Category Archives: Galleries

A category for posts containing or about the galleries of wargaming photos on this site.

Trumpeter Salute 2012 After-Action Report

So, Corey and I spent the weekend over in Vancouver at the always-excellent Trumpeter Salute 2012 gaming convention. We saw a lot of people we really only see at Trumpeter, played a bunch of good games and got to spectate at many more!

Corey is suffering from computer issues and hasn’t gotten his photos processed or online yet, but I finally sorted mine out this evening. You can go check out all of them on my Trumpeter Salute 2012 set on Flickr. Or you can read on for some of my favourite photos, and favourite games from this year’s version of Trumpeter Salute.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: WW1 Air I

Canvas Eagles is an old standby, a great World War One air game. Rene runs pretty it much constantly at Trumpeter, and Corey and I both got into it Friday night. On opposite sides, of course. We have a firm convention rule that if/when we find ourselves in the same game at a convention, it has to be on opposite sides. That’s my Fokker Eindeker at the centre of this photo, which spent most of the game locked in a swirling, inconclusive dogfight with the very similar French Moraine-Saultier to the left. Both aircraft are very agile but not terribly fast, so we could neither outmaneuver nor outrun the other!

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Darkest Africa II

Colin is another Trumpeter regular, and has run a spectacular Darkest Africa game several yaears in a row now. I didn’t play this, just got a few snapshots.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Legends of the Old West I

Our Saturday morning entertainment, with a friend and I attempting lead our outlaw gang into town to rescue a gang member from the gallows, while Corey and another gamer ran the Law to try (and succeed, worse luck!) in halting our attempt. Legends of the Old West has the virtue of being an uncomplicated set of rules that get out of the way and let you get on with the game. Neat scratchbuilt Old West buildings, too.

Saturday afternoon and evening are most convention’s “prime time” and Trumpeter is no exception. Lots and lots of great stuff all at once on Saturday afternoon!

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Even Whites Bleed Red II

My own “Even Whites Bleed Red” Russian Civil War scenario I’ll give the full AAR treatment in another post, but it went well.

ITrumpeter Salute 2012: WW2 Fall of France II

Spectacular scenery in this early World War Two Fall of France game, French vs Germans in 15mm.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Boys Own Waterloo I

Malcolm is another Victoria gamer and friend, but this iwas my first chance to see his full, spectacular “Boy’s Own Waterloo” setup. The British even won this time, apparently.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Roman Seas

Saturday evening Eric Hotz ran his Roman Seas game, with our convoy set upon and seized by the merciless Pompey.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: WW2 Eastern Front

Also on Saturday evening, this elegant World War Two Eastern Front game in 15mm, showcasing new rules and some awesomely painted figures.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Battle of Queenstown Heights, War of 1812 II

Sunday was a bit quieter, but Colin put on the appropriately timed War of 1812 Battle of Queenstown Heights, in which the British/Canadian forces held the Americans to a bloody but marginal victory.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Isle of Pulp Insanity I

Also running Sunday was this spectacular pulp game set in the South China Sea, with various factions vying to discover the secrets of this volcanic island.

Trumpeter Salute 2012: Isle of Pulp Insanity IV

Except that volcanic islands are, well, volcanic, and sometimes prone to slipping back beneath the waves and taking their secrets with them! No need to imagine that with this game, the lower half of the island really does vanish!

This is only about one third of my Trumpeter Salute photos, go check the rest out on Flickr.

Thanks again to Martin and his family for the hospitality over the weekend, Jon for transport to and from Vancouver, and the excellent organizers, GMs and other attendees at Trumpeter Salute for a great time. See you next year!

Photos from My First Thirty Years War Fight

Sunday the 29th of May we got together to do a four-player 1,000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance battle; this was bigger than had previously been attempted and was my first actual game in this period.

I badly bent a rule I’ve held to for more than a decade, and fielded unfinished figures (a lot of them, in fact!) to get a force on the table. I had an allied German army of two units of standard pike-and-shot foot, a field commander, and an oversized technically-illegal unit of really good-quality horse (six bases instead of the usual four, all Superior Determined Horse, for the other FoG:R players out there), the rest of our side (centre and other wing) was all German Catholic. Opposing us was a French force, with one wing of allied English New Model Army. An a-historical mashup, to be sure, but a good game. The two allied wings wound up facing each other, my German Prods vs the New Model Army, while the two larger armies fought the other wing and the centre.

Photos, a bit more narrative and some thoughts after the jump!
Continue reading Photos from My First Thirty Years War Fight

An LPL3 Archive

As discussed in my last post on entering LAF‘s LPL5, here’s all ten of the images from my 2009 LPL3 entries. I finished somewhere in the bottom third of the pack, but certainly didn’t enter with any expectation of doing much better — I entered to give me incentive to work on my painting and photography, which worked out just fine!

