Salute shopping list

It's only a couple of weeks away, and (barring the unlikely event that we get roped in off the reserves list at short notice with one of our participation games) I'm going to be down at Salute as a punter, although I guess I might spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the Lardie stand watching the Chain of Command demos.

Like most folks, though, I go to shows to buy stuff. This year's list:

• Fireforge mounted and foot Templars
• GB unarmoured Dark Ages warriors (thanks, Tamsin!)
• Several boxes of Perry War of the Roses figures - Grahame and I down the club are aiming to get us a couple of armies together
• Plastic Soldier Company
• Panthers
• Tigers
• M3 half tracks
• anything else interesting they have out for Salute :D (the new War Sprays, if they are)
• Miniature Wargames 361

I may toy with some of Warbases and 4Ground's buildings as well.

So: what's anyone else going to be spending money on/hiding from the other half?

[In other news - kudos to the Commission Figurines guys, whose Kickstarter has made it to their target, and is very likely to pass at least one of its stretch goals.]

Battle Report - 06 Apr 2013 - Judge Dredd

Off down to Swindon for a Saturday at Mongoose Publishing's HQ, the home of the Judge Dredd miniatures game. Unlike the other guys from the club, I stayed over with a friend in Swindon, and thus was there on time, refreshed and mostly awake (and not having driven for two hours!).

Dropping off Judge Turner to breach the defenses.

Format was seven short scenarios, with (hopefully) a guarantee that you'd not play the same person twice (although there were two linked scenarios designed such that if you played one you played the same person on the next. I started out by getting trounced, twice, and winding up on the same table three times as a result, before I managed to score a whitewash victory in the round before lunch and move up a couple of places.

Not all of the scenarios were 100% perfect - one or two seemed very biased towards fast moving units, and since my force was two Judges, one riding a Lawmaster and able to give the other a pillion ride, I could have won one in a single turn. As I don't play tournaments in win-at-all-costs mode, I did go for a slightly different approach which cost me any chance at a complete whitewash, but hey :D

For my two middle games of the afternoon I got Rob from the club and the infamous Dreddpool, in the two linked scenarios, The first really boiled down to who had the better luck rolling dice to find something (Rob), which gave him the interesting defensive position for the second game. Which was closer than I expected, despite Dreddpool's rather annoying ability to bounce around the battlefield like an idiot. I came pretty close to blowing his head off before he finally got me.

Yes, those are working lights. Cute, huh?

Last up I had an interesting scrap on an Arctic battlefield, which required me to take as many of three objectives as possible with my two figures. Not so easy. I got the Lawmaster shot out from under Judge Nicks AGAIN - it happened so many times today I'm seriously considering buying one of the old Citadel Lawmasters to make into a wreck, as it's probably decent hard cover! - but managed to scrape a minor loss.

That's Dreddpool's head (AKA 'prime target') peering
over the defences.

All told? Fantastic day - bunch of nice folks clearly there for the fun of the game, not to win at all costs,  and the guys from Mongoose organised an excellent day, Final results - I didn't come last (which as anyone whose been following this blog will appreciate is an achievement!, and Adrian and AndyM from the club came third and second respectively.

Apologies, but no comics for this: it was all a bit fast and frantic. But we do have a club campaign night on Monday!

Book Review - Stonea and the Roman Fens

Stonea Camp is an Iron Age hill fort near March, not far from me in Peterborough. The book, Stonea and the Roman Fens was brought to my attention by Phil on the TFL list, knowing my interest in the Fens as they were around the time of the Dux Britanniarum setting. It's written by Tim Malim, the archaeologist responsible for a lot of excavation and restoration of the Stonea site in the early 90s.

In a nutshell? Fascinating. If you want a feel for what the Fens looked like around the time of the Romans (answer: wet) and a much deeper look into the archaeology of the area than you'd ever get from (say) Time Team or one of the more sweeping books on the English landscape, this one's for you. I'm still working my way through it, because there's just so much to delve into.

Commission Miniatures Kickstarter

I don't normally re-plug Kickstarters, but the rather superb one for modular buildings and ruins I mentioned a while back has four days left to run and is a couple of grand shy of its target.

