Tales of Darkwood – Ruins of the Forest

As I mentioned in my previous post on the fantasy project, I have done some terrain pieces. Starting off we have some arcane ruins that harbor strange artifacts from the fallen empire, together with crumbling statues of long forgotten kings and a mysterious stone circle that still seems to emit an eerie power.

The ruins and statues are all from Citadel's Lord of the Rings range, while the stone circle is from Ziterdes. The buildings look like they have been purposely destroyed rather than having crumbled of old age, which makes for an interesting effect I think.

The kits are nicely detailed, but the fitting between the different parts are less than perfect – or maybe it's just my mediocre modeling skills ...

Going with the forest theme of the project, I went for an partially overgrown look with these. It was fun playing around with different tufts, ivy and foliages. You just have to be careful not to overdo it and remember these are not dioramas, but rather war-games terrain – you have to be able to place the miniatures somewhere!

In the future I want to do a couple of more terrain pieces, a bit smaller this time, and maybe some trees as well.

Thanks for reading!

A New Project

On Wednesday night we could finally welcome the newest member of our family – little Svante – all in glorious 1:1 scale and pre-painted too. Since then it's all been a bit of a blur really ...

I haven't been overly active blogging lately, and obviously this will now continue for the foreseeable future. However, I have a backlog of a couple of posts I'm planning to publish during the coming weeks. After this, we'll have to see what I can manage – with regards to both blogging and painting! – in-between changing diapers and serving the rest of the family.

Hopefully things will eventually settle, and I can get at least some hobby time now and then. But it's still a good while before I'm there.

Have a great week everyone!

Tales of Darkwood – Ragnar Blodsärk and His Men

And now for something completely different.

As I mentioned in another post I lost a bit of my painting mojo over the summer. I don't know if it was the slow progress of the Italian Wars project or just general painting fatigue. However, after some serious surfing on various blogs and particularly the fantastic Lead Adventure forum, I found my inspiration slowly being reinvigorated: I was going to do a fantasy skirmish project.

You see, I'm a bit of a fantasy buff. Ever since I laid eyes on that fantastic map in The Hobbit, I've been hooked on imaginary worlds and made up languages. It's a genre with lots (and lots!) of crap for sure, but in the hands of say a LeGuin, a Tolkien or a Leiber there's nothing quite like it.

I already have some experience with the excellent Song of Blades and Heroes rules from Ganesha Games, and they fit this project perfectly. A standard war band numbers some 8–12 models, which meant I could paint it up pretty fast and still spend some time on conversions etc without it getting overwhelming.

As for the background and setting, the "fluff" if you like, I was very inspired by the newly released Swedish pen-and-paper RPG Symbaroum, which centers around a vast brooding forest, harboring strange remnants of a former empire. So shamelessly stole this idea and adapted it to a (short) campaign: various groups searching a spooky forest for strange artifacts and clashing with each other and the mysterious guardians of the woods. And so "Tales of Darkwood" was born – the name of the forest obviously being an homage to the old Fighting Fantasy book "Forest of Doom".

After presenting the idea to my mate Dalauppror, he immediately responded: "So when do we play?" He was keen to use one of his war bands from an older project, which would fit perfectly for what I had in mind. He also had some custom built terrain we could use.

My own idea for a war band was a tribe of "barbarians" that's been living on the brink of the forest, but never venturing into it because of old taboos. Now however, with the arrival of explorers and missionaries from a southern kingdom, they are desperate to find ways to battle the newcomers and thus enters the forbidden woods in search of something to help them in their fight.

The models are a mix of Ancient Germans from Foundry (the riders) and Black Tree Design, together with an old Citadel wizard. I did some simple conversions on some of the riders. I sculpted fur cloaks over the regular cloaks on two of them, and the leader got an imposing spiked mace from a GW Chaos Marauder. The wizard/shaman I left as he was, as it's such a fantastic model full of that old school charm I'm so fond of. I really dig these old Citadel miniatures, and after finishing my first proper "Oldhammer" miniature I certainly have an itch to do more of them!