LPL3’s bonus rounds were “Germans” for Round One, which I botched; the German WW1 stormtroopers I did for Round 7 were supposed to be my Round 1 bonus entry, but I ordered them too late. Round 5 was “Cavalry”, which I managed with my first 15mm fantasy unit painted in years. Round 10 was “Lost Worlds”, bonus points for an exploration team, a “native” team and “monster” or similar — pegged max bonus points there, and a photo I’m still proud of!

The entirety of LPL3 is still archived over on LAF.

Gallery: Shipyard Photos for Inspiration

Another revival from the old Brian’s Wargame Pages version of the site, and one that I should have brought forward ages ago! You can see the Esquimalt Drydock on Google Maps for a sense of scale that wasn’t available ten years ago when I first posted the photos. — Brian, 22 Feb 2011

In the summer of 2001 I was roommates with a guy who worked in the drydock here in town. He turned into a real asshole after being laid off, but while he was still working he gave me a tour of the yard. I brought my camera, and these pics should inspire people looking for new industrial modern or SF scenery projects!

One thing that would be very difficult to reproduce on the gaming table, except maybe in 6mm, would be the sheer scale of the place. I didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I didn’t even try for some real area photos. The drydock itself is 1100 feet long; the two big cranes pictured below are several hundred feet tall. There were two fair-sized ships in the drydock when I was there, and they could have accomodated a third with no difficulty. And this isn’t even that big a drydock, by maritime engineering standards. The ones that can accomodate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are even bigger…

Wargamers interested in industrial scenery or future-tech industrial landscapes (Necromunda style) should find plenty of inspiration here! Even if you can’t reproduce the scale, the clutter, details and fixtures should provide some ideas.

Click any image below for a (slightly) larger view. Keep in mind these are refugees from the Old Web, when 600px wide was a Big Image.

Old Signs for your Pulp Gaming

Old Signs for Pulp Gaming
Old Signs for Pulp Gaming

Inspired by my brother’s Fake Pulp Adverts post, I thought I would share one of my projects. Over the past few weeks I have been working on a series of old signs for pulp-era 28mm gaming. Designed for any era from the 1900’s to the 1940’s and in any part of the English-speaking world, these signs are fairly versatile.

You can also download the PDF version (Old Signs for Pulp Gaming) if you want a vectorized copy for scaling. As usual, these are designed in the superlative Inkscape, an Open Source vector editing program. The fonts used largely come from DaFont, which has a large set of free and Open Source fonts for use.

Where did the idea come from? The initial inspiration was this image of a locksmith shop in Winnipeg by one of my Flickr contacts:

Old locksmith shop in Winnipeg. Picture by rpaterso
Old locksmith shop in Winnipeg. Picture by rpaterso

After that I started to dive into the Shorpy image archive and came up with some gold. Images such as the one below are great for mining for re-creation:

Old Corner Bookstore: 1900 on Shorpy
Old Corner Bookstore: 1900 on Shorpy

The files are currently licensed for non-commercial, personal use, largely because not all the fonts used allow commercial publication.

Random Pulp Fake Adverts.

I’ve posted these on various forums, but never collected them into one place before. For your amusement, a batch of fake 1930s ads – grab the full size versions off Flickr to reproduce for your personal use on the sides of buildings, on billboards, or whatever!
Continue reading Random Pulp Fake Adverts.

Gradient Backgrounds for Photography

I’ve created a number of simple colour gradient backgrounds that I’ve printed out for use in miniature photography, and recently decided to bundle the most useful of them up in a PDF and make it available.

Eight smooth gradient backgrounds included; on North American 8.5×11 paper by default, but they’re all vector-based so they should scale to whatever size paper you can print them on.

The list:

  • Pale Grey
  • Grey
  • Dark Grey
  • Black (shades to grey)
  • Blue
  • Sea Blue
  • Blue Grey
  • Tan

These backdrops MAY be used for commercial uses (photographs for a webstore or similar) but the file & printed backdrops MAY NOT be sold on any medium.

Photo Backdrops PDF (60Kb)

Enjoy – let me know how you’re using these, and if you have any suggestions for more colours or other expansions on this idea.

Photos from a Fantasy Rules! Battle

More old photos resurrected – this time a few from a Fantasy Rules! 2nd Edition game we played years ago. Human medieval knights & footmen vs orcs and goblins with necromancer help. I’m pretty sure this was the first outing of Tony’s undead; years later he’s finally got enough to field an all-undead army without help from my figure collection.
Continue reading Photos from a Fantasy Rules! Battle

Fantasy Gallery #1

15mm fantasy figures, based for Hordes of The Things (HOTT) or Fantasy Rules! (FR!). Many of the figures are long-out-of-production Ral Partha 15mm (from when they held the AD&D license, before WotC bought AD&D from TSR and started producing plastic crap); the rest are a mix of Reaper & Ral Partha 25mm monsters and Chariot 15mm (now produced by Magister Militum/Navigator.
Continue reading Fantasy Gallery #1