Finally, the din of battle

I finally got troops to the table. A classic Orc vs Elf battle. I was Orcs and George was Elves. I didn't have a stronghold for the elves, so I defended. Terrain included a lake, a swamp and some woods. He opted to enter through the rough, which made sense, leaving me on a big open plain with a lake. Not great planning on my part. I definitely need to make some nice terrain here soon.
I set up with my 5 units of Warband on my left flank, and shooters, Arty, and riders on the right. The lake protected me in the middle. Geo set up with his riders and knights on on my right and his shooters on the left with his blades (including his general) in the center. He also had two units of lurkers, off board. My thought was to use the riders to cover the much larger area open on my right, but I am an orc of little patience.

When the elves moved up and parked in the swamp, I rushed out to fight them. Too long just building armies, I guess, though I tend towards this mistake. I am a notoriously poor defender. I did recognize the potential threat on my right flank, and move up just far enough to use the lake as an anchor. But I knew this area was in danger anyway, as knights quick kill warband. Now, we probably made several rules violations along the way. For example, we see Geos Magician in the swamp, but I don't think we were adding the rough going penalty to his bespelling attacks. He managed to hit my General, but only got a recoil, which broke my line. We stalemated here for a while, while I tried to move my Arty up to reach his magician, and move my riders round the flank. Geo was plagued with ones for pip rolls, which kept him from trouncing my sorry butt. And for some reason, I don't have any shots after this one. But I can tell you what happened. First I got lucky and my artillery dropped a rock on his magician, driving him into the murky depths of the swamp. Then his shooter came in for a close combat and killed my artillery. That put us on even footing again on that flank, and we returned to a stale mate. Geo finally rolled a 5 and had the pips to move his Cav up on my left flank. I got lucky and killed a knight, but his other knight killed my a double ranked warband, and turned to roll up the flank. That put me at 11 points dead. He must have also killed a rider, because, the next turn we realized my army was demoralized, but, even if that weren't so, he had a clear shot at my stronghold and would have taken it in another turn or two.

Still, a fun game, held at our FLGS which got a few lookers on at times. People seemed intrigued, but not captivated.

Three months, a few days progress

Three months.. My goodness. In my defense, we did take a two week vacation in there. I do have some photos, and progress to show. I have found the second edge of the huge Mage Knight Purchase that I made. Sorting, classifying, and deciding what to do has been a bear. It is funny, that when I only had about 50 figures, I just grouped them and found 3 reasonable armies. Now, I have choices, and that means I have to weigh options against one another.



The Orcs are pretty well done, with 26 AP made, but they lack variety, being all Warband and Shooters with a couple Riders. I am working on a Cleric, and maybe a Magician and a Hero.








I am Diligently working on the Elves. They have a few units I hope to Flock this evening. They have more variety, with some Blades,

Shooters, a Magician, Riders and Knights. I am working on a Dragon and some Lurkers.
The lurkers are Woodland Snipers, and I have a pile of them. They are not bad sculpts, but a bit awkward, as they are preparing to shoot while retreating. And I may touch up the paint, and diversify the hair color a bit. I also have a another unit of Blades in the works, but, I really need more Shooters. Elves are Shooters by tradition. I have a few selected at Troll and Toad that I will probably buy, just to make a proper Shooter heavy Elvish force.



A couple of other pics of units for armies in the works just to fill the post out a bit. The Centaurs will be Knights in an army of Hybrid Critters. Minotaurs, Satyrs, etc. There are a surprising number of these kinds of figs in my piles of MK. The biggest disappointment is finding that many of the varied Centaur units made for MK are midget sized, completely out of scale for the rest of the line. They might work well for a 15mm or 20mm army, but MK is a big 28mm.




Finally some random Knights and Blades from proposed Human and Amazonian Armies. Got a lot of work to do. Should spend less time arguing with people on the internets. Not gonna change their minds anyway.

no posts for a month, and a broken promise of pictures. I am a failure at this whole blog thing. Real life has been interfering a bit. I was trying to buy a spare house, and we had a death in the family, and such, but, I still could have put up pictures.

On the other hand, I do have some news. My shopping impulse got the best of me and I bought a pile of Mage knight figs. 800. I have been sorting and classifying for HOTT purposes. I should have taken a pic of the table overflowing..

I have also been working on the Dwarf army. Trying to decide on unit types, really. I have Dwarven Fusers, and a couple thunder gunners who will be shooters. I had originally planned on putting mixed melee weapons together for Warband, but, the Orcs are currently warband, and the trolls are leaning towards warband. And, dammit, do I really need more warband? I considered redoing the orcs as Hordes, but I would need more of them. That might be a long term option.

I am also trying to keep enough figs free to base for Song of Blades and Heroes or TFT. I know that I am building my HOTT armies way too large, but the impulse to have spare units for the kind of game I would like to run is strong.

Let me talk, then, a little about my ideas for a HOTT campaign. The rule book has a system, but it is very formal, and kinda dull. First it assumes that all armies deployed are the same size (24 points). But in reality, Commanders deploy forces in variable sizes, so I would like to let the commanders in my campaign do this. Of course, concentrating too many forces in one spot leaves you hinterlands exposed, but that is a risk one might take, if the reward were right.

I was also thinking of adding rules for spying on other armies. A commander could deploy certain units - Heroes, Magicians, Paladins, and Sneakers, into enemy controlled areas for recon missions. If there were enemy units in the area, they would dice to see if they could learn anything. I haven't determined the odds yet, but sneakers and magicians would excel at this, and Paladins and Heroes would we be the weakest. It might also work to use SOBH to play out these encounters, if the spies were discovered.

