Pro Gloria Miniatures

I probably would have noticed these figures earlier if I had been to the Warhammer Empire forum lately, but a new company (to me at least) called Pro Gloria, has just released some lovely HRE civilian figures, sculpted by Paul Hicks!

Very exciting, and not too expensive either, at €5.95 per pack.  There are currently four packs, and hopefully there will be many many more. These figures will be excellent as NPCs for WHFRP, or for Mordheim type skirmish games.  As an aside, the paint job on these is by Andrew Taylor, and just look at that herald... he has a double eagle under his arms... amazing.

Sometime in the future, I need to get these figures.

Miniature Wargames

Miniature Wargames, a magazine "published continuously since 1983" now has an online electronic version, and you can read a free issue of it here.

Content wise, the magazine is quite nice, with several articles that would interest most miniature wargamers, although with a mainly historical bent [appropriate given the assumed audience].  Several articles have sharp maps, which help to explain the battles or terrain discussed in the article.  The article on Pavia is particularly of interest, as it covers the history of the battle, as well as explaining how to refight it in a fairly rules generic way.

The software used to present the magazine is pretty slick, and allows for easy manipulation of the "pages", which can be viewed larger than life size [allowing you to see how dodgy tabletop quality paint jobs are at 500% of life size].  Some of the hyperlinks in the magazine can be clicked, and the overall presentation is quite nice.  There also appears to be an option to download a printable PDF, should you want to take the magazine away with you.

At a cost of £29.5 per annum, it is a substantial savings over the print edition, which is apparently a staggering £75 for rest of the world subscriptions. However, even this price seems a bit much for me, as I am both a Luddite and quite tight when it comes to this sort of thing.  So not for me, but you might find it interesting, and should certainly have a look at the free issues.

Scratch Built Galley

Now, I am no Tony, but I think I had some success with this project.  A bit of background, a while back, I finished reading Empires of the Sea, and got inspired to look into naval gaming with galleys.  Finding that the available options for galleys were rather expensive, I thought I would try my hand at scratch building a galley.  Following some Internet research, I decided to base the scale on the size of a common Popsicle stick, which happens to be 1cm in width.  This translated to a ship of around 8.5cm in length for an approximate scale of 1/510.  This size also fits neatly on a plastic credit card, which I happen to have a ton of from gift cards and hotel room keys.

After a few afternoons and evenings of work, I had the following results:

Needs, paint, but I think it is on the right track.
I think that I can create more of these pretty quickly, which would be good, since there were over 400 ships at Lepanto...

Skaven for sale

Blog follower ZeroTwentyThree is regretfully selling off his Skaven.  Do take a look, he seems be a great painter, and needs the money.

Painting at work

I have a new job (same company), and with that came an office.  Consequently, I have been thinking about painting on my lunch break, now that my geekery would not be on such public display.  Looking through my "in progress" figures (1000s), I have plenty to work on.

Any thoughts on this?  White collar job, so paint spills would be bad.

In other news, I finished Knight and Knave of Swordsby Leiber, which was frankly rather poor.  The amount of on camera sex, and "edgy" sex, was astounding, particularly in comparison to the other books.  The last "adventure" is basically a series of voyeuristic vignettes, in which our heroes are completely passive. Certainly not recommended. Pretend that Faf and the Mouser just rode off into the sunset or something.

I am now reading the first book of the Elric collection (Elric the Stealer of Souls), so we will see how that goes.

40k with lego

This is a bit more advance than when I played with legos as a kid...

Embedded - Dan Abnett

Note that this gun is completely wrong

Last night, I finished Embedded by Dan Abnett. I turned to my wife and said "well that was annoying", so yes, typical Abnett end.  However, let us start at the beginning.

Dan Abnett is well known to many as a writer for Black Library, the Games Workshop imprint, in particular for his Gaunt's Ghosts series of books, which follow a particular regiment of Imperial Guardsmen around a lengthy crusade.  This is a near future book, or at least appears to be at first.  Set on a colony world, this story has a burnt out and jaded reporter arrive on planet with an interest in stirring the pot for more stories.  There is a small insurgency underway on the planet, and after a few disappointing inquiries in to the real cause of the conflict, Falk (the reporter) has his consciousness placed in the mind of a soldier about to go in to the conflict zone.  The soldier gets shot in an ambush, and Falk must blend his skills and knowledge with those of the grunt he is stuck in to get home.

Overall the book is interesting (aside from the abrupt end), and has several situations suitable for gaming, as well as technologies which are interesting. Soldiers are armed in a manner easily accommodated by most skirmish games, and infantry tactics, when seen, are similar to modern warfare.  Several of the scenarios would be interesting for, say, platoon level games like StarGrunt, and others would work better as skirmish games with individual reactions (Eyeburn ridge).  So for gaming purposes, this book is good, even if it is not great for endings.

