All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.
Historicals, Inspiration

Further Great War Resources

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Over a year ago, in July 2011, I wrote a long article called Great War Resources with links to the Internet Archive and other places you could find resources of interest to Great War/World War One wargaming.

Here’s a bit of a long-delayed followup, the result of an evening wandering the (virtual) aisles of the US Army’s Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) website. My original post mostly had material from the Internet Archives and just a bit from CARL, as I’d only just discovered that resource. CARL material is biased toward the last two years of the Great War, 1917 & 1918. Given that this is an American military library we’re using, it’s only natural it would have more material for the years when the Americans finally realized there was a war on and joined in. Also, there was a huge outpouring of studies and material from all the combatants as the war ground onward, and as I mentioned in my original article, on the Allied side lot of it was deliberately aimed at bringing the newly-arrived Americans up to speed as rapidly as possible in the harsh environment of the Western Front.

To get the best PDF files quickly from a individual CARL listing, use the pale blue “Download” button on the far right of the page, opposite the title. That’ll get you a PDF with a human-readable filename, which is useful. Using the red-and-white PDF symbol gets you the same file, but with a random alphanumeric filename, kind of hard to keep track of once it lands on your own hard drive!

The following links are a few from the CARL Obsolete Military Manuals collection I happen to have noticed that might be of interest.

One easy way to sort through the Obsolete Military Manuals material is to sort by date of original publication. I can’t find a way to save links to specific searches (they time out) but use the Advanced Search dropdown on the top bar (beside the search box) and then use the Search By Date function at the bottom of that dropdown. There’s a few random bits and pieces in the 1914-1916 range, then a positive explosion of material from early 1917 onward.

Found any treasures on CARL or elsewhere that I haven’t mentioned? Post them in the comments, please! (Note that comments are moderated, especially if they have multiple links in them, but I do check up on the moderation queue regularly!)

Conventions, Inspiration, Misc

Always Good Advice

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The Known Rule
NGR contains a large number of rules, and in the end it is not likely someone will have them all memorized. The rules of this game are only applicable if someone involved actually knows the rule (or claims to). If no party involved knows the rule then they obviously did not choose their course of action based on the mechanics. In such a case, the GM should issue a ruling and move on. You should never be looking up rules during play. Doing so results in -1 awesomeness for a player or +1 awesomeness to all players if the GM looks up a rule (per occurrence).

Apparently from a set of RPG rules called Neoclassical Geek Revival (hence, NGR) which I had never heard of before. I’ve been doing a lot of RPG reading recently, which is one of the several reasons things have been quiet here on the Warbard. I’ll probably start doing some RPG-related posts eventually, although this will always be primarily a wargaming blog, but sometimes you run across a great piece of universal gaming advice that just needs to get shared.

I’ve run fairly large number of convention games in the last four years or so since getting back into wargaming, and the above “Issue a ruling and move on” advice resonates exactly with what my experience of running games at conventions. People don’t (in my experience, anyway) game at conventions to learn every single detailed rule in a system. They might want to get a taste of a system they’ve heard of, or they might just be looking for a good game with new people and perhaps a genre/setting/scale they don’t usually play with, but regardless, bogging the game down by constantly referring to the rules is just going to wreck the whole game.

Play the game, not the rules. Momentum and energy matter more than the rules.

As GM/game-runner/etc, issue a ruling, be consistent in that ruling for the rest of the game, and keep moving.

If in doubt, roll something. Then keep playing the damn game.

My personal “convention season” is a late winter/early spring stretch, so I’m starting to consider games I’ll run in 2013’s conventions, and this quote strikes the right note.

The above isn’t just a convention/public game thing, of course. It should be a standard in every game, except possibly with a brand-new system everyone is still trying to figure out. It’s just even more important in convention games, because most of your players won’t know the rules, and you’re always (at least) slightly time-crunched at events. (It probably also isn’t applicable to tournament gaming, but I tend to regard tourney gaming as about as much fun as a trip to the dentist, so don’t personally care if it’s applicable there…)

(NGR is available here, and the quote I’ve used above was originally quoted over here on Jeff’s Gameblog)

Misc, Painting

Latest Addition to my Painting Bench

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Part of the reason I haven’t done much painting in the last several months has been the frankly depressing state of my painting bench. It had progressed beyond cluttered to “under there somewhere”, and when sitting down to paint would involve first moving crap out of the way with a shovel, one naturally loses the inclination to attempt any painting…

So this evening I bit the bullet, actually did take a shovel to the bench, then sat down to reclaim some space from my ever-increasing collection of paints. There are all sorts of great paint racks and storage systems out there (this fairly recent system from Back2Bas-ixs, for example) but they all cost more than I want to spend; my wargaming budget isn’t huge and I’d much rather spend that on figures, rules and scenery! So I grabbed a shoebox lid, some extra scrap card from another box, and a roll of masking tape, and set about building a functional mockup of a paint rack.

Here it is, in all it’s cardboard glory:

workbench
Workbench with new paint shelf, October 28 2012.

