Meet the gang cos the boys are here...

Dalton's Regulators

The great thing about gaming the Old West is the chance to create and tell our own stories -throughout the scenarios we have developed the back stories of our characters and every time they are wounded I feel a little dread that a poor dice role will see them going to Boot Hill.

Leader of the Cowboy gang is 'Big Joe' Dalton - a former Union Colonel who following service in the Civil War went out west to raise sons and cattle.  A man who has seen the horrors of war and hoped to live out his days on the fringes of the town of Deliverance Falls, Big Joe has, through a combination of pride, misadventure and stubbornness, ended up in conflict with his neighbours and the local law.

Lil' Joe is the son of Big Joe - a more mercurial character, Lil' Joe was wounded in an early encounter with the McGregor Fur Trading Company and walks with a limp, thus acquiring the nickname Stumpy, though as a sure shooter, they had better not use the name anywhere in his presence.

The ‘Buckeroo’ - through a lucky early dice role he was elevated to Hero status.  Captured by the law in one scenario, a rescue attempt was made in the next game.  As it was unsuccessful the Daltons then had to ride in mob handed to stop the hanging.  Fortunately for our red shirted rogue he wasn’t left swinging for long.  A word in the right ear made the charges go away and now he’s free to herd cattle and brawl.

 Not Django - the hired gun of the Dalton gang.  A pretty effective, albeit expensive, character.  His closest brush with death was being temporarily blinded, thus reducing his ability to shoot.  It took a few games to get the cash together to get it fixed and now he's back with his 2 six guns.

The last photos are of the disposable cowpokes who come and go,  I think each one has died at one time in our ongoing campaigns.  Working for Joe Dalton isn't the most secure of careers.

More Old West buildings

The Hotel

This was the most complicated structure I attempted - over 2 floors, balcony and staircase.  I dont tend to plan ahead apart from a quick sketch and a floorplan, and this building was going to feature a lot of windows which requires making individual frames (quite laborious).

Scale wise the rooms here are more representative than realistic - I don't think I would get much work as an architect and it occurred to me that guests would be able to spy on each other quite easily.

 My camera phone here isn't very good  - the wooden coffee stirrers are stained with brown ink.  Older buildings with a thin black ink diluted with alcohol (no suppin' whiskey but normal Isopropyl).

Old West Townscape

Back in 2016 my regular gaming partner and I decided to brush off a set of rules from Warhammer Historical - Legends of the Old West.  We had been talking about Wild West rules and although Dead Mans Hand was reasonably popular in our FLGS, Phill and I have a reputation for playing unconventional rules systems.  I didn't know at the time but they were based on the Lord of the Rings mechanic (which ironically is our current game of choice).

We had some generic terrain, trees and rocks etc but the Old West needs a town to fight over and lots of terrain for the all important In The Way rolls, so figuring if we could each construct 5-6 buildings we'd have a town in no time.

I've pulled together some photos of wips and finished articles.  Construction was coffee stirrers, card and balsa.

The first is the mercantile and dry goods outlet.

Songs of Blades and Heroes - Greek adventure

It's been a long time since I posted anything - but actually blogging has been a distant runner up to gaming, painting and modelling.  In the time I last posted (back in January 2017) I've built half an Old West town, repainted some old 40k marines, a further Napoleonic french regiment and 2 forces for the newly released Middle Earth battle game.  I'll post photos as soon as I can.

 The following photos were from a game I played earlier in April, using Wargames Foundry Greeks and Mythical monsters (Skeletons and Medusa).  We used Song of Blades and Heroes as it's pretty simplistic but still gives a great game.  In this a force of Argonauts and Heroes took on the King of Colchis in the ruins of a temple.

 

The temple was scratch built from wedding cake pillars and foam and although is perhaps a little too big, really added to the atmosphere of the game.

For a few Shakos more...

 Just a few pics of my British and my growing French force.

Voltigeurs..

 

A few Rifles next to a scratch built barn...

Lt. receiving his marching orders...

An added bit of ooomph...

Grenadiers... (these were my favourite to paint)

First game of Sharp Practice 2

 Back in the summer I played the 'new' TooFatLardies Sharp Practice 2.

Now, I'm a big fan of Sharpe and have read all the Cornwell books since I was a lad and my dad introduced me to a Readers Digest condensed version of Sharpes Eagle, which is still my favourite story.

I wasn't too much in love with the TV versions in the 90's but I watched all of them and was happy that somebody had made them.  The books always described large battles but on the TV budgetary constraints meant we had to make do with the same number of confused Ukrainian extras running around in circles with a smoke machine in the background. 

I had given up on collecting my own Napoleonic force but Song of Drums and Shakos gave me enough impetus to get started.  Victrix had had a sale and me and a friend picked up and shared a box each of their flank and centre companies and I added a box of French for myself.

A few months later I added a box of Perry Light Dragoons and some Rifles and they were ready for when SP2 came out.
 

More images can be found on at http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=93889.0 where Björn has added a commentary.

We enjoyed the game a lot and have had a couple more rounds where we have grappled with the fine points of the game.  The randomness of the cards when deploying has been a thorn in my side and others have commentated on their disatisfaction with diced movement but neither of these have prevented us from giving up on it, and frankly, I haven't yet read of a game which plays this period better.

As I was saying....

Well that was a little longer hiatus than I intended.

After a motivated start to blogging in the earlier part of the year, during the summer the urge kinda left.

This doesn't mean that I've been inactive, as actually 2016 was a pretty busy year in gaming, painting and model building.  The big surprise was an awakened interest in Epic after I dug out my old Space Marine set and finally painted an Imperial Guard army.

I also bought a few miniatures from http://vanguardminiatures.co.uk/ which are a pretty decent proxy for Space Marines.

To support my IG Vanguard also supplied me with a few proxy Big Tanks and 'not Valkyries'  - lovely models and fun to paint.  Sadly no photos.

Despite having the mini's I'd never really played a game of Epic until this summer - we used NetEpic, I think, which was very simple to pick up and there is some talk (there's always talk) of some sort of campaign between my forces of the Emperor and Phil's Orks.

To prepare for this, and because original models are difficult to come by, I scratch built this Thunderhawk to use as support.  I tried to use somewhere near the correct scale as I wanted it to be more than a representative piece.  It still needs a lick of paint.

Another project was this simple Epic scale adobe village made from offcuts of foam, covered in filler and white glue and painted with a few simple motifs and patterns.  I have a few 40k bitz that i'm going to add to make it into some kind of primitive technology used by the inhabitants - think Tattooine.

My original Space Marine box has more Rhinos than I need for my force so I had a go at scratch building a Vindicator from a bit of plastic rod and plasticard - not bad I think.

Epic has gone off the boil in recents months but the good thing is that I now have all I need when we pick it up again and can go straight into it.  Assuming other projects don't get in the way.......