Recommended Listening

If you are into Ancients at all and aren't listening to the Ancient Warfare podcast (and for that matter subscribing to the magazine), why not? :D

Can I particularly commend to you the most recent couple of episodes, one on the rôle of geography and maps in ancient warfare, and the other on how re-enactment and experimental archaeology contribute to our understand of ancient battles. Listened to the first and a chunk of the second on my way back from the O2 last night - definitely worth a listen.

As far as my podcast goes, sadly I have very little voice of any use (thank you for the cold, dear), so I'm not editing/fixing stuff today.

Book Review: "AD69: Emperors, Armies and Anarchy", Nic Fields

[Free review copy supplied by Pen and Sword Books. My usual statement applies. Price £25 hardback, or £15 digital.]

What we have here is a very nice-looking, circa-250-page hardback, covering the Year of the Four Emperors, in which, in the aftermath of the death of Nero, the position of Roman Emperor was held in fairly rapid succession by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius before settling into the markedly more stable hands of Vespasian. It's where the collection of ways to die in the Imperial purple moves on from the merely suspicious (did he really die of natural causes?) and starts getting interesting: Nero (suicide), Galba (killed by his Praetorians), Otho (suicide), Vitellius (killed by Vespasian's troops). From a wargaming point of view, it's a fabulous excuse for pitting legionary against legionary - witness our WAB campaign day last November, which was themed around this year's events.

There are all the component parts of a really good book in here. It covers the lead up to Nero's death and whole story of AD69, with lots of nice titbits about legionary organisation, ancient sources, some fascinating speculations about various folks' motivation, some interesting parallels to the here and now etc etc. But... and I really hate to say "but", because I so wanted to like this book....

The warning bells rang when the first thing I read after turning over from the contents page is the full captions for all the plates in the middle of the book. Huh? Flicking to the middle, all the photos have short captions as well. Better, surely would have been facing pages of captions and photos? Anything that stops me flicking from the beginning of the book to the middle and back every time I want the details of a photo. 

The main text itself covers the whole story, with, it has to be said, an awful lot of editorialising by the author - some of which I find it hard to agree with, some less so. But you reach the word 'FINIS' on page 99. The next 140 pages are: appendices, several of them fascinating; a sprawling list of footnotes; a bibliography and a pretty decent index. More than half the book is not the main text. More to the point, a lot of the appendices belong in the main text - for example, Galba's speech after he's made emperor and adopts Piso Licinianus resides for some reason in Appendix 9, as does the lex de Imperio Vespasiani, the law the Senate enacted in the last days of December 69 to bestow power on Vespasian. Many of the footnotes are ten to twenty lines long, many contain valuable and interesting information. Am I really supposed to read with a finger in the appropriate page of footnotes and look up every one as I go? I'll be honest: I didn't read a good third of this book by page count, and that's really not a good thing for a reviewer to be saying.

In short? It's a frustrating book, that you can't read from front to back if you want to get all of its considerable and interesting content in any semblance of a sensible order or context. And that's a crying shame, because the words, the sentences, the paragraphs and the pictures contain individually and severally the ingredients of a really good book on a fantastic period of history, that's fundamentally been put together wrong.

"Old Skool"?

Northstar's "Nick's Bargain Basement" sale is still going. I was particularly amused, in the light of the analysis I did on the club's top 20 games last year by this....

And I quote:

"Remember when Ancient Wargaming meant legions of 28mm miniatures marching across the table-top? Lets relive those heady days again with these North Star Old Skool Ancient Army Deals."

So, playing with big armies is old school now, huh? An interesting thought....

Sword and Spear

Busy weekend ahead - busy converting 80+ pages of words and chords to a custom ChordPro format for the band's iPads for the weekend's run through...

If you missed Neil raving about Sword and Spear on the last Meeples podcast, do yourself a favour and go listen. I've picked a copy up on PDF for a disgustingly reasonable £6, and will be reviewing them properly next week after a play test at the club on Monday. At a first glance? They look very interesting.

