Cottage/Shop front for DnD and...

 

What started as a simple construction, and one which I was not happy with, has undergone quite a few changes and now has many uses.

I have extended the roof, detailed the inside walls and added wood beams, but the most interesting bits are the partial, ruined side walls and the ruined floor for the second floor. It now resembles and fits in with the other ruins I have recently been making.

This means that I can still use it for DND as originally designed but I can also use it for Frostgrave and even Kings of War as ruins.

Also it stores a lot easier than the full cottages I have made in the past, which I like very much. I have started to add these features to a second town house with 2 floors. Will be painting this hopefully at the end of the week.

I much prefer to have multiple uses for my builds, I have to say I am much happier with this model now.

Oathmark: 15mm Flat Humans

A few months ago I started to make some 15mm flat humans to play Oathmark with and initially I mounted them on square 12 mm bases and used movement trays to ......move them!!?

As you can imagine 15 mm card models are very lite and kept falling all over. A re-think was needed. I decided to grab myself some magnetic sheet from Ebay and mounted it on display card, a quick wash of an appropriate green and they were done.

The figures I mounted onto 12mm washers, again from Ebay, and the two items worked very well together.

Basically I'm far happier with how these turned out and as a result has begun drawing the Skeleton adversaries,

Removing fatalities is easy and storage is much easier as the troops stay in place.

I could also cut some 15mm bases for Kings of War and use the same figures for another game entirely, an idea I really like.

It then occured that I might be able to create a travel set for D&D or for games like Frostgrave.

So you may see these in the future.

I need to create some cavalry models in the end and some character models. 

I have also been drawing some cottage designs, you may have spotted one in this post (oh know Darryl what do you mean) but I'm not sure they are what I want to do, so will have to see.

Next time an update on the ruined buildings I've been making.

Folly Number Two: Solo Wargaming?

Another "Folly" that has been rumbling along in the background for the past few months has been my attempt to organise solo wargaming. Mr Don Featherstone has been scribbled in and drawn upon for the past few months on and off.

I've produced a range of materials to help me play solo, from cards to maps and have been researching information from a variety of sources. Mighty Empires-GW, Solo Wargaming-Featherstone, Oathmark series- McCollough and of course old ideas I had of my own and things gleaned from the internet. 

So I have produced a map using my D&D map making cards and laminated that. Then using the Mighty Empires markers I drew some tokens for villages, cities, fortresses, armies and direction arrows.

I drew the tokens much larger and then shrank them once coloured on my printer.

As I was going to use these with 10mm Romans/Celts I created some unit cards, as Don would have done, to enable secret deployment.

Then tactical cards to aid in play once the game has started. Now these are the most problematic part of the process, basically they might well give silly orders to the AI army that follows them. Only time will tell. 

The illustration gives movement instructions and underneath are further combat suggestions.

Finally I added something I made a very long time ago. It is a set of terrain cards that creates a very wide number of possibilities. I did not design these I found them here , so thanks very much to Avian.

These cards by Avian I have used loads of times and they work really well in my opinion.

Finally Don Featherstone talks about having a system of rewards and fines for units that do well or poorly and also weather related tables etc. Well the Oathmark books have a wealth of material about this and other ideas, most notably battles that are linked together through scenarios. So I will be using Joe's rules to help create a more interesting battlefield development.

There you go, my latest folly, but not the last.

More to come next month.

Oathmark Folly?: One Amongst Many

I realised some time ago, perhaps had already known really, that I can get genuinely excited about a new project. Excited in the same way I used to get excited as a youngster, as a teenager. 

Thumbing through Oathmark by Joseph McCullough a few weeks ago, I had just that feeling.

I love Joe's games, but recently have lost the umph to get one played, new Frostgrave languishes on my shelf, Rangers - much loved, sits unplayed, Oathmark also.

Looking through the book it came to me that I could create 15mm scale armies to play with. Perhaps just two so that when Pandemic allows I can play with a friend. I love the idea of 15mm armies and the notion of playing a campaign/narative style wargame. 

Also I enjoy the challenge of designing and making the models to play with.

So my challenge this Autumn is to create two armies to start playing Oathmark with, before Stargrave hits the stands in April. 

So interlaced with my mad ramblings are some shots of the 15mm "card " flat models I have been making for a while now. I have halved the base size and made trays to move them about, they are very light which is a problem still to be resolved.

So far I have constructed:

20 Spearmen

20 Warriors

20 Archers

10 Linebreakers

1 Wizard

In the pipeline are their opponents, the Oathbreakers, undead army, still being designed.

These humans are the 30mm designs I posted a while back shrunk on my printer down by 50%.

It makes the drawings seem more detailed as the the marks are all crammed together in a small space. I believe this is a comic book trick and works well. 

The sheet I copied was already painted so they then just needed cutting, sticking on black card and gluing to a base. 70 models for the cost 2 sheets of A4 and some black card, very very cheap.

Also, by tilting them slightly across base you don't get "disappearing army syndrome" the curse of Flat armies, Ha :-)

Will post updates on progress in coming weeks.

Cheers all, stay safe.