The first thing I realized is that I’ll need at least one more that size to get my existing collection of paints fully up off the bench itself, but this is a start! The shelves are box cardboard slightly heaver than the card the shoebox is made of, and there’s a cardboard “toe” at the lower edge to keep it propped against the wall at a slight backwards angle to keep everything on the shelves. It holds 24 Reaper dropper bottles (the same size used by Vallejo or Foundry) and the two lowest shelves hold 10-12 GW/Tamiya-sized jars.

I’m calling it a mockup because one of the things I want to build is a much larger shelf/rack system that goes across the whole back edge of my painting bench, with lots of shelving for paints, inks, tools and in-progress figures. I can get thin acrylic sheet (ie plexiglass) fairly cheaply from a local plastic supply shop, so part of the reason for this quick-and-dirty shoebox shelf is to see what sort of proportions that project will have. (just for scale, the cutting mat at front centre of my bench is a 12″x9″ model.)

In the meantime, I’m going to scare up a second shoebox lid and bodge together another quick-and-dirty paint shelf for the rest of my paints and inks!

Historicals, Inspiration

Dogs of War

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No, not the Warhammer-universe mercenaries, but the real thing, in real-world wars. The Library of Congress’ excellent Flickr account, where they share all sorts of treasures from their huge photo archives, put this image up earlier this year:

British Ambulance Dog, WW1
"Getting bandages from kit of British Dog (LOC)" via the US Library of Congress on Flickr. Click to go to the original Flickr page to see larger images.

"The animal seeks for wounded men lost on the battle-field; he searches in holes, ruins, and excavations, and hunts over wooded places or coverts, where the wounded man might lie unnoticed by his comrades or the stretcher-bearer."

That lead to some Google searching and the discovery of several interesting articles about military dogs on the Western Front, primarily as ambulance dogs or messenger dogs. There’s another LoC image on Flickr that has some very good links in a comment just below it, a few of which I’ve reproduced here.

The fascinating Out of Battle blog has a pair of posts from 2008, one on messenger dogs and the other on ambulance and other uses of dogs, with some further links and resources. Over on the always-valuable Internet Archive there’s a 1920 book called British War Dogs, Their Training and Psychology, downloadable in the usual variety of formats, including PDF with the original illustrations and diagrams.

I’m not (yet!) into Western Front Great War gaming, but if you wanted a unique unit amongst your trenches, a dog and handler could be done quite easily with a spare infantry figure and a dog — quite a number of manufacturers make dogs in both 15mm & 28mm. From the look of the period photos, most of the dogs were collie or terrier types, not very large, which makes sense. The ambulance packs could be sculpted with a bit of milliput or greenstuff, and a messenger collar would be even easier to add.

Unleash the dogs of war!

Misc

Getting Back At It

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So I promised to run a Russian Civil War game at a friend’s place on the Nov. 11th long weekend; I made the promise ages ago and suddenly looked at a calendar and realized that’s about two weeks away… and it’s been months since I’ve touched a paintbrush or even looked at most of my RCW stuff!

So this weekend it’s cracking on with the half-finished 20 or so mixed infantry, another dozen Red sailors, and the finishing touches on the mostly-painted cavalry force. I’ve also got an assembled field gun I might try and get painted and based, just to add variety and give whoever doesn’t get the armoured car in our game a weapon capable of actually killing the thing!

Right, fresh water in the pot, clear the crap off the painting desk… amazing how an underused space attracts random junk, isn’t it?

Inspiration, Pulp

US Marines in Interwar China

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Dusting off my sadly-neglected blog this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend to post a link to a very cool trio of old movies shot in the early 1930s by the US Marine Corp in China. The US (as well as the British, French and a few other Western powers) maintained military forces in China right up into the Second World War, including aviation forces.

I can’t seem to embed the videos, but head over to Leatherneck Magazine’s USMC Aviators in China article to find all three short, silent movie clips.

If you were looking for scenery inspiration, a lot of this footage is at fairly low level, and while it isn’t hugely detailed you could get useful inspiration for Chinese buildings and compounds by peering past the airplanes!

Hope any Canucks reading this are having an excellent Thanksgiving weekend. I’m trying to get back into the gaming thing after a summer and early fall of practically zero activity, so more content soon, hopefully!

Fantasy, Historicals, Misc

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

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Bit of a slow summer here on the Warbard, and in gaming in general for me. I haven’t touched a paintbrush since June (or possibly May…) and while I’ve done a bit of scenario design and a lot of reading, most of my actual gaming time has been taken up with the Savage Worlds RPG rules and planning a possible fantasy RPG with Savage Worlds. We shall see how it goes, as always, and I do want to get back into painting soon, I have Russian Civil War sailors and some cavalry to finish!

Historicals, Inspiration

Two New Books: Britmis & The Great War on the Western Front

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My most recent order from Naval & Military Press showed up this week; just over three weeks enroute isn’t bad for surface shipping from the UK to western Canada.

