game (after WW1 in December, Lowenheim in January, WW1 in March, Memoir44 in April) was a 25mm fantasy battle using the Te Wapen rules (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Te_Wapen/ ).

Four players were present: Maarten, Alan, Eddy and myself. Eddy was so kind to provide us with an after action report:

Just a small AAR on last night�s game The Punitive Expedition into the Orc
homelands after the successful raising of the siege of L�heim. As fate
would have it Alan and me would be playing the brave humans, Maarten and
Phil playing the ugly, cowardly bad guys so it seemed that the God of Dice
was for once going to play fair tonight.

It would be a classical medieval/fantasy battle and Phil re-assured us that
�There would be no suprises�. At that point in time we should have realized
anything Phil says has the believability of a press statement by Mohammed
�There are no Americans in Bagdad� Saeed al-Sahaf but that would become
painfully clear in the game ahead.

So we split-up our army into 3 sections to be able to navigate the 3
mountain passes leading up to the Orc plain � and presto, suddenly archers
appeared out of nowhere to pepper our trapped troops with deadly arrows from
the safety of the mountains. �Well, you can�t call that a surprise, can you
- you�re moving through mountain passes, what did you expect ?� was the
only comment from Phil so we knew that there would be other trouble ahead.

Those archers had cost us two units, both of them ranged units (blunderbuss
and archers) and managed to delay our approach considerably so while the Orc
army was happily setting up a battleline only our cavalry had managed to
extricate themselves from the mountain passes and form-up in a line. There
they would wait a couple of turns for the infantry to catch-up and cover
their flank.

As our cavalry was on the left, and the Orc cavalry / wargs was on the right
a gigantic cavalry clash was clearly going to happen so it would be
important to get the first charge in. Through some cunning play (read :
luck) it were the humans who got to launch their charge first. And what a
charge it was � virtually annihilating the Orc cavalry but then it dawned on
us that it had all been a gigantic trap as the deadly card of �Judgement
Day� was used on our troops � twice - This had the effect of removing just
as much figures from our units as we had killed in that charge. 2 heavy
cavalry units got wiped-out, with a third just hanging on and our most
powerfull unit � the Red Dragon � frozen in place. It was a disaster from
which the left flank would never recover. Gone was the tactical plan to
occupy the enemy burial mound.

So with our left flank gone, our right flank still hopelessly stuck in the
mountains and out of the game, our only hope lay in the centre where we had
a local superiority as the Orc army had concentrated too many of their units
on their right flank to counter our cavalry. But the God of Dice hadn�t
abandoned us : Maarten and Phil were getting low dice while even our
long-shot totally-against-the-odds attacks managed to kill some enemy units
so the unit kill tally was slowly turning into our favour. With one unit
killed equaling 1 VP we were even ahead by 1 point throughout the middle of
the game though we didn�t control any of the victory locations worth 2 VP�s.
It was getting late so at that point Phil declared that since neither army
was likely to fulfill their victory conditions a �moral victory� would be
given to the first army to reach 10 VP�s. It was 7-6 in our favour at that
moment so a desperate struggle in the center ensued with both sides going
for kills regardless of the consequences. The Orcs were up first killing 3
of our units so it was 7-9 and they were only 1 VP removed from victory, but
in our next turn the last cavalry unit coupled with a wizard�s fireball
attack and even a regular infantry attack (the only one in the game IIRC,
all the rest being ranged, cavalry or magical) managed to kill an orc unit
and in a stroke of genius Alan also managed to occupy the central victory
location stone which netted us an additional 2 VP�s : 10-9 � we had �won�,
but given the carnage all around us, we would have settled for a draw
anytime.

Aftermath :

As this was a card-driven game with activation, attack bonus and opponent
counter-cards we had to use-up all our cards to get out of those bloody (in
both senses of the word) mountains and out into the plain while the Orc army
had had a chance to accumulate some deadly counter-cards which they used to
good effect. I don�t think we ever used either a bonus card or a
counter-card throughout the game which is fine as it means the system is
flexible enough to cope with different situations and strategies.

I should have brought along my digital camera (and I will next time) as the
table looked spectacular. For those who were there here�s what I would have
taken pictures off : the Orc army lining up beautifully in the center of the
table, the total confusion in the mountain passes following the ambush, the
human heavy cavalry drawn up for battle on the hill and the charge downhill
and the scenes of Armageddon in the centre as both armies just battered each
other to pulp.

Hyperborea - latest

We've just completed the first full turn of my new Ancients campaign. We had an interesting if cautious first round, with some players sending in five pages of orders and others being rather minimalist - neither is a criticism, but it was interesting to see the different approaches.

The latest events are summarised in the second edition of the game newspaper.

Processing the orders was fun, basically I look at the game situation, the explanation of the player, the likelihood that it will succeed anfd then I roll a % dice. The higher it is the better it will succeed. Suffice to say I had the usual range of massive successes and pathetic failures but the result is a story that develops.

