Great War German Casualty Bases

You might remember that earlier this year I prepared a pair of British stretcher bearers and a handful of British casualties for use in our games of “Through the Mud and theBlood”.   It’s taken a while to do the same for the German forces, but in this post I’ve blogged the matching German casualty bases.

On each of the bases I tried to make a small impression to place a micro-dice into,  This serves to denote “shock” in the wargame, a feature which generally inhibits or restricts the actions of the unit suffering the “shock”.  We found in a lot of games that the micro-dice can get knocked over, hence the need for an impression in the base in which the micro-dice could be stored.  Kudos again to Curt from Analogue Hobbies for coming up with this fantastic idea.

Like grasping at smoke

Chasing them was like grasping at smoke.  We had followed their tracks for three days now.   Although we knew the paths and hillsides of the Grey Moors, all we could see of them was black figures barely-seen, darting in the half-light.  Sometimes we caught a glimpse of their spears, or heard the sharp cry of our cattle, stolen by them.  But more often, we heard nothing but the sound of the wind and the shriek of the ravens.

Only on the fourth day did we trap them, near the fell-side where my grandfather told me the Enemy had fallen long ago.  

They were nearer now.  We could hear their snarls and shouts in the heavy air.  They sounded more like animals in pain than men.  In the sharp shafts of seldom-sunlight, we could see their painted faces, stretched and twisted in anger and rage. 

Their horsemen goaded us, spears stretching in the fierce wind towards our braced shields.  Their children and young-bloods darted in the heather, snapping darts from strange bows, their javelins darkening the sky. 

A Few Loose Ends…

Just a quick note to say that I’ve now (rather belatedly) updated the scenario for “Breaking the D-Q Line” which we played at Bovington 2012.  I’ve added the German and British briefings, orders of battle, card information and special rules for those of you who would like to know all the secrets of the game!  The full scenario is available as a download from Google Docs on the on the right hand side of this blog under the heading  “Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries and Play-Aids”.

I’ve also up-loaded a pdf of my homemade card decks for “Through the Mud and the Blood” onto the blog.  I’m not sure how much use they will be to people.  The Big Men in the cards are all quite specific to the characters who have appeared in our games.  However, I know I very much enjoy looking through things like this when they get posted by other folk.  They were fun to prepare and pretty easy to produce.

So in the spirit of sharing, you can find mine in the section headed “Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries and Play-Aids”, again to be found on the right hand side of the blog.  The PDF file for the cards is quite large (they’re in colour), but if you keep clicking “download” in Google docs, you can hopefully get access.  Please let me know if there’s any difficulties accessing them.

TooFatLardies Summer Special 2012

I hope that you’ll forgive me a quick plug for a new TooFatLardies Summer Special which had been published yesterday by my good friends Richard Clarke and Nick Skinner.   It’s Nick’s first spell at the crease editing the bi-annual publication, and he’s collected some fine articles as you can see from the list of contents which he published in the TooFatLardies Yahoo Group.

It’s 118 pages, costs the pretty reasonable price of £6 and is available here.

Here's a look at the contents of this smorgasbord of Lard ...

Flaming Holidays!

First, many apologies for the shortage of posts over the last couple of weeks after our trip to Bovington 2012. Life caught up with me, my work became frantic and I went on holiday for two weeks! While I’ve tried to keep up with everyone else’s activities in the Blogosphere, I’ve been neglecting my own contribution – which I hope will be only a temporary lapse!

Following the fine examples of many of you, I took a modelling toolkit on holiday with me and a couple of dozen figures. However, the cottage we were staying in was rather smart and I was a little nervous that the owners may not take too kindly to me gouging holes in their table with a mis-deployed scalpel blade. This disincentivised me somewhat from doing much modelling. Not that I really needed an excuse, as the fantastic views over the Northumbrian coastline where we were staying and some good bottles of wine in the evening were the kiss of death for the holiday modelling project!

It was therefore good to be back home from a hobby perspective at least and I’ve something planned for the rest of the summer which I hope to post soon.