Black Tree Design sale

If you're looking for some more figures for Chain of Command in 28mm or some Picts for Dux Raiders (among other things), you probably ought to be aware that Black Tree Design are doing some 20-35% discounts this week on a lot of their ranges, if you're a Premier Member.

The deepest discounts are on WW2 US and Early Romans, but there's a decent choice on all manner of stuff. Best of all, being a Premier Member just requires signing in.

Dark Ages gaming Facebook group

Brief post today, as I'm scurrying out to day 1 of the real reason I'm over in the US...

For those of you on Facebook, Heer Browne has just created a new group for folks interested in Dark Ages gaming, "Wall of Shields". If the group he runs on the historical uses of Flames of War is anything to go by, it'll be worth a look.  You can find me there.

Plastic 28mm Republican Romans

More 28mm plastic goodies...

It looks like the nice folks at Agema Miniatures have managed to book a slot in Renedra's queue (I suspect that, if your name doesn't begin with V, W or P, this is actually quite a feat), and will have the follow up to their rather lovely Velites available at Salute.

To quote:

This box set allows you to make up 40 highly detailed models of Roman Republican Legionnaires, comprising of 16 Hastati, 16 Principes and 8 Triarii. Bases are included.

---

Minor administrivia - as of the time you read this, I should be rolling down the runway at Heathrow in the direction of Seattle for a work security conference. I hope to keep blogging while I'm away: I suspect very early in the morning while I recover from jetlag - I do have a project to work on, which may prompt some posts.

See you soon!

Tidy-up time...

I was rather struck by yesterday's WAB day how embarrassingly tatty my assorted Dark Ages and British figures are. I wasn't intending to use any of them, but Grahame and I had rather held off on picking an army until we knew who else was turning up, and as it turned out, balance was perfectly served by us both taking an Italian City States army. 

So I thought nothing more of it till Saturday, when, in between feeding sheets of card to the printer and unjamming it, I started work on the army list, and my heart rather sank:

"Infantry: at least 50%"

Ouch. That means I needed to find 1200 points of Norman-ish infantry. My El Cid army has 16 infantry with spears (which will do for Provisionati), 12 crossbowmen and 8 archers. That's... just under 400 points. 

Nuts.

However, it does look like I could field a bunch of Milites, which seem to be no armour, shield and spear, from assorted generic Dark Ages figures, and I could cheat another 16 Provisionati from my mail-armouered Saxons...

...But dear oh Lord, how did I end up with so many broken spears, shields and swords?

Answer: 'because they're plastic, and you never finished the whole magnetic basing and putting sheet steel in their boxes thing, you idiot'.

I foresee a LOT of drilling and glueing in my future!

Battle Report - 9 September 2013 - Dux Bellorum

No, that isn't a typo.

Andy Hawes has played Dux Bellorum a few times, notably in a big demo game at this year's Salute for which he and his co-conspirators deservedly won an award. Monday night saw us try a basic 32 pt a side battle, with, predictable, Andy's Romano-British against my Saxons.

Given it was my first game, and I'd only skimmed the rules on Kindle the previous night, unsurprisingly I lost!

Very much a classic warband vs. shieldwall grinder - on my left, my Companion cavalry and Andy's beat each other to a standstill, on the right I somehow managed to lose a cavalry duel, and as a result one of Andy's units of horse rolled up the centre, where four warbands were pounding four units in shieldwall.

The basic problem was that, taking losses, I started losing command points, and thus took more losses due to not having command points to prevent it :D

Pretty good fun, though: for that scale of combat it plays better than WAB - less random, and more convincing, I think. On the whole? Still prefer Dux Britanniarum, but then that's partly because I have a lot invested in the campaign!

Battle Report - 17 Aug 2013 - Axes WAB tournament

The Rushden clubhouse - it's the local scout hut.