This time I got Britmis: A Great Adventure of the War and The Great War on the Western Front: A Short History.

Britmis is an NMP republication of Major Phelps Hodges’ memoir of his participation in the British military mission to Siberia during the Russian Civil War and subsequent escape through the Gobi Desert to China when the Russian Civil War started going very badly. It has the gloriously Edwardian sub-sub-title “Being an account of Allied intervention in Siberia and of an escape across the Gobi to Peking”, and in addition to being interested in the Russian Civil War generally, I’m a sucker for any book with sub-sub-titles or chapter sub-titles that start with “Being an account…”, so I expect Britmis to be a fun read.

It’s a chunky little trade paperback, 365 pages or so and includes photographs taken by the author during his adventures. I read Beasts, Men and Gods in e-book a while ago, and Britmis looks to have a lot of the same flavour and interest!

The Great War on the Western Front by Paddy Griffith is one of the standard modern texts on the Great War, “revisionist” in the best sense as Griffith works away at the old myths that the Western Front was nothing but pointless slaughter and stupidity. I won’t be getting to this one for a while, but NMP had it on sale at an absurd discount (their regular price is pretty good too, mind you!) so I couldn’t pass up the chance to add this one to my library.

Inspiration, Pulp

Pulp Atmosphere

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Urban pulp is often about the dark alleyways, the gritty industrial districts, the shadowy corners, the threatening figures in fedoras and trenchcoats lurking in the misty dark… so here’s a pair of photos from Shorpy that just ooze that sort of atmosphere!

Via the always excellent Shorpy, a very atmospheric streetscene in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh Noir over on Shorpy, just in case the hotlink doesn’t work. (Sometimes Shorpy links work beautifully. Sometimes they don’t work at all…)

More noir-ish images from Pittsburgh, via Shorpy. Sure, they’re from 1907, which is technically early for the sort of pulpish goings-on that interest us here at Warbard, but close enough, and awesomely atmospheric!

And again, Shadowland over on Shorpy.

Having just been away for a week, and July having been awfully slow on the wargaming front around here, I hope to resume more regular posts soon, as I get back into gaming regularly. Still, that seductive summer heat will keep luring me out outdoors (you know, the bright room with the blue ceiling and lousy wifi reception…) so the summer doldrums might last a bit longer. We shall see. In the meantime, go explore Shorpy, there’s a huge amount of great stuff on that site!

Historicals, Reviews

Book Review: The White Armies of Russia

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The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle of Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention by George Stewart is another modern reprint from Naval & Military Press, and was part of the same order I made to NMP back in April 2012. I’ve been reading it in fits and starts in between other books, but finally settled down to actually finish it about ten days ago.

“Brutality made Bolsheviks where none had been before.”

—p.288, White Armies

White Armies was originally published in 1933, so it’s not a modern book, but it is still one of the touchstone pieces of Russian Civil War history in English. When I asked about this book over on the TooFatLardies mailing list, Richard of TFL mentioned paying quite a lot of money for an original edition a few years ago and being happy to pay it, but thankfully these days NMP’s facsimile edition is available relatively cheaply. The book is 470 pages or so, paperback, and seems solidly bound. The original photographs and maps are included, although quality of these (as NMP warns for all their facsimile editions) is not quite up to modern standards. This is especially frustrating on the maps, which are numerous and were apparently most drawn by the author or commissioned by him for the book. Many of the reprinted maps have a lot of barely readable tiny print, though, which makes them hard to use. That aside, in a conflict as sprawling as the RCW, it’s nice to have any sort of map to try to follow the action with!

White Armies of Russia. Book cover image from Naval & Military Press.

The book is focused, as the title implies, almost exclusively on the actions and personalities of the White movement(s) in Russia, and on the various non-Russian groups that interacted with them — primarily the Czech Legions and the British, American, French and Japanese interventionist forces. Stewart has an obvious distaste for Bolshevism, but he pulls no punches describing the corruption, brutality and ultimate failure of the Whites.

The book is laid out roughly chronologically, starting with the first (February) Revolution and the beginnings of the counter-revolutionary movements and moving on from there. Each chronological section has, generally, a chapter on each of the main theatres of the RCW (Murmansk/Archangel/the North, the North-West, the Southern/Ukraine/Crimean, and Siberia, broadly speaking). This book design does make following a single theatre all the way through the war a bit of an exercise in hopping around in the book, but it’s hard to see how to avoid either chronological or geographic dislocation when attempting to tell the story of the entire RCW in one book.

The White Armies of Russia by George Stewart. 2009 NMP reprint, original publication 1933. £16.00 at NMP, less if you get it during one of their regular sales.

The Shortest Possible Review: One of the classic histories of the White movement during the RCW, and still a good single-volume history decades after it was written.

Given how focused White Armies is on the White experience, I’d be curious to hear recommendations from readers on a similar book focused on the Bolsheviks and Red Army, to fill in the gaps, so to speak. Suggestions in the comments, please!