The Joy of Bad Footwork: creating Off-Balance markers

“In the carriage of the feet, you should float your toenails in a little and step strongly with your heels. In the use of the feet, you should walk as usual, whether the case calls for large, small, quick, or slow strides. Feet that seem to fly, float or be immobile are, all three, undesirable”.

Miyamoto Musashi “The Book of Five Rings”: The Water Chapter

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Good footwork is one of the key elements of fine swordplay. And bad footwork is something which can be introduced into a miniature wargame of sword-fighting to try and add to the fun.

In both “When the Last Sword is Drawn”, and the Three Musketeers-inspired companion ruleset “With Flashing Blades”, one of the consequences of combat can be a miniature figure becoming off-balance.

Initially, I used to mark the off-balance status on the tabletop. But with a small playing area in these games, this became unwieldy.  I then moved to marking the character card of the miniature figure which has become off-balance.  I added a place on each card which could be covered with an off-balance marker.  

As being off-balance is a circumstance which is temporary, the off-balance markers could be added, and removed, as the game progresses.

I had a lot of fun making the off-balance markers for both games. Of course, I didn’t need to make any markers at all - a simple counter would have sufficed to place onto a character's card. But part of the pleasure in creating a smaller foot-printed game is that the time saved on not needing to paint lots of figures can pay dividends elsewhere.

I hoped that smaller 20mm MDF bases, of 2mm depth, would be enough to allow some modelling opportunities. I had a number of spare metal swords, scabbards, tessen (a Japanese armoured metal fan), and fallen sashimono banners to get me started. To those items I added small dōsojin stone shrines made from green-stuff, tiny geta wooden sandals (which are quite clumsy and look a bit like wooden flip-flops), small 3D printed bonsai trees, a 3D printed Buddha, and some Zen-like towers of prayer stones made from modelling putty.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve created a “summer set” and a snow-bound “winter set”, with the same items.  Two sets were not necessary, but were certainly fun to do.

I felt that the extra work in creating these items help spread the fun from the playing board and onto the wider table.  The entertainment around the table in awarding a character a set of clumsy wooden sandals when that character becomes off-balance is more than worth the additional effort.

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Let the Blood Dice roll...

One of the pleasures in designing a wargame is being able to create tangible things which add to the fun and theme of the game.

A key themes of the swordplay in “When The Last Sword Is Drawn” is having miniature warriors wielding iconic Japanese katanas, wakizashi, no-dachi and naginatas.  Who doesn't want to have the chance for their miniature heroes to wield an array of sharp edged weapons from Japanese cinema, manga and samurai literature?

To preserve that theme into the game, I wanted each miniature figure wielding a razor-sharp weapon to get to roll a “Blood Dice”.  Only one (or sometimes two) of the sides of the dice has a symbol - being a cinematic blood spatter.

If a miniature in combat rolls the blood symbol on their blood dice, then their opponent has suffered a debilitating cut from the razor-edged blade. The effect of that is to increase the severity of any additional hits on that opponent. The blood dice therefore gives a different dynamic to just inflicting casualties in a combat round.

The more we used the blood dice in the games, the more players seemed to like the effect of the blood spatter face appearing in a cluster of dice results.

I had to work out how to incorporate the idea into the dice I already had in my dice-bag. Of course, I could have just given a differently coloured dice and used “6” for a blood symbol. That’s perfectly serviceable, but seemed to lose a bit of the drama of specifically designed dice.

I therefore bought a few handfuls of blank dice and painted blood spatters on one (or more) of the dice sides. I started with D6s, but also tried D12s (painting two sides), a couple of D8s (painting one side on one, and two sides on the other) and even (purely for laughs) a D4.

I kept the scarlet “blood” paint as thin as possible and lightly gloss-varnished the whole dice to make sure all sides were evenly painted.  Maybe a statistician might report that the micrometer depth of paint on a face of the dice makes a difference to the various rolls in a game, but so far I think that the blood dice rolls have come up as unpredictably as normal dice.

Thirty of so games in, the blood dice have been causing mayhem, as was the intention.