As the leader got a red shirt I decided to name him Ragnar Blodsärk ("Blood shirt"). Simple and straight forward, just like Ragnar himself I imagine.

I choose to use some Pagan Rus shield transfers I had laying around. In part to give the models a bit of a different "non-western dark ages"-look, but also to add some colour to the miniatures.

For the bases I wanted to try some new toys and experiment with a new look. I went for the thick moss of the forest floor, together with thick underbrushes with a slightly alien feel. I think the red leaves work particularly well against all the green on the bases, and the slightly muted colours of the miniatures.

And no, the irony is not lost on me – even when I decide to do a fantasy project all my miniatures look like they belong in the Dark Ages ... Sigh.

I'm now in the process of finishing some terrain pieces for this project, and of course I'm looking at doing another war band or two! These projects have a habit of getting out of control once you start.

Hopefully I'll be able to get a game or two with Ragnar and his men before the new baby arrives.

As always – thanks for reading and I hope you'll all have a great weekend!

Lion Rampant – It's Here!

I'm lucky to have been a play tester for the medieval large scale skirmish game Lion Rampant by Dan Mersey, of Dux Bellorum fame. I have now received my complimentary copy and had quick skim through the book. This is the first time I have my name in print in a wargames book, which of course is very flattering indeed. I had to show it to my fiancée who was suitably impressed (or at least pretended to be).

Lion Rampant has the usual high production values of Osprey's Wargames series – the layout is the same used in the other books in the series and it's filled with a smattering of gorgeous illustrations taken from their regular reference volumes, together with some really nice pictures of painted models and terrain used both as illustrative examples and as pure eye candy.

We've played a fair number of games of Lion Rampant by now, in various iterations, and the rules give a fast and fun experience – highly recommended for a club night or similar. You can find a bunch of AARs from our games on the excellent blog of Dalauppror. He has been even more involved in the development of the game than me and have a couple of picture of his stunning minis in the book – very well-deserved if you ask me.

A standard 24 points retinue, as the armies are called, numbers around something like 40–50 models, depending on how you choose to organize it. This means it's pretty easy to get into the game, as you don't have to paint up droves and droves of models. My own retinue – the medieval host of the Novgorod prince Alexander Nevskij – is 42 models strong, with a mix of mounted and foot troops.

The book is out now, and well worth checking out.

Italian Wars French 3 – Reisläufers 3

Hot on the heels of the last update, here are another two bases of mercenaries for my French army for the Italian Wars. As before, these represent either Landsknechts or Reisläufers (Swiss mercenaries).

The models are yet again from Foundry's classic renaissance line. Some lovely sculpts by Alan Perry that certainly have held up well over time.

These are in a more attacking pose, and will form the front line of the pike blocks. Originally I had planned to do the second line in standing poses, and the first line in advancing, but after reading about the very aggressive tactics of the Swiss mercenaries – they would often recklessly charge across the battlefield before smashing into the enemy – I decided to forgo all standing poses for a more dynamic look of the units.

Here is an almost finished unit, just the command stand left to do. There's really nothing quite like the sight of a pike block on the wargaming table!

After this it's another two attacking bases, and then two command stands and my pike blocks are finally finished. It's been a bit of a chore so far, but the end result will be well worth I think.

Thanks for reading – I hope you'll have a great week!

Italian Wars French 2 – Reisläufers 2

Here are the next two bases of pike armed mercenaries for my French army for the Italian Wars. They are either Landsknechts or their Swiss counterpart Reisläufers.

I actually finished these earlier in the summer, but I just now took the time to finally photograph them.

The miniatures are from Foundry, the classic sculpts by Alan Perry, and I have to say I like them a lot. The models looked a bit dodgy in the bare metal, so I wasn't too sure about them, but they painted up really, really nice. In my opinion they certainly hold up well against the much more recent Pro Gloria.

After posting up the first batch, I got some comments on the basing – more specifically some people thought they looked too regular and ranked up, and lacking that "push of pike" feeling. In hindsight, I do agree and for these new bases I tried to position them in a more irregular manner. I think they look much better for this.

