Fall In 2009 - Chevauchee 1355

Forgive me for I have sinned; it has been 16 days since my last hobby-related post.... While taking the afternoon off to watch the Phillies first playoff game against the Rockies, I decided to take a few quick pictures and post something hobby related for the first time in almost two weeks. We are only one month away from Fall In, and I have work left to do.

This is the English/Gascon army of Edward, Prince of Wales (The Black Prince). I have laid it out roughly in its intended deployment; Left, Center, Right and a cavalry contingent on the far right. As can be seen, it is sitting on an incomplete blue board battlefield. More on that later. All figures are complete but the bases need to be flocked. Details of the deployment would be different, but the contents of the army are set.

Each of the three main infantry "battles" consists of five or six units of three stands each. The front line in the picture consists of longbowmen and crossbowmen, the second line is hobilar foot and Gascon spearmen, and the third line is dismounted knights. Singly based leaders and banners are in the rear. I have been a slacker and not ordered flags from the Flag Dude. It may be too late and I may need to make some flags myself. This wouldn't be a big deal, as many of my flags were made by me from the beautiful flags that can be found on the Danish wargaming site that is in my Links section.

A typical English infantry "battle" is shown here. This battle has five units, and will be the English Left - 2 longbows, 2 hobilars, and 1 dismounted knight along with their leader and banner. A battle this size will probably be led by a leader with 4 command cards. This will make command somewhat flexible, but still make it difficult to do everything you would want to do once the troops get fully engaged.

The English order of battle will probably be very similar for the two different games that I have signed up for at the show, but the scenarios will be pretty different. In one of the games, it will be a fairly standard "English on the defense" scenario, but the other will put the English army in a position where they must attack. That one should be interesting. The scenario with the French attacking will probably be similar to Poitiers (my originally intended game) in many ways; the game with the French on the defensive will be significantly different.

This picture shows some of the French mounted knights that will form the hard-hitting core of the French army, along with some of the leaders and banners. The red flag in the center rear is the Oriflamme, the most sacred secular token of medieval France, which is only brought out from its resting place in the church of Saint Denis on the most important occasions. Whether or not the Oriflamme makes an appearance at Fall In remains to be seen.

One of the main things I need to decide is what kind of battlefield I want to go with. Simple terrain cloth with stuff on it is the easiest, but I much prefer to run games on a stiff terrain board, like the in-process ones in the first picture. I am in the midst of making a set of 2.5 foot square modular boards, but finishing six or eight of them in the next few weeks would be a project I don't know if I want to commit to. Maybe I play it by ear. Terrain boards look much better, and the chances of the game getting disturbed by an inadvertent slip are much less.

We shall see soon enough...

Painting Table Sept 17, 2009

I've decided that I have enough figures of all types for the games I want to run at Fall In, and therefore will only be painting two more mounted banner bearers. The primed and ready to go figures are shown at right. Which reminds me, I really need to write Rick O'Brien, the Flag Dude (link at right) and get the last few banners I am going to need...

As I tinker with the order of battle for my scenarios, I have pulled out some of the English HYW figures and laid them out on the table. The English army musters! Longbowmen and dismounted knights are behind the hedge sections in front, dismounted hobilars and more longbowmen are to the left rear, Scots spearmen are behind the center, and the cavalry are on the right. All figure bases and the hedge sections need to have their bases flocked (one of my least favorite jobs).

One interesting thing I have noted about the pictures I have posted as part of this blog - my camera of choice, a Canon SX100 IS (8 megapixel) camera, set for fairly high but not maximum resolution, takes pictures that can be pretty unforgiving on close inspection. To see what I mean, click on the picture of the mounted leader with the knights from a few posts down and look at how stark the shading becomes. What looks very effective to the naked eye on a 25mm figure becomes quite different when blown up to 10-12 times actual size. Interesting. Note to self - take pictures of better painted figs only (or buy even tinier paint brushes)!

Painting Table Sept 14, 2009

This weekend was relatively productive, with a number of small projects getting done in the evenings after the kids went to bed. I completed two stands of mercenary crossbows with two more to go. I will do the other two stands in different colors - something else bright.

I took some time to tidy up the painting on the bases of all of my English HYW figs, so that all that needs to be done there is flocking and matte coating, which is an hour or so of work.