If you or your club are into Bolt Action, FoW, IABSM, the Lardies' new Chain of Command or anything else that lends itself to WW2-era city fights, you owe it to yourself to grab a deal here, be it in 15, 20 or 28mm. This one deserves to succeed, IMO: there are club deals at £200 if you want to club together, in all scales.

Heraldry 101, part 9 - Fish Heads. Roly poly fish heads.

If you don't get the reference, check YouTube.

First, fish, or, alternatively, more Latin/French names for the weird contortions heraldic critters get into. There's really only three of note:

• Naiant. Swimming. Horizontally, facing left.
• Hauriant. Swimming, head up, tail down.
• Urinant (no tittering at the back!). Swimming, head down, tail up.

On a related tack, there are a couple of oddities for snakes:

• A snake (or, in fact, anything's tail) may be said to be nowed if it's knotted, usually in a figure eight knot.
• The heraldic term for the classic snake biting its own tail is, unsurprisingly if you're well read, an ouroboros

Moving on to heads and, of necessity, necks. A head is quite a common charge: if it's viewed sideways on there are a couple of terms that explain the state of the neck:

Couped: neatly cut off

Erased: raggedly cut off, usually in a very stylised manner

In addition to couped, there's couped close, which means there's no neck at all, and couped at the shoulders, which should be obvious. (By analogy, one could have erased at the shoulders). The term affronté (sometimes spelled affronty) for a head facing the viewer should be familiar from last time!

Heads are typically blazoned as proper, and the terms bearded and crined (i.e. having hair of a certain colour) may be used if you need to be specific. A head of colour (to use the politically correct term) is usually blazoned with the anachronistic blackamoor's head. Also cropping up are things like a Saracen's head, a Turk's head etc. One interesting term is a maiden's head (I'm sure there's an intentional herald's pun in there somewhere!), which refers to (and I quote) "[the] head and shoulders of a woman affrontée, couped below the breasts, her hair dishevelled, and usually wreathed with a garland of roses." Yes. Quite.

Next up, and not least because there are Fireforge Templars on my Salute shopping list, crosses of all forms.

[This post respectfully dedicated to the memory of my former colleague and friend Steff, who managed to raise a laugh and a smile at his funeral by asking for the aforementioned music to be played at the beginning. Rest in peace, mate. You're missed.]

Terrain part 4 - making a marsh

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but since our plans for Easter Monday went out of the window when 'er indoors picked up a tummy bug (fingers crossed I don't!), I got some free time I wasn't expecting to finish this off (I started it on Easter Saturday).

Core ingredients: an A3 piece of plastic card and some DAS modelling clay. First up, I created some edges for the marshy bit (and some lumps and bumps in the middle) using the DAS, trying quite hard to make sure it's a complete unbroken bit, for reasons which will become apparent later. In addition to that, I set one of my 'tree washers' on a small island, as I have designs on there being a willow tree in the middle of this patch of fen. I sprayed the resulting board (having let the clay dry for 24 hours), starting with Humbrol brown, and then in the swampy areas, first Army Painter Army Green then Angel Green.

Next up, the remains of a causeway, as a nod to our local archaelogical site, Flag Fen. I wanted something that looks like it pre-dates our Dux Britanniarum campaign and has fallen into disuse, leaving a few bits of timber extending into the fen. I knocked this together from the last of my stash of BBC coffee stirrers and half a dozen matchsticks.

I'm rather pleased with this - that old, knackered timber look is Humbrol brown, and then a fairly heavy wash of Army Painter dark tone ink. It seems to produce the look I wanted with surprisingly little effort.

Next, it's just a matter of liberal use of scatter materials, various lengths and shades of static grass ranging from my standard 2mm Javis summer mix (I at least do the edges of all my scenery bits with that so they'll blend in with my terrain tiles when I make them), through various lengths of War World Scenics grass (a new discovery) through to some Noch 12mm (yes really) static grass and some cut down Hornby reeds.

And that's where I am at the moment. More later in the week when all the PVA is dry and I have found a reliably dead level spot for the next stage.

I want one :D

Gripping Beast/4Ground will have a really rather epic Saxon/Viking Great Hall available for Salute: it
looks absolutely awesome.

More pictures here, but I swiped one just to show it off.