Back from the Rushden Phoenix club's annual Axes WAB tournament. Took my Parthians, hastily rebadged as Palmyrans (which has always been a plan, and one of the reasons I went for that army) - basic force being two units of catphracts, two units of horse archers, a unit of foot archers and a unit of allied elite Roman legionaries.

Got there (thanks to a ride with Carl from our club) in good time, so grabbed tea and got set up for my first battle against Paul Tysoe's Late Imperial Romans. The running joke was that several of the LIR armies had fewer actual Romans in than mine (as they were basically packed with Foederati, which to be fair isn't that unhistorical). I felt this scenario was a bit contrived, as it had a river running the length of the table, and deployment zones that were basically 4'x4' triangles. I basically deployed my heavies on one side, and sent the missile troops up the other flank to deal with Paul's bolt thrower. Paul, very sensibly, having units packed with missile weapons, just waited for me to get to him, and shot me up while I approached. It almost worked - the cataphracts are sufficiently slow that juggling things to make sure I could charge him and he couldn't charge me is quite a fine piece of manipulation, and I got it fractionally (by 1/8" or so) wrong. Result, my general's cataphracts got smacked around a lot, and ran away, causing one of those unpleasant cascades of failed morale tests that resulted in most of my army running away.

One to Paul.

Next up, I drew my chauffeur(!) Carl, who had brought an Ostrogoth army: lots of cavalry, a couple of units of foot and some skirmishers.

I basically got outmanoeuvred in this one, resulting in a capaphract sandwich: the cataphracts really do move like an ocean-going tanker, once you've set them on a path, they even wheel at a penalty. General's unit broke, cue tests all round. Cue some absolutely dreadful dice! No unit in my army has leadership less than 7. Of the five units that had to test, all but one rolled 11s or 12s on 2d6. Arrggh. Cue mass panic, army break point.

Ah well.

Last battle: Martyn Hill from the Rushden club's Gallic army - lots of warbands and skirmishers.

This went surprisingly like the previous one, including getting outmanoeuvred and rolling appallingly bad dice!

Conclusion? Mostly - this particular army is somewhat brittle - most of its firepower is concentrated in three big expensive units, two which are difficult to manoeuvre and really do not respond well to being charged. That and I suck at both dice rolling and tactics! :D

All that aside? I had a great time: the WAB crowd (as I think I've mentioned before) are in general a very friendly bunch, and most of us play the game in a very sporting and friendly manner.

Apparently, so do I, as (while coming dead last) I came away with the Best Sportsman award.

Huge thanks to Simon and the guys at Rushden Phoenix for organising and running the tournament, and congrats to Andy Beer of our club for coming a well deserved overall second!

Battle Report - 12 Aug 2013 - WAB

My horse archers avoiding the Ostrogoth's heavy cavalry.
Wise move.

I think I've clearly been playing too much Lard :D

Last night was my first night down the club after getting back off holiday, and Carl and I had a warm-up game for the Rushden club's Axes 2013 tournament on Saturday.

I lost.

It's not, I don't think, that I don't like Ancients, or even WAB. It's that I really miss at least one, and preferably both, of rules that have Command and Control features, and scenarios that actually have some context in the larger scheme of things. You'll still catch me at the campaign-themed tournaments that the likes of Scrivs and Tom, or Andy, Grahame and I run, as they're just... awesome fun with a great bunch of people, and enough thought goes into them to provide some context without contrived scenarios.

I may, though, be giving next year's WAB GT a miss.

Heraldry 101 part 12 - Marks of Cadency

Having covered what happens when two people marry in heraldry last time, let's move on to the next stage of human relations - kids. To be specific, what arms does (for example) a son bear while his parents are alive?

Once again? It depends :D

In the early history of heraldry, the answer is 'whatever worked'. Remembering that in heraldry, the original aim is to be able to tell two people apart on the field of battle, the son would bear something that looked like his father's colours, but with some form of difference, also known as a mark of cadency. On the death of his father, if he was the eldest son and heir, he'd inherit his father's arms (or is parents, if their arms were marshalled).

