RCW/BoB/AVBCW: LK II

18/07/2013 2 Comments

The Germans in WW1 were slow (if not almost stationery) in getting off the mark when it came to tanks. They did produce the A7V in small numbers which was a slow lumbering beast, but having encountered the French FT-17, and then the British Whippet took the plunge and commissioned a Leichte Kampfewagen which turned into the LK II. They were too late to see combat but a small number were ready by the end of WW1. The Germans, prohibited from having tanks by the Allied Powers, sold them to Sweden.

LK II

Whilst Rich pinned it together he innocently commented that it look like an agricultural tractor, and I had to point out that that was how the Germans listed them after WW1 when shipping them to Sweden:

The parts were shipped as boiler plates and agricultural equipment and then assembled in Sweden as the Stridsvagn m/21 (Strv m/21 for short), which was essentially an improved version of the LK II prototype.

A nice little model even if the pictures don’t show the back plate….

Filed under AVBCW, RCW / BoB Tagged with , ,

Woodpecker

15/07/2013 2 Comments

Woodpeckers are getting rarer and rarer.

Fortunately, I regularly have them in my garden.

here’s a Green Woodpecker.
Wet Palette to come.

Filed under Uncategorized

WHFB: Hobgoblins

14/07/2013

No not those rubbish Chaos Dwarf underlings – the real ones back in the Golden Age of Citadel !

This guy is very very good at painting.

This is NOT my painting, but it’s what I aspire my Hobgoblin army to look like !

Available as C27 Hob Hounds & Master.

Then old C36 Hobgoblins were my first main purchases, and have a huge pile of them to paint. By a towering co-incidence this battered model missing mosdt of the shaft and point of his spear was given to me today by Byakhee Rich.

And yes I have an army in waiting…. 😉

Filed under Warhammer Tagged with , , , , , ,

WHFB: Dark Elf Heroes WIP

14/07/2013

As well as various tanks under the lick of the brush, my Characters on Cold Ones have seen some progress:

DE Characters on Cold Ones 1

They’re at the stage of dry brushing the highlights. However in the current heat, the paint is drying too quickly and rapidly cogging up the brush so I had stopped, not wanting to ruin them.

DE Characters on Cold Ones 2

Then today, I went round to Byakhee Rich’s Pinning service, and he showed me his solution, or rather one I’d heard about but never tried. Wet pallette painting. I’ll be trying it out later today, with his home brewed version (and my knock off copy).

Witch King & Raging Heroes character

Whilst at Rich’s, I picked up some stuff that he had pinned previously. The Witch King, and a Raging Heroes character. I’d opted for the pointing arm rather than the sword, as there is insufficient room in a DE chariot.

DE Character by Raging Heroes

The arms of both needed pinning, and the cloak of Malekith’s. In addition, I wanted to be able to swap heroes in and out of the chariot, so the feet needed magnets.

Rich had earlier commented via e-mail:

Got bored and pinned some Dark Elves. Very pleased with how the Raging Heroes lassie went onto the chariot – the mini is so well balanced that you can stand her up without the magnets.

And indeed she does… now to add her and the chariot to the ‘to do’ list.

Filed under Warhammer Tagged with , , , , , ,

British Mark IV Tank – female

13/07/2013

In the great British summer, the countryside is a buzz to the sound of the strimmer, hedge cutter and mower. However,this week it has been far too hot and there is an eery silence across the country. So I did some painting.

Cue the snorting monstrosity of a Mark IV tank:

Yup, finally got round to finishing one of these beauties off. Armed with machine guns (Hotchkisses or Lewises) only:

Byakhee Rich had pinned them some time ago and I’d done 80% of the painting.

Next up is the Hermaphrodite Mark IV – one sponsson female (machine guns):

One Sponsoon Male (Gun and machine gun).

Then I can get on to the next 6 Mark IVs and give them White/Red markings. 🙂

Filed under Painting, RCW / BoB Tagged with , ,

The Palace of Curiosities

10/07/2013

Rosie Garland, female vocalist of one of my favourite bands (The March Violets) has had her first novel published:

I bought the book, as given the lyrics of the ‘Violets it was probably a good bet, and also because Rosie has had several anthologies of poems and short stories published before.

It sat on an occasional table for a week looking reproachfully at me, until the hot weather arrived and I melted and could do nothing but read.

Its a good read, a Victorian kaleidoscope of the vaudevillian underbelly of the late nineteenth century, replete with grotesques and freaks.

Rosie Garland

However, they are portrayed with all their human desires and frailties which I liked.

Rosie has certainly used her erudite repartee formed as an onstage performer to help build the text of this book. Though the middle is a bit slow, it does build up the overall decay of the troupe towards the end of the book.

The paperbook is out in the Autumn.

Well worth reading if you like weird Victoriana.

Here’s the author on full on mode….

It’s educational….

For the over 18’s only please…

Wanking is forever

Filed under books Tagged with , , ,

Which genre or game ? II

07/07/2013 1 Comment

I sort of ran out of time and space on the previous post to continue my thoughts on which games and genres people play.

Having been into town today and visited my local GW and had a conversation with the shop manager I was inspired to write some more.

Why Warhammer ?

I picked up on Warhammer just as it was swaping over the 2nd Edition, the first red box. Our school had a games club that did random games once a week in the lunch hour and my friend Byakhee Anthony who lured me in with RPGs was key to this. Before I’d moved to the Malverns, I’d only eer done WW1/WW2/Napoleonic Airfix games with Byakhee Stuart, save for a very brief few months when I was engrossed in Fighting Fantasy that read whilst our family lived with my grandparents as our house was built. We’d read The Hobbit in our English classes and I was intrigued by LOTR.

