The Spirit is Willing, But Weak

Still not done with the medieval Big Box, and I have been a really good boy.  My New Year's Resolution was to complete the Big Box before starting any new projects.  Until this week, I hadn't purchased any figures or rule sets all year.  And then Osprey had to announce a near future sci-fi skirmish featuring spies, secret agents, and special forces types.  Black Ops.

Yep.  I pre-ordered it.  At less than ten bucks for a hard copy, it was too much for my feeble resistance.

Well, since it doesn't come out until mid-October, I still have plenty of time to finish my current project before kicking back over to catching up on my 15mm sci-fi lead pile.

Session 11 - Beneath Malvern Manor

When last we left our band of plucky heroes they had descended below the depths of Malvern Manor in an attempt to locate a powerful artifact.  At last, a second dungeon to warm the cockles of this old gamer's heart.

Yolo and Gilgamesh elected to sit out the initial foray into the dungeon where the party easily handled a small squad of ghouls and purple molds.  The party returned to the surface and escorted them to a small chapel of Torm where the group made a solid attempt at a long rest.  The night was interrupted by four robed figures passing by the party's rest area and deeper into the cave.  Yolo, as a elf requiring no sleep and little rest, was on watch, followed the squad through the halls and through a massive cavern filled top to bottom with spiders and webs.  The only was through was to sneak into a small cage and descend into a tunnel that bypassed most of the cavern.  Too far from help, Yolo returned and let the rest of his friends catch up on their sleep.

Lower right - sacred chapel of Torm for all your long rest needs.
The large open cavern is chock a block filled with spiders and webs of all sizes.

All together now, the party penetrated beyond the spider hall - most likely the source for the spiders that had taken over the surface portion of Malvern Manor - and squeezed through a narrow hall into a room filled with several large rodents and swarms of lesser vermin feasting on a corpse.  Yolo leaped into the fore, and engaged all of the giant vermin almost single handedly.  Bottled up in the hallway, the rest of the party shrieked like grade school girls at a slumber party as they swatted ineffectually at the swarms.

Beyond the spider cavern.  Yolo single handedly slays a swarm
of four giant rats while the rest of the party struggles with a few small
swarms of normal rats and bats.

The giant rats took advantage of their superior numbers to tear Yolo to shreds.  (Read:  Four giant rats attacking with advantage for several rounds guarantees a few critical hits.  Yolo took five crits in two rounds.)  Without the timely intervention of the half-orc paladin, Mordred, and his potent healing, Yolo might not have survived his fight.  Which is all part of the plan, as a standard fighter, Yolo's job is to take punishment and serve as a damage soak while the heavy hitters work their literal magic.

A brief look at the corpse revealed the last of the missing guardsmen, but no clues to the mysterious interlopers.

The next cavern in the complex proved to be a mushroom forest filled with deadly fungi of every variety.  While each species on it's own would be easy to deal with, having all of them in close proximity made for quite a conundrum.  You couldn't fight the violent ones without triggering the ones that spew poison spores.  You couldn't sneak past the ones that shrieking in bright light without getting too close to the ones that reach out and grab you.  After puzzling over spells that might help, the crew hit on an easy solution - a silence spell and dousing all artificial light.  The inhuman members of the party relied on infravision to escort their human friends out of the cave.

The next room proved to be the last - a large tomb inhabited by the surviving Malvern Brother, Lucius, and his undead minions consisting of two zombie ogres, a dozen human zombies, and a few skeletons.  In a case of mistaken identity, the necromancer assumed that the party was sent by the Dragon Cult to kill him, and was angry that the Cult had betrayed him.  Through a rage spittle filled rant, it became clear that this fellow was holding out hope that the Cult would resurrect a Dracolich, per the terms of his agreement, and their attempt to craft a hoard large enough to bring Tiamat to Faerun was simply not kosher in his book.

The final confrontation with a betrayed Dragon Cult leader,
and his zombie ogre, zombie, and skeletal servants.
The colorful circles in the south chamber show the
mushroom maze of death.

Whoever he was, he wasted no time in summoning more skeletal reinforcements from the mushroom maze - their arrival preceded by a piercing wail from the shriekers in the previous room.  The party elected to wipe out the crazed necromancer's minons first - they were closest to the party after all.  Once they were dispatched, Lucius went down hard and fast.

And that's when the real trouble began...

Five Feet of Rivers

Happy Labor Day.  For my labor of the day, I finished off some river pieces.