Another tweak might be to add in supply lines and scavenging. Each area might have a maximum capacity for "living off the land". This is all very nebulous so far. I should probably take pencil to paper and sort it out. I still sort best with pencil and paper.. Old school

Time Marches on, but, as yet my armies do not.

First post of March. Not much to say. Haven't gotten my figs to the table. Friend G is going out of town on Fri/Sat, so probably not then. Did play an abbreviated game of Arkham Horror, and joined G and a friend of his in a brief FRP session of Call of Cthulhu. Playing an Anglican priest, and having a good time judging sinners, but, not sure how I am going to fit this into my schedule. I am already falling way behind on my Chanter Practice.. skipped class tonight cause I just wasn't prepared. Not a good sign. Wish my eyes didn't hurt all the time..

Ok, I am going to put up some new pics by the end of the weekend, and I did buy the fixins for a nice little Dwarf army.. and some figs to enhance the Trolls and the Orcs a bit..

Call me Beleaguered.

My weekend plans are flocked

Tomorrow, 12 hours from now, I will not be playing Fields of Glory at Recon in the the cities. Recon is a quarterly miniatures 'micro con' held by the MMGA* every few months. George and I went a few months back and played some DBM with a fine gentleman down in the cities. He has moved on now; to Field of Glory. In the interim I bought two armies for 15 mm FOG/DBM. Ostrogoths and Romans - a fine match. I had hoped to go down this weekend and take part in a FOG tourney (as a total NOOB) and get my ass kicked up and down the table top. But, today I got hit with OT at work. A mixed blessing, because it means all the things I had planned to do today, I didn't. And therefore I won't be going tonight or tomorrow. I will, however, get a little extra on my next check, so that will help. FOG appears to be on the move in the twin cities. I will probably get more chances to go down and learn to lose gracefully.

Instead, I have put some effort into getting my HOTT armies to table. I still have plenty of figs to base, but I also have enough bad guys and good guys to field some armies - though less strictly themed than I originally envisioned. Basically, for the moment, it will simply be forces of light and forces of darkness.. Orcs allies vs Elves and allies. I won't offer an opinion on which is the force of darkness, as the reader probably has his or her own opinions. Tonight I did a quick and dirty flocking off all my based Elves and allies.They look ok. I used a wet paint flocking technique, using a very wisconsinesque (iron rich mud) brown paint I picked up free at the local haz waste recovery place. I made several trips there last summer to get rid of a few things - more trips than were strictly necessary mind you - each time coming home with a few of their recycled paint cans in various earth and water tones. These are set aside for making scenery, battle mats, etc. Paint applied to base, base dipped in a mixed flock while paint is still wet and Viola! grass on a muddy field.

Tomorrow I hope to do the Orcs and allies. Most of the troops that are close to table ready are core army types. Blades, Spears, Riders, Knights, Warband. The only unusual units are the Magician and the Troll Artillery (I neglected to mention them in the last post, but they were pictured). That's ok for now, I suppose. I also popped one of the elf riders off the base, so that all my rider units have two figs and all my knights will have three, for standardization. It also allows me to make another Elven rider unit, as I still had one in the lab.


* the MMGA website is woefully out of date, but they have an active yahoo group.. if you want to join it, and can't find a link, drop me a note, I will modify this footnote to include one.. for now, I am a bit ty ty.. and rambling on as well oh, bother, it was easier just to add the link..

amazing the typos you see after you post these things. There are still quite a few, but the worst are gone.

Pictures...

Well, I finally have some progress to report on the HotT project, and pics to prove the point. The pics aren't all great, I need to set up a system for consistent, focused images..

An Elf Mage, Two Elf blades, Elf Riders, Knights and Shooters.


I will try to figure out what figs I used for each, at some point. I know the Blades with three elves were cloud warriors.. the shooters are combination of master archers and High Elven archers, the blades with four figs are High Elven warriors. I think the mage is Master Cyrus, and some apprentice adepts or some such.. At some point I will make a chart, maybe. Not mission critical, I guess..I also have a pile of Orcs based...

6 stands of war band, and 2 shooters. And a fair number of figs ready for basing.

if any of my legion fans knows of a tutorial on formatting the page when I put pics into it, I would love to get a link..

Screw it, done is better than perfect

I have been delaying the inevitable decision to give up on the removable basing for my Mage Knight HOTT armies. I am better off just mounting the figures to fixed bases, than taking more time trying to figure out a way to have my cake and eat it too. That said, I will begin this task this week. But I also must work on cleaning the geek room and its geek lab. That may be a project for tomorrow.

I loaned my digital camera to a friend who was taking a class, so pictures may be delayed indefinitely, or I may borrow one from my wife or kid. Right now the background for any pics I took would embarrass my family, and bring social services to clean my house.

I have also succumbed to my ebay compulsion, and purchased more mage knight figures. This time they are packaged as sets built around factions, which, I hope, means some consistency of theme. The pics on the auction were poor, but, if I am lucky, this should represent a nearly complete Elf and Orc army.

I did get Ubuntu online, and, in fact, got a new computer (2.4 G with a 40G hard drive and larger monitor for 45 bucks) to run it on. It has a dual monitor vid card, and I have an old LCD projector I plan to mount in my geek room for RPG purposes. My long term goal is to use the older P3 computer into a wiki server to manage my life, and all that data I have piled up.

I am probably going to start selling some of my board games. This feels like drowning my children, but, I have some projects that are going to demand some funds. A part time job might also be an option.. the horror..