Indulgent?  For sure.  But certainly fun.

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A Bumper Apple Harvest

I like tinkering around with bits of terrain and scenery.  I always think this is most fun when the items being tinkered with are things you've had hanging around for a while - maybe they're even items you've been using in games and which need to be freshened up a little bit.  I've been meaning to try and produce a couple of apple trees in 28mm for some time, and the two small trees I had earmarked for the job (very nicely produced by The Last Valley) have been sitting on a shelf forlornly for at least two years.

One of the things about the current world isolation and lockdown is having the chance to pick up some of the projects we might have placed on the back-burner for some time.  I therefore "painted" the trees with very-slightly diluted PVA glue, which really made the trees a lot more solid, added them to a base (from Warbases), did the groundwork, and then started to produce the "apples" from green-stuff.

Errr..... yes, dear readers, I made the apples from green-stuff.  It's not as mad as it seems.  (OK, well, it is a little bit mad, but please - don't give up yet).  Here's some apples - Bramleys - from the trees in my garden last autumn.  Some big, some small, a great many are misshapen, and the colours are definitely non-uniform.  

So, in other words, they're perfect to be re-created in green-stuff.  They didn't take long to produce - I did about 50.  Put on iPlayer, Netflix or a DVD (I chose the very good "Richard II" in "The Hollow Crown" series) and the time flies.

Then, when the apples have set, superglue them to the branches.  I also did a few windfalls on the ground and also added a couple of green-stuff eggs for some chickens I had painted recently.  The eggs are a bit large - as some posters on Twitter correctly noted - but hey, it was Easter and that's the time for all sorts of miracles.

When the apples are securely glued on, they're easy to paint with a base of light-ish green (Vallejo Lime Green), and a glaze of red (Vallejo Red and Dark Vermillion).  I'm enjoying using the Vallejo Glaze Medium - just take Vallejo Red (or Dark Vermillion for some variety), and dilute with the Vallejo glaze medium, and the result is a (hopefully) realistic tone for the apples both on the tree and collected in the apple barrels.  The eggs got painted a shade of peachy-ivory.  (And a big shout out and thank you to Nick - Moiterei - for suggesting the Vallejo Glaze Medium on the comments on this Blog some months back!)

And that was it.  Hopefully allowing battles to take place in an orchard, and for the Flemish apple harvest to be looted for years to come!

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The Legions of Rome; the Catuvellauni of the Downs - Ancient Sharp Practice

“When my mind drifts back now, it is images rather than a coherent narrative which present themselves to me: mist rising from horse lines in the thin keen wind of a morning by the Danube; long marches, the men ankle-deep in mud behind creaking wagons, as the beech and ash woods of Germany enfold us; a hill-top in Northern Spain, when snow fell below us in the valleys but we lay on dry, iron-hard ground under the stars; grizzled centurions lashing at the transport horses, yelling at the legionaries to put their shoulder to a wheel that was spinning as if in mockery of their efforts; a boy with blood oozing from his mouth as I rested his dying head on my arm and watched his leg kick; my horse flinching from a bush which parted to reveal a painted warrior, himself gibbering with terror; the sigh of the wind coming off a silent sea; the tinkle of the camel bell across desert sands.  Army life is a mere collection of moments.” (Augustus, Alan Massie)

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One of the wonderful things about watching a new wargaming period evolve, and a new set of rules coming together, is the impact it has on the imagination of wargamers.  Something along those lines is happening at Lard Island these days.

As some of you might know, Richard and Nick have been play-testing a new set of rules for Ancient warfare.  No doubt there’ll be more of this in future TooFatLardies Oddcasts, but for the moment, let’s just call the rules “Ancients Sharp Practice”.  Or, if you prefer, “Infamy, Infamy” – a name which might raise a smile if you’ve ever seen a particular “Carry On” film from the 1970s.

Both Richard and Nick – but particularly Richard – have been hard at work developing the rules, painting the figures and brushing off some of the terrain we made for Dux Britanniarum.  In doing so, they’ve been building on the terrific work of other Lard-enjoying wargamers who’ve already been using the “Sharp Practice” rules for the Ancients era.