Another project that got done was to make 30 short sections of hedge. These were made out of three two-foot sections of half-inch basswood sprayed green, which then had clump foliage glued onto them. Doing this reminded me that I need to make similar sections of archer stakes. I will want some of these for the Fall In games.

Painting Table Sept 11 2009 Part 2

Here is a prototype picture of a mostly finished crossbowman from the Italian mercenary unit I am working on. Sometimes I like to paint one complete figure from a unit to make sure the end result will be what I want before doing the rest of the unit. Impatient, I guess... I am taking some liberties here with the colorfulness of the outfit, but want to make this hired company stand out, and am justifying it as a successful unit that has cashed a few paychecks.

In addition to painting this stuff, there are some less glamorous tasks that need to get done. Pretty much my entire English HYW army, while painted and based, needs to have their bases tidied up, flocked and then given a final coat of matt varnish. Also, I need to make a whole bunch of hedge sections for the scenarios we are putting on.

Painting Table Sept 11 2009

Here are some pictures of the last couple of things I have completed, which will all be used for our Poitiers game of Day of Battle at Fall In 2009.

A leader and his knights.

A unit of Cheshire longbowmen in their distinctive green and white tunics.

Crossbowmen are next.

Some things are just plain fun to paint, so I do have some Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figs, two of which are shown here, Theoden, King of Rohan, and an Isengard troll.

Painting Table Sept 9 2009

So what's on the painting table now? In prep for Fall In, I have the following lined up:

• A unit of Cheshire longbowmen (12 figures), mostly done. According to HJ Hewitt in The Black Prince's Expedition, archers from Cheshire were some of the first "uniformed" troops in western Europe, wearing tunics with split green and white. I am adding one unit of them as they will stand out.
• A unit of mercenary Italian crossbows (16 figures), primed and started. I am using 12th Century Crossbowmen figs for these. They work ok for HYW, and will fit in with a variety of earlier periods as well. These are decent figs that can realistically used from 1100 to 1400 or so. I would use Genoese crossbowmen from the HYW range if I hadn't been too lazy to getting around to buying them. Too late now.
• Two or three mounted banner bearers, to be based singly, not started. I will use French caparisoned knights for these, chopping and drilling the weapon hands to hold flag poles.
• Another unit or two of dismounted French men at arms wouldn't be a bad idea, but I might not need them. These would be easy enough to knock out, as the figs can mostly be dry-brushed for the mail and armor and only the tunics and details need painting.

Here a few English dismounted men at arms for the French to go up against. These are proof pictures from Fernando Enterprises in Sri Lanka, who paint some of my stuff for me. I know, I cheat...

All the figures I am working on at the moment, and most of my medieval figures for that matter, are Old Glory 25mm.

After Fall In, what comes next? I have a few odds and ends of Hundred Years War to complete, some Wars of the Roses retinue figs, and then I need to decide on which major new project to embark on - Renaissance Italian Wars or medieval Ottomans and assorted Eastern Europeans. Both are tempting, and I have plenty of unpainted lead waiting in the wings for each of them. I would really like to do Nicopolis (western European crusaders and Hungarians against Ottomans and their allies in 1396), so maybe I am leaning in that direction. We shall see....

Welcome

My primary hobby for the last bunch of years has been miniatures wargaming, or painting and fighting battles with toy soldiers. I actually spend considerably more time painting the figures than using them, and I have a notoriously short attention span for completing projects, so I intend to use this blog to focus my efforts a little bit as well as to let interested parties know what I am up to. Having never done anything of this sort before, this boring little tidbit is an exercise in using the tools and not making anything blow up. So far so good. Going forward, I will be posting pictures of games we play, painting efforts, and whatever else of a hobby-related nature that comes to mind. Or anything else for that matter.

The project on the docket at the moment, and one which has a due date, is to finalize the events that I will be running at HMGS's Fall In show in Gettysburg PA in November with my good friend Chris Parker. Chris is the author of the Day of Battle rules set (whose title I have shamelessly pilfered for the title of this blog) for medieval battles, and we will be running a pair of games at the convention based more or less on the battle of Poitiers (the Hundred Years War one, not the other). We need to nail down the orders of battle we will be using, finish painting the last few units needed, and then playtest and tweak the whole affair. More to come...