Christmas Thanks

I hope everyone is enjoying their Santa Clause and Secret Santa presents this year. Thanks to Chris, Cath and Ian for arranging these Christmas goodies once again. It has been a pleasure participating.

Big thanks to the kind person to send me some Black Scorpion old west models. These will go perfectly with some of my planned entries into the painting challenge this year and will be jumping the queue. In fact, the undercoat is drying on them now.

Also a big thank you to whoever sent me this Wars of the Roses artillery piece, it is beautifully painted and will take pride of place in my little collection. So much so it has inspired me to finish off the perry plastics and increase the size of my force :)

War of the Roses mercs

To support the Woodville forces, I created a small unit of mercenary crossbows. These were supposed to be Burgandian mercs, but in the end I decided not to make them anyone specific. All of these use the same body and head in order to create a uniform appearance, but had some of the legs cut off and replaced with those from the other Perry sets for some variation. The bare head is taken from the Warlord commando sprue, which sizes up very well. If you're looking for a lot more variation in your WotR figures, you can't go wrong with these to add in some spice

If anyone happens to have any of these heads or torsos spare, I'd love to trade you for some of the other bits and pieces from the sprues (or my bitz box if there are other things you're after)

Valde Crus!

It took a while and a series of disasters to get around to finishing my first major entry into the painting challenge this year, but finally, they are here! Hopefully the next set of figures will encounter a lot less in the way of problems!

This is the start of a small Lion Rampant force made up of parts from all four of the Perry plastics kit. Each figure is based on small 20mm circles that fit into movement trays if I ever decide to go up a level to Hail Caesar (or something else).

The force is painted up in the bright green livery of Richard Woodville, first Lord Rivers and step-father to Edward IV. He started off on the Lancastrian side and eventually changed his mind when things started looking... bad. He married off his daughter off to Edward and eventually rose to the rank of Constable of England, before being executed by Warwick in 1469. The main livery marking is a magpie.

First up we have 11 archers, with their officer. You can probably just about make out that the archers have hand painted livery icons on front and back. These were supposed to be some really nice transfers, but some problems with their size meant it ended up being a lot easier to just paint them instead. They aren't all the same by any means, but I like that

11 bills, with their officer. Again, some of these have the magpie icons on their uniforms. You can see the officer has the magpie on his leg, just to tie him into the unit a bit.

12 unmounted Men at Arms, with one extra standard. As these are all based individually, the standard can be used in this unit, or as part of a command stand for larger games. The banner is a piece of brass cut into shape by CitadelSix, which allows for very stiff, dynamic banners. To make sure that the banner didn't snap the plastic pole, I had to drill that out and replace it with a brass spear, which looks much much better. One day I may get around to making standards for all the other units as well, but for now...

Finally we have a unit of six mounted Men at Arms. The model that was originally entered into the Mounted challenge was dismantled a bit after that photo shoot as I realised I'd put the wrong rider on the horse! For the challenge, this only counts as 5 mounted troops though. The banner and pole in this unit are also brass, from the same supplier. Thankfully in this case, the transfers went on without too much distortion. There was a bit of touching up around the edges where you see the white and green checks.

Here's a couple of group shots to show the whole force together.

In total there are 37 28mm infantry and 5 mounted knights... plus whatever Curt deems fit for the banners. So somewhere in the region of 235 points

Looking at the photos, I really need to iron the cloth!

Mounted knight

So the second sub-challenge has been and I've still not submitted anything other than the challenges. How embarrassing! Still, hopefully in the next week or so I'll be able to do a nice big post, but here's a teaser.

After the varnish nightmare last week, only one knight was salvageable in time to enter it into the Mounted sub. The green come across as rather bright, but some research shows it is entirely possible to dye fabric that green using the techniques, dye and mordants available at the time.

Crossbow Mercs

To go with the other WotR models from the last post, I've done 5 crossbow mercs. The four crossbows all started off with exactly the same pose body, but two of them have had leg swaps to provide a bit more diversity on the figures.

These won't be usable in a game yet as I only have one more body left and they will be coming in groups of 12. I need to find another 6 of this head type and 6 of the body with jacket over a breastplate... why oh why did I decide to make the mercs have a uniform?!

It's a rosy war

Big thanks to my Secret Santa, who's parcel arrived today. It's very heavy, I'm excited to find out what is inside! Photos on Christmas day ;)

Prep time for the Winter Challenge has been limited over the last few weeks thanks to lots of trips to foreign places, but at least my Perry plastics are starting to come together nicely. I've been using a combination of parts from all of the different Perry WotR sets as well as a few spare heads from the Warlord plastic Commandos. So far there are 6 mounted Men at Arms, 12 unmounted Men at Arms (2 units worth), 12 archers, 12 pike and a comander with standard.

 Thanks to the kind folk at Citadel6, I now have livery symbols for Richard Woodville, 1st Earl Rivers. Prior to Warfare this year these didn't exist, but as Claire likes Magpies (to the extent that her business logo is one), it seemed like a nice idea to carry the theme through. Citadel6 were kind enough to make the magpie livery transfers for me, which you can now also buy from their shop. As she's also from Stafford, I've picked up some Henry Stafford transfers to for when I get around to making a second WotR Lion Rampant force. I've no idea if they historically fought together or against each other... but they are two different colours of livery so I've got some variation.

I also had a basing conundrum to sort out. I wanted everything to be based individually so that I could play Lion Rampant, but wanted them to be based in roughly the right size for Hail Caesar later. Thankfully Warbases do 20mm round bases and the trays to go with them. These work out to be *nearly* the recommended size for HC. I may need to pick up a load of the base rims for Lion Rampant to bring the bases up to 25mm if anyone complains about the tiny footage, but that's a problem for later.

There will be much better photos once the painting challenge gets going, along with some vikings, more zombies and a few (as yet undecided) surprises for the challenges.

War of the Rampant Roses

Inspiration comes in many forms. The latest thread of gold that I've discovered on the interwebz is Captain Blood's excellent, if very long, Wars of the Roses thread on Lead-Adventure.de. It shows his experiments with the Perry War of the Roses plastic kits to see how far he can push them to get new and exciting poses. Historical accuracy isn't all that high on his agenda, which allows for a bit more flexibility. The kits have been tempting me for a while, but this has just boosted them onto the Warfare shopping list.

This isn't really a part of history that I remember much about. I do remember a trip to the Bosworth museum when I was little, but apart from that it's all a bit of a blank (shame on me!). Menne of Warre is helping fill in some of the gaps while Amazon takes it's merry time delivering some Osprey books on the subject.

In order to make use of these figures, I've been reading through the Lion Rampant rule set as I've heard lots of good things about it on various blogs and forums hereabouts. This is looking like quite a nice system for skirmishes, though 7th Voyage would also be good fun with the Once and Future book allowing for some more pulpy WotR games. The aforementioned Menne of Warre site also has an interesting article about what Lion Rampant and how the period units and force composition would map to the rule options.

Now I just need to spend the rest of the week working out what I need to build two small LR forces to play with and which of the historical forces to paint them up as... or if I follow Captain Blood's example and just make stuff up, assuming it is from a 70's tv series on the War of the Roses ;)