Grain Fields

I finally sussed out how to turn some scrap fun fur into grain fields.

Mrs Rabbitman used to make dolls and puppets and I kept some scraps of the fur, thinking to make thatched cottages and such out of them.

Well, my Medieval village is now looking pretty good thanks to the 4Ground and Perry cottages, saving me the trouble of making more cottages. So I thought I could turn them into fields of standing grain useful for everything from foraging Romans to roaming Panzers on the steppes.

The trouble is the colours of said fun fur were not very grainy. One piece was white. The other pieces were striped grey and off-white. Although this made for some very nice Big Bad Wolves, fields of standing grain it does not.

How to colour it? At first I thought tea, but the fibers are synthetic and I didn't think the tea would hold. Then I remembered my pail of chocolate brown latex paint I used for all my Northwest Frontier mountains and rocks. I thinned some of that down in a big bucket and soaked the pieces. The solution was I fear too watery and it ran off, so I ended up pouring paint right on and smudging it around with my rubber gloved hands.

Here are the results hanging to dry in the yard.

Not a promising start...

The piece on the far right of the picture started out white and got the heaviest rubbing in of brown paint. The piece on the left got the lightest treatment. You'll notice the drizzling of brown paint turning the lawn brown.... fortunately Mrs. Rabbitman doesn't care about having a perfect golf green lawn either!

The Mad Padre inspected my Work In Progress rather dubiously last night. But today I took them back outside and gave them a good misting of Krylon satin finish Almond spray paint.

And got this:

The piece in the upper right corner is the formerly white chunk of fur. It is heavily matted. So it will either represent grain heavily trampled by cavalry charges or rampaging tanks, or it will just be rough scrub in the Backest of Beyonds.

I couldn't resist setting up a quick vignette to see how photogenic my new grain fields are:

Hmmm... looking a bit too much like fur

Well, better from this angle

Well, not bad. Didn't cost me anything. I need to spend a bit more time with a brush getting everything standing up again.

Small Pack of the Vanities

Whenever I come back from FTXs (Field Training Exercises) the voluminous pockets of my combats are stuffed with crap. Left over rations (I collect the Soldier Fuel bars - a chewy high calorie snack bar which most adults find kinda gross- as rewards for the cadets), Ops plan, schedules, FMP (Field Message Pad), bush hat (swap it with my beret when coming out of the field), an extra spoon (never know you might drop the one you're using in the dirt), pens, sunglasses, wet wipes (always useful)....
And then there's the bulkier items that one should also have about one's person; sun screen, water bottles, rain gear.
If I went to supply and requested a pack (to which I am entitled as part of my scale of issue) I'd get one of these (as demonstrated by a colleague):

Rucksack with colleague

A full frame rucksack for humping your worries through the boonies on serious treks. A bit big, and it would in all likelihood have seen much better days back in the 80s. Assuming it had all its straps and buckles.
So I decided I needed a day pack or small pack.
My vanity wouldn't let me get one that was civilian pattern. Something about hiking along with a bright red or blue pack just looks wrong to me, even though we aren't tactical and most of the cadets are wearing civvies in the field anyway.
The really nice Gucci gear ("Gucci gear" a phrase to describe private purchase equipment to supplement or replace the less comfortable or less useful issue gear) packs from Soldier Gear or CP Gear were out of my price range.
After I got paid for my latest painting commission I went to my local surplus store and found a day pack that fit my price range in digital camo (looks kinda like, but isn't really, Cadpat) with a big enough central pouch for rain gear, training aids and lesson plans and side pockets for water bottles, sunscreen, bug repellent and anything else I might find useful. The straps aren't padded and the buckles aren't quick release, but I don't plan on doing any serious trekking with it.

Just what the Trg O on the go needs!

To add to my field swag, one of the drivers who delivers to my store from our warehouse used to be in the Reserves and finds my CIC work interesting. The other day he brought with him a couple of "Junior General Kits" (olive drab zippered canvas portfolios to go over a binder or spiral notebook with pockets for pens, markers, other bits of crap) and a newer, slightly nicer FMP.
He figures I'll be using them more than he ever will.

Sherman Brew Up!

My old friend the Mad Padre has finally been posted back to Ontario and is now a convenient 45 mins away. So last night I had the crew over for a game to both welcome him back to the fold and initiate my new Sherman squadron. Mike has posted his own AAR with even more pictures on his blog here.