As time went by, theses differences were formally codified, particularly in England and Scotland. In England, these marks of cadency (also known as brisures, from the French verb briser, "to break")  are as follows:

• first son, a label of three points
• second son, a crescent (the points upward);
• third son, a mullet;
• fourth son, a martlet;
• fifth son, an annulet (a ring);
• sixth son, a fleur-de-lys;
• seventh son, a rose;
• eighth son, a cross moline;
• ninth son, a double quatrefoil.

In England, these are voluntary, as the principle of 'one man, one coat of arms' is honoured considerably more in the breach than the observance: they are only really used when there is some important reason to distinguish two branches of a family. 

In Scotland, however? Oh boy. The label is used for the first son, but after that a complex system of variously coloured and styled borders is used. For more detail than you could possibly ever want, check the Wikipedia article on the subject and its references, as well a set of images of the current cadency marks for the British Royal Family (who, of course, just have to be different!)

Heraldry being, historically, a tool to distinguish fighting men on the battlefield, has for the most part not adopted cadency marks for daughters (cue 21st century outrage at this point). It's worth noting that Canadian heraldy (for one) however has.

It has to be said, in the earlier periods we game in (11th century on), we're dealing with the 'whatever works' period of heraldry, and applying formal rules that probably weren't invented then is a last-ditch replacement for doing the research, if you can. By the 15th century (War of the Roses etc), to be fair, things get a little more formalised.

Anyway. Next? Borders and backgrounds. Till then, have fun!

Terracotta Warriors

Another Epcot goodie. Admittedly these are 1/3 scale replicas, but even so... I confess to being a wee bit tempted by a Chinese army in 28mm. 

Actually? Stuff that! Anyone fancy WAB in 600mm scale? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terracotta_Army

"Carve Out A Kingdom" - recommended reading

For those interested in joining us for our Normans In Italy WAB campaign day in November, here's some light reading.

Grahame from our club happened on these in The Works for a fiver - they're of the historical fiction-based-on-fact genre, and are Jack Ludlow's Conquest trilogy. I'm about halfway through book one as part of my holiday reading (before I start my way through the Kindle books), and they're actually pretty good.

Enjoy :D

[PS: please excuse typos for a few - on wife's MacBook Air, and it's taking a while to get used to where the keys are!]

"Carve Out A Kingdom" - save the date!

Wearing my committee hat, I'm happy to announce that Peterborough Wargames Club will be running another WAB gaming day on Sunday November 24th 2013. 

This will be:

An introduction and army list details will appear on the club site in the next week or so. Rest assured that if your immediate reaction is 'but I don't have an army for that', this may not be the case. Grahame from our club has been working on the lists starting from Armies of Antiquity 2 as a basis, and the details will include a lot of suggestions for how you can pass off an army as one of the lists, especially if you have anything El Cid or Age of Arthur related. Also note that next year's WABGT's period is 600AD to 1249AD, so it's not unlikely you can put together an army for both.

We're aiming to live up to the standard of last year's successful Bretwalda gaming day, with a number of believable new scenarios, good looking terrain and a friendly, laid-back atmosphere where taking part and having fun are as important as winning.

Watch out on the club site for more details and a signup form, and I'll make sure it gets mentioned here and elsewhere.

Re an archaeological question

Thanks for everyone who answered my question on Sunday.

For those who are wondering, I picked for mine one of the more plausible sites of the battle of Mons Graupius. I know there's a whole bunch of candidate sites, but there are a couple of fascinating theories (see the Roman Scotland site for one) that given unlimited funds it would be great fun to explore.

More later, since I have an essay deadline of 5am :D

Battle report - 15 July 2013 - WAB

It has been a while since I last played WAB - the WABGT, in fact, in February.

To be perfectly honest, it was too darn hot to play WAB, or anything else with that level of occasionally nit-picky rules. But I did need the practice, so Grahame and I tried one of the scenarios for the Rushden Axes tournament in August, his Late Imperial Romans against my Palmyrans.