Exciting times indeed, and doubly so when you see the troops being arrayed on the tabletop for the first time.  

Last night’s clash was set three miles from where I live – near the small Hertfordshire village of Wheathampstead.  These days, the village is a very pleasant stopping point for cyclists on the Chiltern Cycle-Way, or a flashing blip on the B653 as you drive past on the way to either the M1 or the A1, travelling somewhere else.  

But in the first century AD (or CE), it was the frontier between Rome and Britain.  The local tribe, the Catuvellauni, were fierce, proud warriors who may well have led the British resistance to Julius Caesar in 54 BC.  The tribe minted coins, and built impressive defences – still visible today at ‘Devil’s Dyke’, just a long stone’s throw from the playing fields where my son’s football team plays on a weekend.  

I digress, but only to mention that history has a way of catching up with you in the most unexpected of places.

On the tabletop, we witnessed a truly impressive array of British chariots, warbands, slingers and skirmishers facing off against a force of Roman legionaries and auxiliaries, advancing through wooded terrain to quell a Catuvellauni insurrection.  Already, some of the features of the game are coming to the fore – the balance between different methods of fighting (Roman corporatism against tribal heroism), the importance of cohesion and control, the focus on the decisive moment of the melee.  It’s shaping up to be a very fine set of rules – and, like Dux Britanniarum, all the more interesting for your humble Blogger being on the ground floor of the Temple of Venus, so to speak.

I know, dear readers, I know – I’m hopelessly biased.  But hopefully you’ll still enjoy some of the battle reports to come….

Take care and fare you all well until next time, Citizens of Rome and proud daughters and sons of the Catuvellauni!

Blog Spring-Clean: Repairing Broken Links

Just a quick post to thank a couple of visitors to this Blog for mentioning that a few of the links under the "Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries, Play-Aids and Painting Guides" section (on the right of your screen) have become broken over time, including the cards I designed for "Through the Mud and the Blood" (which I know a couple of people have found useful).

I'm very sorry this has happened. It's simply a result of messing around in my Google Drive files - entirely my fault. Hopefully all the links should not be up and running.  Thanks to everyone who mentioned the broken links - much appreciated.

Unfortunately, over the years I seem to have lost the painting templates for British and German Great War infantry. I'll try and find those (hopefully they're useful) and, if I can't locate them, I'll recreate them from my hard copy notes. 

I've also added into the documents you can download a couple of extra "Through the Mud and the Blood" scenarios. "The Wiring Party" is a game we played in 2011, featuring rival British and German wiring parties and also a bold British Anglican Chaplain, searching for a wounded officer. "Rally Once Again" is a frantic search by the British side for troops which have been split up and fragmented, in order to rally them back into the action. I hope they're both good reads - they were certainly fun to play.

I've also added some rule adaptation which we used in 2014, but which didn't quite make the cut into any of the Specials: "Le Cafard". These are a fairly bleak and depressing set of bolt-on rules dealing with battlefield stress, which turned out to be quite fiddly to use in practice. I think there's some useful ideas in here, but they need more work. I've included them really as a work in progress in case anyone's interested in how rules get developed through tabletop gaming.

Going through my files, I realised that there are quite a lot more "Through the Mud and the Blood" themed documents which could be uploaded here.  I'll try and sort that out later this Spring or in the Summer.  Ideally, I'll also try and organise the side-bars in a more logical way to help people navigate through them.

There's also a host of mid- and late-17th Century material (from the Thirty Years War and the fictional Flemish Free City of Laarden) to upload.  Again, I'm hoping to do that when I have some time in the spring and summer of 2018.

Thirty Years War in 2mm - An Update for Patient Readers

For anyone reading this Blog who has been patiently waiting since last year for an update on our 2mm scale Thirty Years War project, I have some good news (and an apology). 

As you might recall, last year I built a collection of 2mm scale armies to re-fight the battle of Lutzen in 1632. Full details of the ideas behind the project can be found on a couple of earlier Blog posts, HERE and HERE.