The scenario is D+something, June 1944, outside the village of St. Pierre-Lapins. Bomber Command has given the vital crossroads a good pasting and now a squadron of the 1st Hussars (4x 4 tank troops and a Sqdn HQ of 3x tanks) and two platoons of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles have to advance through the fields and orchards and seize it. A kampfgruppe of 2 platoons of panzer grenadiers (without tracks), a platoon each of 3x PzIVh and 3x Panthers supported by 2x Pak 40 AT guns stand in their way.

We advanced on a two troop front and on the right got into a fire fight as the first Pak 40 engaged us across a field. The first shots missed but after a motivational talk from the Mad Padre, Pasha Dan started rolling better, causing some damage to my tanks with mobility kills and gun sights damaged.

Wierdy-Beardy and Mad Padre discuss tactics, or drink options.

On the left the Shermans took cover behind a hedge and let the infantry lead the way towards an orchard. Wally Wargamer got  his platoon in line over the hedge and into the 9" auto-spot range. The Mad Padre issued his commands and Wierdy-Beardy lit up the unfortunate Winnipeg Rifles with a devastating salvo, shredding the platoon in one go.

Note to self; go prone with your last action or send out scouts first.

The supporting Shermans started pounding the orchard with HE fire, but it was a bitter revenge.

On the right, the second Pak 40 and a PzIV in the ruined village opened up, brewing up the Squadron HQ.

The Sqdn COs tank was the first to go in a catastrophic fireball, killing the Old Man.

PzIVs in the ruined village

Large amounts of HE fire from the Shermans did wipe out one of the Paks, and the Panzer Grenadier platoon fell back to the next hedge line.

On the left some Panthers uncovered to engage the Shermans. After some desultory and unsatisfactory exchanges of fire with the Shermans, the Panthers then shifted to the center but attracted two more fighter bomber attacks. The first missed and hit the Panzer Grenadiers in the orchard. But the second scored our only tank kill of the game.

So at game's end, Wally Wargamer had brought his second platoon over the road to sweep the orchard, chasing Wierdy-Beardy's shattered platoon out, trailing shock points and dead. Brett's Shermans were sweeping around the orchard to start getting flank shots on the Panthers who had arrived in St. Pierre-Lapin to start adding their weight to the fire fight with my two shattered troops burning merrily along the hedge row.

The Canadians had taken about 50% casualties in men and tanks (damaged, immobilized and totally brewed up). The Germans had lost about 25% of their men and still held the crossroads. Without a set piece attack with proper artillery and more infantry, I don't think 3CID  will be getting the cross roads. Of course if the 12th SS can mount a quick counter attack the Canadians would be bundled right back to their start line if brigade doesn't get some AT guns and Vickers MMGs up soon.

1st Box Done

...at last!

I've been working on a large commission of 15mm Sudan figures for a couple of years now. 24 figure units, all individually based for playing The Sword and the Flame.

• 2x units of red coated British line. (Peter Pig)
• 1x unit of Camel Corps (Peter Pig)
• 1x unit of Naval Brigade (Peter Pig)
• 2x Nordenfelt guns with crew. (Peter Pig)
• 1x unit of Jediyya riflemen (Essex)
• 1x unit of Hadendowah/Beja riflemen (Essex)
• 3x units of Ansar with swords and spears (Old Glory)
• 3x units of Hadendowah/Beja with swords and spears (Essex)
• plus 4 extra Ansar and Beja command and a mounted Old Glory Amir.

so about 300 figures and 2 guns. And that's just the first box. The second box is on my table waiting to be prepped!

I showed you the first unit of redcoats way back in May 2011, when I used the Army Painter dip to finish them.

This second unit though, I had a better 10/0 brush and more confidence so I tackled the belts on the British infantry the old fashioned way.

detail study of uniforms

Whole unit deployed

The bases are 15mm diameter Litko laser cut wood.

Of course now it was time to get everybody out and set up a vignette to tempt my customer in Alberta. A classic square being rushed on all sides seemed the best way to get everyone into a single shot.

The whole lot

Yes, there should be smoke from all four sides of the square, but then you wouldn't be able to see anything.

Some closeups:

Berkshires and Naval Brigade

Camel Corps

The Amir leads the Faithful

The Peter Pig are nice to paint. I like the sculpts. The Old Glory are OK, lots of animation but rough. The Essex figures weren't so great I thought. Some of the Beja had weapons to glue in that I felt could have been cast in the hand and the poses are kinda flat.

The Mahdists will look better once the flags arrive in the post.