A single piece of 3-inch by 24-inch bass wood was enough to make five feet of rivers.  Using the RAW, you'll never need more than 36-inches of river, but with three lengths of unbroken river, on bridge, and two fords, you've got enough pieces to make any of the setups listed in the rulebook.  There was even enough wood left over to add a curve and short make-up length.

That short length is important for my setup because my mat is actually 30-inches wide by 34-inches wide.  So three lengths of 10-inches works great one way, but leaves a small gap when laid out the other way.  That short piece fills it in nicely.

May need to rethink that road piece left of the bridge.  That
bridge is a metal cast bought from Heroics and Ros.

Here's a better shot of one of the fords, with the pond in the back to show the matching water colors. It doesn't show up all that well in the photo, but after sealing these pieces with dullcote, a second coat of gloss finish was applied to the water itself to give it a nice wet shine.

Knights defending a ford.  Because using heavy mounted troops
to defend a static defense line is the mark of a good leader.

  

This is the classic war-game color for streams.  In nature they only look this blue when they reflect a clear blue sky.  On the wargaming table that color makes it clear what the feature represents, and provides a nice stark contrast against the ground surface.  It's only a cliche because it works.  For more in-depth reading, there's a great comparative analysis over on Wargaming With Barks.  Check it out.



Grinding Away at the One Hour Wargame Box

Should have a little something new to show you near the end of this long Labor Day weekend, but here's a couple shots found buried on my cell phone.  To give you a better idea how easy it is to work in 6mm, how about a couple of pre-paint shots of the farmstead?

 

These also give you an idea of the bare metal look of the Heroics and Ros small and large farmhouse.  The stone fence is just a thin sliver of basswood.  Kind of wish I'd put a small wooden gate in the opening to the field wall now that I look at it again.  In 6mm, those little details aren't hard and really help polish off otherwise basic features.

One Hour Wargames: Towns

The built-up areas in Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames towns have varying effects on movement depending on the historic era.  For the medieval era, they don't have any effect at all.  And yet, in the scenarios listed, they often trigger special rules or serve as objective markers.  So from a rules perspective, it makes sense to have a couple stands of "towns".

Also, they just look cool on the table.  Even if the scenario doesn't call for it, they make for more visual appeal, which is such a big part of this hobby - regardless of what they tell you at the 40k tables.

For my Big Box of One Hour wargames, I have elected to represent towns as a farm stand.  Not the kind you pass on the road in the country, but a wargame stand featuring a farm.  The field on the right is simple balsa wood walls and painted sand.  The walls are big enough that a full stand of troops can fit inside them.  The row of crops is early in the season and consists of glued and painted sand that should hold up well with repeated wear and tear.

The buildings are from Heroics and Ros' scenic range.  The small building is listed as SCEN10 (Small Farm House) and the larger one as SCEN12 (Large Farm House).  The balsa wood walls help tie the farm to the field, and the well in the courtyard is a short piece of balsa rod.  The tree is a left over rubber toy from the Tree Toob.  It's going to tower over the rest of the woodland terrain pieces.  We'll call it an ancient oak tree and not sweat the difference.

 

All that's left to complete the set now are some roads and rivers, and then we can actually sit down and start playing.  Eight months in, and we are still ahead of schedule to complete the big box by the end of the year.  Might even be time to start thinking about the Big Box for 2016.

Medieval Knights - The Good Guys Group Shot

That last post was getting a bit image heavy*.  So how about a second post with a nice group shot of all four units of hard charging knights ready for battle?

Now that's what a massed charge should look like.  None of this three-figures-per-stand nonsense you see from guys who game in a scale I can't afford.

* Also, two posts for one real update.  Ain't I a stinker?

Medieval Knights - The Good Guys

This post sure was a long time coming.  Four stands of 6mm medieval knights ready to roll for a game of Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames.  These are all Heroics and Ros figures mounted on basswood bases three inches wide by two inches deep.  These stands each have one bannerman and about 20 other knights in two poses.

 

Yeah, so this fantasy army wears red and yellow colors and flies dragon banners.  Any resemblance to an army from (for lack of a better word) literature is purely coincidental.

Look at that line-up.  Simple all-red horse gear, individual shields, this must be a force cobbled together from different houses within the kingdom.

Advancing line abreast, and with matching horse gear, but individual shields, these men must be retainers of a wealthy nobleman.

This well disciplined unit is charging in classic wedge formation.  Well drilled, and with matching uniforms and shields, it must be an elite guard unit.