It’s probably helpful to mention that, during the last year, the thematic ideas which Curt (fellow rules author) and myself started with have not changed a great deal. We are still looking for our rules for the period to create a wargame focused on re-creating iconic 17th Century battles in a manageable space, and in a compressed time period (so you could easily play a game in an evening).

We're still focusing our efforts on the Thirty Years War, which provides a wealth of significant, reasonably well-documented battles to attempt to recreate.  It's also a fortunate co-incidence that next year will be the 400th anniversary of the commencement of the war, which might prompt an interest in looking at different ways of wargaming the conflict.

And we are still looking to try and recreate the unique visual elements of large scale “battle paintings”, and focus on the attributes of battle and warfare which contemporary commanders considered - in their diaries, letters, orders and commentaries – were important in determining victory in the field.

What has been evolving have been the rules themselves as we tinker with mechanisms, talk through variations, play-test scenarios and parts of the battle, read more (and more) and generally try and refine and finesse what we have on the printed rules pages.

As anyone who has written, or adapted wargame rules, this is quite a difficult process. Just when you think progress is being made in one area, something else slips out of place, perhaps as a consequence. The challenge for me has been to try and retain the themes which I consider make the warfare of the mid-Thirty Years War unique, while also making the game playable and fun. Some of the most difficult elements of rules writing and play-testing have involved the combat mechanisms at the heart of the battle.

Part of the challenge has been to both understand what happened in mid-seventeenth century battles and, in particular, how contemporaries believed those events affected the course of the fighting.

As Sir James Turner wrote in his commentary on the arts of warfare, “Pallas Armata”:

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“Of all Martial Arts, to fight a Battel well, and gain the Victory, is of the highest importance, and makes the Prince or his General most renown’d: It is this (and neither retreats nor taking Towns, though both these shew the qualifications of an excellent Captain) that crowns them with Laurels.”

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This is all wonderful, stirring stuff. And there are endless exhortations of this type throughout "Pallas Armata". What Sir James’ commentary is rather short of is what actually happened at the sharp end of a melee or a firefight. Here’s the commentary in a key chapter of “Pallas Armata”, Chapter XXII (“Of things previous to a Battel, of a Battel itself, and of things after a Battel”) on melees:

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“Your advance on an Enemy, in what posture soever he be, should be with a constant, firm and steady pace; the Musketeers (whether they be on the Flanks, or interlin’d with either the Horse or the Pikes) firing all the while; but when you come within Pistol-shot, you should double your pace, till your Pikes closely serr’d together, charge these, whether Horse or Foot, whom they find before them. It is true, the business very oft comes not to push of Pike, but it hath and may come oft to it, and then Pike-men are very serviceable.”  (Spelling all as in the 1671 edition)

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There is an immediacy and great vitality through the whole of “Pallas Armata”. It’s evident Sir James Turner knew precisely what he was writing about. But to me, reading in 2017, the precision, granularity, and detail of the fighting you’re looking for as a (very) amateur rules-designer is absent in the text. And, in my view, the same is true of other commentators (Montecuccoli, the Earl of Orrery, Richard Elton) who were writing around the same time.

So, we’re working through the rules mechanics, and carrying on play-testing, and continuing to try and make sense of what happened in the battlefields of 1632 and 1634 - as well as re-reading Sir James Turner's writing and wondering what on earth he meant! 

When Curt was over last week, we played through a pared down game of the battle. This featured a couple of memorable events, principally the shattering of part of Count von Pappenheim’s impetuous cuirassiers by means of a well-deployed, enfilading Swedish artillery battery. And yes, that is one of the 2mm “shattered bases” being deployed into the ragged Imperial mounted line…

Also featuring in the game were some lovely scratch-built 2mm snow-bound villages made by good friend, Mark Backhouse.  And also, somewhat bitten by the 2mm scratch-building bug, it was the first game in which I fielded the Imperial Chancellery baggage trayne which I made a couple of months back but have only just got around to painting.

Although the rules are written, and fairly comprehensive, we’ve a fair way to go in play-testing a set of rules which I hope will be both accurate and fun. And fear not, you’ll be the first to know when that happens!