What can I say? I lost :D It was fun, though.


A very wacky set up, this one. A river along the length of the table, and triangular set up areas diagonally across the table.

Made for some interesting setup choices: clearly I had to charge my cataphracts down the length of the table, since in WAB they are a bit like Disaster Area's sunship - steer like an absolute cow.

This is definitely one of those scenarios where you need to use some form of combined arms - unsupported units in what turns into a long, thin battle don't last long.

One unit of cataphracts got stuck into one of Grahame's cohorts, which tends to favour the cataphracts as they have a ridiculously good save.

However, as they were rather lacking in support, due to another messy scrap in the middle of the table, they collected some foederati cavalry up the rear, and then another cohort in the flank...

As they say - a battle's only a waste if you don't learn from it...

In other news - where would you keep the new, unpainted figure that's the general for your cataphract-based army...

Yes, that's right. In the box with the cataphracts, you idiot!!!

Sometimes, I am hopeless. :D

The best laid plans...

So, after a scorchingly hot, but great day out at Flag Fen with some folks from my course, I had a cunning plan in three stages.

Part 1: dig out my copy of WAB2's Armies of Antiquity and cobble together a 2100 point Palmyran list (using my Parthians).

Mission accomplished, at least a first cut. We'll see how it goes when I play test it down the club on Monday against AndyB.

Part 2: find the nice figure I have for Queen Zenobia, which is somewhere in my hopefully ordered filing system in the workshop. It's actually the Layla bint Suraya bint Javaira figure from Hell Dorado, but it's rather cool.

Aaaaand.. fail. Grr. It's not in any of the boxes it should be in, nor in any of the ones I've looked in that it shouldn't be. And it's also muggy and hot, and I'm done looking for tonight since any more looking requires, realistically, a trip down to Hobbycraft or Staples for some more Really Useful Boxes to tidy the remainder of the unpainted pile and all the scenic scatters into.....

...which rather scotches Part 3: paint her, or at least make a start.

Ah well.

I think I'm going to curl up with a Scotch and enjoy the Ashes highlights. Apologies to any Aussies among my followers :D

Review - Agema Miniatures 28mm Roman Velites

I'm usually pretty on the ball on the world of 28mm plastic ancients, as I have five WAB armies (which are probably 90%+ plastic in total) plus the makings of a sixth (Greek), but I have to confess that the arrival of the Agema Velites had completely passed me by until Grahame mentioned them in the car on the way to Salute. Of course, I don't actually need another ancient army, but they had to be worth a look, right.

Agema Miniatures is a husband and wife team, Greg and Rita - as far as I can tell, he sculpts, she draws - and the Velites are the first of a range for Punic Wars Romans. So, let's have a look!

Smaller than the typical Warlord etc box - you're getting 16 miniatures for £9.60 (plus p&p if you order from their site). Lovely box front art, though: very striking. The back has some shots of painted minis, as well as some close ups of the unpainted plastic - if I have a gripe here its that the shots of the plastic look a little soft, and don't do them justice.

Inside, there are eight identical sprues, made, perhaps inevitably, by Renedra. Each sprue has two figures, with separate arms and heads.

What you actually get, in fact, is

• two torsos, 
• two helmeted heads,
• one wolf-skin head
• one wolf-skin cloak
• two left arms
• one open-handed right arm (throwing overhand)
• one right arm carrying small gladius (stabbing underarm)
• two shields, one with javelins
• one empty gladius sheath, one sheathed gladius
• one javelin, which unlike a LOT of plastic javelins doesn't look like a scale tree trunk.

Detail is nice and crisp, and the proportions are much closer to actual normal humanity than quite a lot of the other 28mm plastic ranges out there (Warlord's Early Imperial Romans particularly leap to mind). Also, full marks for providing an empty scabbard for the guy who's stabbing with his gladius.