Some Big Battalions.

My painting output has been really off lately. I've either been too busy, too tired or too depressed since the spring and watching Netflix with the Mrs. has often seemed a more appealing way to spend an evening. But I decided to cheer myself up and work on a couple of large SYW Austrian battalions I had sorted out over the winter.

I could've done more Fallschirmjaeger, or Canadians, and goodness knows I've got a pile of Colonial or Wars of the Roses figures to work on. But the SYW Austrians give me a very satisfying pleasure. I dunno, I like the SYW Austrians. The baroque genteelness of the Hapsburg Army and their admirable Empress make me smile. And they need more musketeers to stand up to Old Fritz on the table.

These are the last of the Old Glory Austrian "Firing line" figures. I have been organizing my Austrian battalions with 8 musketeers, a drummer, an ensign, an NCO and an officer giving a 12 figure battalion. To do two more like my first battalions would have left me with 4 left over standing and 3 left over kneeling figures. I hate left over figures, and Black Powder is thankfully very flexible in unit size.

I also had an awful lot of extra command figures to flesh things out even more. So I had the clever idea of doing them in two ranks with both standards and extra drummers and officers. This meant making the bases even deeper to protect the muskets and allow for two ranks.

Black Powder suggests a frontage of +50% for a 'large' unit, but 180mm would look exceedingly silly and I didn't have anymore musketeers, so I settled on 160mm by giving a bit more room on the flanks. I also thought that since the battalions are almost always in line I decided to base the units on two 80mm by 50mm stands. Also with large stands like this it's very easy for them to look very flat and boring, even with my usual mix of three shades of flock, some tea and chopped up dried lichen. So I added a few tufts and clumps of Army Painter "meadow flowers". I went with the yellow instead of white to accent the yellow hat tape.

Large battalions aren't an upgrade for the Austrians in the BP supplement The Last Argument of Kings, but it is a common trope in other rules like Warfare in the Age of Reason, so I thought a couple wouldn't be out of place. I could always make them 'raw' or something if I need too.

I also opted to paint them in the older War of Austrian Succession uniform with the coloured waistcoats.

I reinforced the fragile weak spot were the front hand is holding the fore-stock of the musket with a band of epoxy before I primed them. This and the big stands paid dividends when I was flocking the fourth and final stand and fumbled it. My new whitecoats bounced off my knee, the chair and onto the rug! After some hyperventilating and rapid uttering of the F-word I picked it up, expecting snapped off muskets and a bent flagstaff.

Not a scratch!

Giving fire

Some Sharp Practice on the Frontier!

And I bet you'd thought I wasn't going to post about gaming anymore, didn't you?

Now that Cadets has wrapped up for the year, I managed to find both a free evening last night and a couple of my friends were available, so I set up a small Sharp Practice game. I haven't gotten any of my Napoleonic Russians painted yet, but I've been thinking that SP might also be jolly good for skirmishes on the Frontier. Get some real Boy's Adventure stuff going.

Now Richard Clarke maintains that Sharp Practice is for the muzzle loading black powder era; French and Indian Wars, Napoleonics and up to the American Civil War. Anything getting into breech loaders is stretching things a bit. But we're gamers and we always modify rules out of period don't we? (Witness all the Warhammer mods for WW2, Colonials, etc. etc.).

I haven't done too much really. British infantry with the breech loading rifles don't require an action to reload. I also treat them all as light infantry and use the light infantry with Minie rifle line for firing. The Pathans have generally poor fire discipline and since they are equipped with a mix of ancient jezzails to new breech loaders, I require them to spend an action reloading. Gurkhas are elite and aggressive. British and Indian infantry are Regular to Good. Highlanders are aggressive in fisticuffs. Haven't thought much about the Guides. Elite obviously, but I haven't decided on anything else for them.

So last night, Capt. Wooster of the Blandingshire Fusiliers, with some Gurkhas and an attached screw gun had to go visit a den of troublesome dacoits (bandits) and sort them out. Can't have them stealing sheep, kidnapping the daughters of tea merchants and generally upsetting the neighbourhood.

I only used about half of my table, giving me an area roughly 5'x5'. I thought maybe a smaller scene of action would get people stuck in faster and we might have a heroic storming of the native stronghold. The village and chief's tower were in the far corner. A river ran up one side through some rocky hills and jungle. Opposite the Imperial entry side was a long rocky hill and a dry stream bed.

 

Peaceful natives or den of thieves?