As you may remember, I had some problems with the first bunch I painted using the straight Foundry triad system. For the new models I reverted back to my standard method, relying more on washes and sharper highlights. As a result, I'm much more happy with the look of these. The problem now is of course they have a slightly different look than the first bases – a bit darker or dirtier and with more contrasts between the layers. I haven't yet decided if the difference is too noticeable or if I can pass them off OK.

Here are some shots of the finished bases to date. You can clearly see the difference in painting styles.

Lots of pointy stuff.

I will not field the pike block like this, but nevertheless it's nice to get a feel for the finished unit.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you'll have a great week!

Back Again

Well, hello again dear readers. I'm not sure any of you have actually noticed my absence but once again it's been awfully quite around here for a while. You can chalk that up to the very nice – but very, very hot! – Swedish summer. I've been away on vacation for a while, visiting my family among other things. Since we came back to Stockholm we've mostly been doing day trips to the beach as it's just been too hot to do anything else.

However, I have managed to get some painting done, and finished a couple of more bases of Reisläufers/Landsknechts, but overall my painting pace has been very slow as even in the evenings it's mostly been far too hot to paint. Needless to say, my blogging hasn't been very prolific either.

Last week I got back to work, while thankfully the temperature dropped to more manageable degrees, and hopefully I can get my act together and take some snaps of the newly painted miniatures later this week.

Usually when projects start to slow down my mind keeps wandering to new stuff, and I get all sorts of ideas for projects – pouring over blogs, fora, books and whatnot and making grand plans that usually involve expanding the lead pile ever more ... This summer has been no exception as I've struggled to get some momentum to the Italian Wars project and consequently my inspiration to pick up the brushes has slowly been dropping.

This time it was a trip to a certain church (seen at the top of this post) not far from where I grew up that provided the spark for a new project. This church was built by a family that had major impact on the course of Swedish history during the 12th and 13th centuries – and indeed well beyond that. This visit, which really deserves a post of its own, and some brushing up on my knowledge of Swedish history for this period has got me thinking about possible gaming projects.

I now have an idea of what I want to do, but as our new baby is due in October I suspect my hobby time will be close to nonexistent for the rest of the year. So I'm afraid this one will have to be filed away for the future.

There is another (smallish) project though, that I'm just about to start, that hopefully will give me a much needed boost of energy with regards to painting. But more on that in a later post ...

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you have a nice week!

Pigs!

It's been very quiet around here lately due to several factors including enjoying the very nice Swedish summer but mainly because I've prioritized painting over blogging. Here are the first results of these painting sessions – some prime Dark Age bacon, with a serious attitude!

These are iron age pigs, closely resembling wild boars (they even have the imposing tusks).

Once more these are from the boys at Gripping Beast, my regular suppliers of Dark Age goodies.

With these finished I should have plenty of choice of what livestock to steal when raiding.

Thanks for reading! Coming up are some more landsknechts/reisläufers.

Cattle and Cane

Taking a short break from my Italian Wars French (don't worry, I'll get back to them soon) with a quick Dark Ages diversion: The next game in our Dux Britanniarum campaign will be a cattle raid and for this we naturally needed some cattle – and sheep too it seems. I've had these Gripping Beast models in the lead pile for a while and now was the perfect time to finally paint them up.

This was a quick job, mostly using drybrushing and washes and for such limited amount of work they turned out pretty good I think. I have no idea if the colours are correct though, but they look fine to my untrained eyes. The sculpts are perhaps a bit rough but perfectly serviceable.

I must apologize for the bad pictures. Lately I've had some real trouble taking good pictures. They just look washed out with most of the the highlights killed, and I can't quite figure out why. I think I need to experiment some more with my setup.

Anyway, speaking of our Dux Brit campaign, I have started on an AAR from our second game (we have played three so far) but work, family obligations and computer trouble have kept me from working on it. Hopefully I'll get some time during this coming week to finish the report.

Thanks for looking! Have a great week everyone!