So lots of new shiney toys were presented to a 12 years old kid. Well that was what caught me.

Lots of fantasy figures as Citadel entered their Golden Age, for a young lad who had started reading fantasy fiction, then read LOTR and there was no looking back. I also got lucky as a group mof us wen to The Last Citadel Open Day. Mecca ! GW/Citadel were flogging off Forces of Fantasy the Warhammer 1st Edition supplement for £1, and clearing stock of metal based figures.

Being Evil is Good

What also helped was out group raised money for charity – the son of the local games shop had developed cancer and so we had a marathon session to raise money for the unit he was being treated in. The longer our forces could stay active, the more money raised.

Note 1: We raised £130 … not £30…which back in 1985 was a considerable sum for 6 kids to raise on their own initiative.
Note 2: Our efforts gained GW’s attention, and we were sent a copy of their new Judge Dredd RPG along with figures, courtesy of Bryan Ansell.

The ‘hefty tomes’ of the rules were but magazines compared to today’s hard back !

So, as one of the first mass produced games systems, with a strong product base to support it, and a peer group to play with Warhammer caught me. We;’ve stuck with it for consistency, and nostalgia.

It may not be the best fantasy wargame system out there, but it has stuck. Its a bit like Betamax vs VHS. And its still with us today.

Filed under Rules, Warhammer

Which genre or game ?

06/07/2013 4 Comments

My old Byakhee Stuart askedwhy I was so keen on the RCW/BoB genre, and that got me thinking. The brain cell processed a lot of thoughts, some of them vaguely sentient. And ended up encompassing a number of arguments as to why I liked certain genres and games, and not others.

For instance, I love wargaming, role-playing etc, but am totally disinterested in most board games except for a fleeting change of direction.

So, my random thoughts coalesced:

Why I like RCW/BoB

  • I found and read “Farewell to the Don”, whilst we briefly lived with my grandparents before moving to the Malverns. It was a very evocative book with fascinating photos of a war I had never heard of before, and as an 11 year old made a big impression.
  • My family then watched “Dr Zhivago” and whilst I didn’t immediately make the connection, that too made an impression. We also watched “Lawrence of Arabia”.
  • Having been totally turned off history in my secondary education, rediscovered an interest whilst at university along with historical wargaming ideas.
  • Through my twenties I read even more history books, and even did an A level in Economic History so absorbed even more knowledge about the era and the momentus changes wrought by WW1.
  • Mark Copplestone then brought out his BoB range and I was hooked – a top class designer doing figures of a period I was very interested in.
  • More research followed and this period seemed to be the happy medium of infantry, cavalry, artillery, a/c, and tanks none of which were the uber-monsters of WW2.
  • And you had some great characters which you could use to go down the pulp adventure route very very easily.

Ok, so far and so good, but you need more than an interest in the period to get buying shiney stuff. A bit of research showed that you could have any number of factions:

  • Reds
  • Whites
  • Blacks (Makhno et al)
  • Greens
  • Czechs
  • Germans
  • Austro-Hungarians
  • British
  • British-Indian
  • French
  • Greek
  • Basmachi
  • Turk
  • American
  • Japanese
  • Chinese
  • Mongolian
  • Finnish
  • Estonian
  • Swedish…volunteers for the Finns and Ests
  • Baltic Landwehr
  • Latvian

Now forgive me for saying that gives players a huge latitude to mix and match different armies, and their latest cool shiny stuff. The various armies also shared a lot of equipment and were inter-mixed.

So for instance, this week’s purchase has been a unit of Swedish infantry. Backed up by one of their tanks – the Leichter Kampfwagen II which was a German tank (prototype) they flogged to Sweden after WW1.

These troops can be used for Swedish volunteers in Finland and Estonia. They can be used as Finns and Estonians equipped with Swedish stuff. They can be used as a “what if” scenario in the Baltic area if Sweden got more involved. They can be used alongside German and British figures given both their countries supplied equipment to Latvia, Estonia and Finland.

So, to summarise, the RCW and BoB genres, provide a huge range of combatants, a huge range of equipment that is not the uber mensch of WW2, and a very diverse potential for “what if” scenarios pairing very diverse historical armies together.

Filed under RCW / BoB, Uncategorized

WHFB: DE COK Building the unit

03/07/2013

The observant will have noted tat the Cold Ones photo’d yesterday didn’t have any riders….

Now they do.
I have managed to make all of them have the same shield design and am scouring the net for more of the same design (will swap, please contact me)…

Head on.

The characters mounted on Cold Ones have been primed and received block coats of colour. Along with some decoration for their bases.

25+ years ago block coats of enamel were ok, now looking at these photos it looks very very crude. Good job they’re about to b washed and highlighted at the very least. 🙂

Filed under Painting, Warhammer Tagged with , , , ,

Deadlife/Wildlife

03/07/2013

Last week Spades, caught his first Rabbit.

All three cats were out there busily and studiously ignoring me !

As you can see his fur coat is not in good shape – visits to vets have preceeded this photo, and since then a phone call has seen him on tablets due to stress. However, his front quarters are glossy, his eyes bright, and if he is able to catch a rabbit, bring it home and prevent the other two from taking it off him, he’s a healthy chap.

However, the cats don’t get everything, this hedgehog has been frequenting my garden most nights, and is brave enough to come up almost to the patio doors, even when I have the lights on, TV on and the doors open. he’ll also let me (just) touch him, which is amazing. After I did that once, no more, let him get on with his life.

He can’t have been that scared, as he came back the next night. Not the first time I’ve seen hedgehogs in the garden, but not so frequently.

Filed under Cats Tagged with , ,

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