 

Busy market day

The Imperial force came on in long skirmish lines (after I pointed out to Mike that his gaggling columns just wouldn't do); Blandingshires opposite the stream bed and Gurkhas facing the hill.

Surprise!

On the tribal blind card a couple of groups popped out to fire at the invading ferenghis. The lead company of the Blandingshires charged into the stream bed to bayonet the dacoits, while the Gurkhas stormed up the rocky hillside to overrun the sangar.

Gurkhas storm the sangars

close up of the action

Patrick kept forgetting to activate his screw gun, even though the Gurkha captain was a level 4 Big Man and thus had loads of actions he could perform. So the gun only came into play on the last turn, firing one shot into the tower.

The screw gun comes up

The Blandingshires sent one company to the left to pursue another group of dacoits sniping from some ancient ruins, while a second attacked the village and captured the camel stables in another round of fisticuffs. The Gurkhas meanwhile came down from their hill and stormed into the village from the other angle.

Storming into the village

The first company of Blandingshires cleared the ruins and captured a hill on the edge of the jungle, but were then charged by a howling mass of tulwar wielding Ghazis. Despite their aggressive bonus, I rolled badly for the Ghazis and they were pushed back with a few martyrs and shock points.

Ghazis charge out of the jungle!

They rallied a few turns later and charged into the flank of the third Blandingshire company hoping to drive it back from the village but with similar results.

That's where we left it, the Gurkhas and fusiliers were clearing the village and moving up to the tower supported by the now deployed screw gun. The chieftain decided to head for the hills.

Not bad, deploying the dacoits in small groups (6 figures vs. the Imperial 9 or 10) to make them more fragile and limiting the tribal command and control was quite effective.

Playing in the dirt with the Army Cadets

We try and do a year end trip to wrap up each training year with the cadets. As much fun as we can get within what's left of the budget, and maybe they can learn something too. This year we went to visit Robin Barker-James, a retired history teacher who has a barn full of artifacts and memorabilia (mostly WW1 era) near Tillsonburg ON, and he has taken to digging trenches in his fields for visiting school groups to get a bit of insight into the Western Front.

Part of his collection

He has quite the varied menu of activities to choose from, so you can customize your visit to your group and their interests/strengths. He was also a drama/English lit teacher so school groups can do dramatics as well as trench raids, casualty clearing and battlefield archaeology. For some community service/team building and a re-enactment of WW1 Fatigue Parties, we helped him build a set for an upcoming drama group.

Fatigues, an essential part of the Western Front experience.

He also demonstrates the basics of bayonet drill (with a Ross rifle), and has some unique 'rock-paper-scissors' rules worked out so the kids can bayonet duel without actually coming into contact and knocking any one's teeth out with their wood and plastic tube dummy rifles.

Bayonet course

Non-contact bayonet duel

We then moved onto some fun living history activities. This involved a lot of lobbing dummy grenades made from foam and duct tape at each other and generally having a good time. First they took turns clearing each other out of the village we had just built.

"German" bombers with buckets of dummy stick grenades

Defending a house

Then we had a couple of trench battles. The defenders had two bombs each and the attackers had two 'bombers' equipped with pails of bombs (about 2 dozen per pail) plus a Lewis gun. They quickly learned that with the bunkers, switchbacks and barricades, the bombs were the most useful weapon. When someone got eliminated they had to go to the end of the line, but slowly in each game the attackers worked their way down the trench, clearing each position. One battle, for a particularly large and complex trench system, bogged down when the attackers lost their bomb buckets to a lucky grenade throw!

Pillbox

Waiting for the attack

Nice trench, just needs more mud and rats

Defending a barricade

Attackers moving up

Then on Sunday after getting our tents dried out and folded up, the cadets did a bit of battlefield archaeology. Our host had buried some of his artifacts in dirt and the cadets got to go find them and then try and figure out the story they revealed.

Cadets, playing in the dirt.

Trench art

Remains of a French rifle

An old helmet

 

Soldier's pipe

It was quite an enjoyable weekend and the cadets had a lot of fun playing what we used to call 'silly buggers' when I was a cadet. Even though I was standing up on the ground helping declare who was a casualty during the trench battles, I still got some interesting insights into trench warfare and it's unique difficulties and tactics required. So even though there wasn't any mud or rats or stink, the venue can still provide some good lessons into WW1.

To arrange your own visit, you can email Mr. Robin-Barker James at robin.barker-james@sympatico.ca.