Next up is Knight and Knave of Swords, the last of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books.  Hobby wise, I am working on a scratch build, which is actually going rather well.  More on that as it gets closer to completion.

Maps the Carmen way

Carmen's Fun Painty Time! has a nice little tutorial on making a map using Photoshop elements.  Often I struggle with various open sourced software, and here is a little tutorial that makes the comerical products seem so much easier...  I assume having artistic skill helps a bit too (you no doubt recall my crude efforts in this area)

Anyway, here is his very fetching final product, a wastelands area map, which would be perfectly servicable for a miniatures campaign, or a roleplaying exploration map. Throw on a hex grid, and you are good to go.

Empires of the Sea: Renaissance Galleys

I finally finished reading Empires of the Sea, by Roger Crowley yesterday.  I own this book, so I have been interspersing it with library books, as it has no due date.  This book is a cracking read about the very narrow period starting with the Siege of Rhodes (1522) and concluding with Lepanto (1571).  During this period, the Ottoman Empire attempted to conquer the whole of the Mediterranean, and was apposed at times by a Holy League comprised of Spain, Venice, and the Papal State.  Each of the three main Christian powers had their own interests, and the League fell apart several times before successfully defeating the Ottomans at Lepanto.  This battle cost the Ottoman empire nearly its whole battle fleet, and most importantly, all of its experienced sailors (nearly 30,000 men were lost).

The book itself is very gripping.  Mr. Crowley describes the various battles in detail, using letters and memoirs of those involved to get the feel of combat.  You can feel the exhaustion and elation of the sides during skirmishes, and the horror of  battlefields awash in blood.  Mr. Crowley also describes the political machinations of the various League partners and the Ottoman court, so you get a feel of why certain outcomes were achieved. I highly recommend this book. (it also has 83 reviews of 4 stars or better on Amazon)

Reading this book has really stoked my interest in naval battles for this period, and I looked first at Langton miniatures, which are truly lovely (and exacting).  However, at £7 for a single 1/1200 galley, it would be extremely costly to do much more than a few ships per side for a skirmish.  Lepanto had over 200 ships just on the Christian side... so another direction will have to be taken.

First rate galleys of this period were fast narrow ships made solely for combat, with 24 or so oars per side, each pulled by three men (mainly slaves).  These 144 men were the motor that moved the ships in combat, as sails were rarely used. Ships had an array of heavy prow cannon, and were also armed with smaller guns on the bow, then were packed with missile armed troops (mainly arquebusers, archers for Turkish Ottomans), and further packed with heavily armored infantrymen.  The goal in battle was to ram another galley, and send infantry over to capture it, meanwhile pouring on the supporting fire from the missile troops.  Don Juan's flagship, the Real, had many hundreds of men on board, and during the battle of Lepanto, both flagships had constant reinforcements from the embarked infantry of other galleys.

Here are some links I found surfing around:
http://stokesinternet.com/games/rengalleys.html
http://gonsalvo.com/reports/galleyho.html
http://www001.upp.so-net.ne.jp/a-sasano/english/e-galley.htm
http://www001.upp.so-net.ne.jp/a-sasano/english/e-galley_design.htm  

Next up is Embeded by Dan Abnett, which ought to be interesting.  I wonder if he can avoid having his usual ending in a non-GW book.

Mongoose and Star Fleet Battles

Now that is a teaser poster.

You may have already read about this, but Mongoose and ADB have a new agreement for Mongoose to produce miniatures and an ACTA variation for the Star Fleet Battles universe.  Much like Klingon Armada, this new game will use the Star Fleet Battles background and ships with a different "engine" to handle the actual game play and fleet construction. The new ships will form Starline 2500, and will be computer designed 1/3125 instead of the 1/3700 scale used by the existing (rather poor looking) hand sculpted ADB ships. Ships will be cast in resin.

As I already have a micro machine based fleet of feds, Klinks, and Romulans (in the usual varying stages of construction), I am not particularly interested in their replacements.  I am however interested in remodeled versions of Kzinti or Gorn ships, which should be far sharper and more attractive.  Yet another rule set for this setting is puzzling, but it may be more playable, and anything that drives interest would be great. [this would make four official rule sets using this background]

On a blogging note, you may not have noticed this on your own blog, but my site views have exploded in the last week or so.  While I would like to think I am just that popular, I suspect that it is some sort of counting error... in any case I am already over 1200 views for this month, double my previous high.