Of course, the upside to having only two figures to a sprue is this has probably been much quicker for Agema to sculpt. On the downside, it makes the number of poses a bit limited - there are only effectively two poses - throwing a javelin or stabbing, but you can have subtle variations by swapping arms and torsos, and some (the more 'elite') can have the wolf pelts.

I had a quick chat with Greg (in fact, I came back after I'd bought a box and got rid of a large pile of purchases to the car) during the early afternoon. It sounds like they've been selling well, and I'll certainly be keeping an eye out. Next up are going to be a box of Legionaries: I hope this will have enough diversity to produce hastati, principes and triarii. They're considering a Kickstarter to get the Legionaries out a little quicker - I'd definitely be tempted.

After that, apparently, the plan is (and I quote):

to progress through Legionnaires, to Carthaginian Citizen and Liby-Pheonician troops, to Spaniards and Celt-Iberians. Who knows, we may even release a plastic elephant set in the future if the range proves successful!

Sounds promising!

To conclude: I really like these, and I'm very tempted to put together a Republican Roman army - if nothing else, I know I'm good for a couple of years before the WAB GT comes round to that era again!

Those Parthians

I should, I think, share the end results of my painting marathon with those of you who don't subscribe to Curt's blog. Once I'd got these assembled, they basically took me a Sunday plus a week of evenings, and I was quite pleased not to be varnishing at 6 am on the day of the tournament.

As I'm sure I've said before, I am not the world's best painter: if it wasn't for Army Painter, I'd be too embarrassed to show my handiwork. :D


First up, we have 23 cataphracts, being a mix of Old Glory Parthians and Palmyrans, with some A&A Miniatures Palmyran command figures. (Old Glory UK didn't have enough of the Parthians, and they basically said 'will the Palmyrans do, they're very similar'. Since they're going to double as Palmyrans before I'm done, I didn't have a problem!). Horses were undercoated in Army Painter Matt Black, and dry-brushed with Army Painter Plate Mail (or, for the unit leaders, Weapon Bronze). Riders, to provide a slight contrast, were undercoated in Plate Mail spray, faces, hands (AP Tanned Flesh), metal kontos (Vallejo US Field Drab), leather work (Vallejo Red Leather) etc painted, and then washed with AP Strong Tone ink and the faces retouched with AP Human Flesh (a lighter shade).

For an encore, 72 (yes, really) horse archers, being 6 complete boxes of Wargames Factory Persian cavalry, which turn out to fit almost perfectly in a Really Useful 7L box.

Horses were undercoated in AP Matt Black, then given assorted shades of brown (AP Oak, Monster, Fur Browns, Vallejo Flat Earth). I went with the 'mostly bay or black' approach for what's probably a set of fairly inbred mounts, though there are half a dozen pale enough to be duns or roans. Saddle blankets in Vallejo Khaki, and one of AP Red, Ultramarine Blue or Angel Green detailing, and then harness in Vallejo Red Leather. To be honest, I rushed these, and there'd have been more coat variation if I'd had more time.

The riders were undercoated in batches of twelve in AP Daemonic Yellow, Desert Yellow, Bleached Bone, Uniform Green, Ultramarine Blue and Necrotic Flesh. After that, I snapped them on the mounts (they're a tight enough fit not to need glue, actually!), did faces/hands (AP Tanned Flesh), headgear (AP White, which covers *superbly* well), leggings (AP Leather Brown) and leatherwork (Vallejo Red Leather), and bows (Vallejo US Field Drab). Final stage was a wash of AP Soft Tone ink which dragged back and evened out the overall 'look' of the different colours, which was remarkably effective, if you contrast these pictures with the shot of the un-inked and basically just undercoated ones from the previous Monday.

Basing was Tamiya textured 'Desert Sand' and then dipped straight into Javis Desert Sand mix: left to dry, a few dabs of PVA and a sprinkle of AP Winter static grass. Varnished with AP Anti-Shine.

And there you go.