For those who want the background, you can see this in previous posts on this blog.

For the next turn, we have a Peace Council, which is Phil's idea and something unusual (unique?) for a wargames campaign. It promises to be interesting, so watch out for a full report here.

In the meantime, here is an annotated map showing what is going on.




hyperborea - turn 1


Originally uploaded by ahuyton.




Alan

Foundry Dallimore painting book

Having been painting for years in what is now generally accepted to be the _Foundry style_, as 'invented' and pioneered by the illustrious Kevin Dallimore, I was very interested to see that Foundry had a book planned written by Dallimore about his, or the Foundry's, painting style. Of course, there's a gap the size of a healthy [narwhal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narwahl) between Foundry _planning_ to release a book, and actually releasing it (just look at what they did / are doing to the late Terry Gore _Ancient Warfare_ and _Medieval Warfare_ rules), so it took quite a while for the book to actually appear. However, I ordered a copy once it became available on the [Foundry site](http://www.wargamesfoundry.com).

I had high hopes for this book, but I came away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is of course the ultimate in what is often referred to as 'wargames porn', i.e. lots of pictures of truly amazingly painted figures, the likes of which are hardly ever seen in real life (another parallel there). If you want to ogle at hundreds of exquisitely painted figures and vehicles, this book is your ticket to nirvana.

On the other hand, I had hoped that Mr. Dallimore would have explained his technique a bit more. Now, there are of course lots of step by step photographs of miniatures being painted in his style, which illustrate the basic 'three layer' concept quite clearly, but face it - the basic three layer concept is exceedingly easy to grasp: you put three layers of paint on and you're done. You do not need seventeen step by step photo series to get that.

What I would have liked to see, and did not find in the book, is the two things that make or break a three layer paint job: colour choice and topography of the paint job. Or in plain English: what colours to use (in terms of value and chroma difference between the three colour layers) and where to put them. That is never explained, possibly because it is very difficult to explain.

The colour choice (not the colour balance of the entire figure, but the amount of difference between the three layers) is more or less implied by the book's use of the Foundry Paint System colours. The assumption is that as Dallimore has designed the colours himself, they represent the 'correct' colours to use. For example, as I have [remarked earlier](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000044.html), the shade colour is already quite light, a fact that I had not appreciated before. In effect, my 'three' layer paint jobs are mostly two layer paint jobs, as my shade is usually so dark as to be indistinguishable from the black base coat once the highlights are applied. This is probably the reason why the shade colour in the Foundry Paint System is so light, and presumably why Mr. Dallimore formulated it that way. However, none of this is mentioned explicitely in the book, which is something I had expected.

The second point, where to put highlights and how much of the underlying layer to cover, is also not explicited anywhere. You can infer some of this from the step by step pictures, but again it is never stated (beyond the occasional tantalizingly short remark).

Now, perhaps I expected too much from this, and indeed the two areas that left me wanting are very difficult to explain, but I had expected a bit more. Too bad.

What I did pick up from the book is what colours to use in an intentional two layer paint job. I have been using two layer paint jobs increasingly on figures (see, for example the latest bunch of [Celts](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/22845/) whose skins are simple two layer jobs) but have been struggling with getting them to 'pop' as much as a three layer job, mostly by not knowing which colours to use as the two colours in question. The book's section on two layer paint jobs, in concord with some areas in the rest of the book have helped me in deciding this - skip the highlight colour and treat the shade as 'mid' colour, i.e. leave fairly noticeable areas of black.

That's it for me - mixed feelings for the book. I've lent the book to Alan, so I'm curious as to what he thinks of it (Alan, that's your cue :) )

Lighting redux

In my [first article](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000035.html) in the miniature photography series, I talked about lighting. The gist of the article is that lighting is very important and that you cannot get enough of it.

I have been struggling to get enough light on my miniatures with the desk lamps I'm currently using to paint by, but never quite succeeded in doing so. The photographs turn out OK, but you can still see evidence of uneven lighting on most photos, as well as some blatantly underlit photographs, as in this Viking:



(if you don't see what I mean, click on the photo and select the largest picture on the 'All sizes' page).

This weekend, however, I found the perfect recipe - no more underlit or unevenly lit figures - just use sunlight! The last four pictures of miniatures I took are done in simple daylight, with no extra lighting added (though, admittedly, with long exposure times), and they are just perfect (lighting wise, that is). Check out this dwarf (who, incidentally, will go up on Ebay soon):



This pic was taken with the dwarf sitting on my living room table in normal, indirect, sunlight (not direct sunlight to avoid hard shadows). Nothing more was done with the picture except to snip away the background and replace it with a white page.

Of course, as I take most of my pictures at night after having just painted them, I might have to rethink my photo taking strategy :)