Italian Wars French 1 – Reisläufers 1

Finally I have some new painted miniatures to show you. These are the first 4 bases of the first pike unit of Swiss mercenaries (Reisläufers) for my French army for the Great Italians Wars. To begin with, there will be two units of Swiss pikemen, each consisting of 6 bases – 3 standing and 3 advancing. The plan is to eventually bring them up to 9 bases each with an extra 3 bases of attacking pikemen in the front rows.

The miniatures are from Pro Gloria and very nice they are too. They required very little in the way of cleaning up, which is always a big plus in my book.

In a stroke of genius (ha!) I have decided to do the units as combined Reisläufer/Landsknechts units, which means they won't be 100% correct for either faction but I'd like to keep all my options open. In line with this, the flags, when I get to them, will be removable.

The Italian Wars project have changed a bit since I talked about it last time. Originally my plan was to make a couple of French units to fight against Dalauppror's splendid Imperial Landsknechts/German mercenaries. However, since our good friend Søren, of Black Powder Games, joined us as the Imperial player the plan changed – and the project grew. After some discussion we decided to move to a slightly later period instead of the early wars, as we were keen to paint up some lovely colourful landsknechts and gendarmes in full regalia. There's really nothing quite like the spectacle of two armies for the Italian Wars on the tabletop. So instead of Fornovo, our focus will now be on the period of the battle of Pavia, ie the 1520s.

This had the added bonus of us being able to use the army lists straight out of the Pike&Shotte rules, which would give us a rough guide to our forces – always a welcome thing when you start up a new period.

My plan is still to paint up a core starter-force to get some games going, and then add to it when I have the time and inspiration. By now, I probably hade enough miniatures in the lead mountain to at least double the number of units, but first things first. If it's one thing I have learned, it's that you should start small and then add to it, rather than try to paint too much from the start. I have the "boxes of shame" (ie half-finished projects) to prove it ...

The modest starter army will consist of:
2 units of Swiss pikemen, 6 bases each
2 units of gendarmes, 3 bases each
1 medium artillery, 1 base (I might do another base of artillery if I have the time)
2–3 command bases

As you can see there are a fair number of miniatures left to paint. It's always easier to get painting when you're working to a set deadline, so Sören and I have schedueled a first game in late August. Hopefully we'll both be ready by then!

Back to the Reisläufers then. These models actually proved a bit of a challenge to paint, for several reasons. The first was it always takes me a couple of miniatures in a new army and period to get a "feel" for them, add to this models from a new manufacturer that you also have to get a "feel" for, and it was a bit of trial and error before I got the colours and details right.

Second, I made the mistake of trying to paint too big a batch at the same time. I find 6–8 is about the sweet spot for me personally, but as I knew I had quite a few of these buggers to paint up I tried to push myself and do double this amount, This proved a bit too much, at least for the level of finish I went for here, and from now on I think 10–12 will be my absolute limit in terms of what I'm comfortable with (again depending on the level of finish) and I will do the rest of the pikemen in batches of 8 (or 2 bases).

Third, I was going for a very bright finish on these models, and therefore I wanted to avoid using my regular technique that's largely built on washes. In my experience, washes can dirty up the models and the end-result can feel a little grubby. This looks great on eg Dark Ages miniatures, but this time I wanted something different. Instead I tried the Foundry three-step method. Now, I'm normally using a lot of Foundry colours as I like the triad system although I don't use it as intended. Instead I add washes and mix the shades to get the results I'm after. This time I tried the system straight out of the bottle, so to speak, and wasn't very happy with the result. The main problem was a lack of contrast, especially in the darkest recesses. So I had to go back and add washes to get the contrast I wanted. I think the root of the problem might be that I'm using brown undercoat instead of black and this obviously makes it impossible to blackline the different areas and get a good definition. Well, whatever it was that caused the problem – no time saved was saved by using the three-step method so lesson learned.

Well, as I said, a bit of trial and error, and hopefully the rest of them will prove easier to finish.

Thanks for reading – have a great week everyone!