Historical and quasi-historical gaming of various sorts. English Civil War and Thirty Years War, the Great War (World War One), the Russian Civil War and other interwar conflicts, and whatever else we wander into!
A friend scored this 1970 classic of our hobby when I was at BottosCon in Vancouver last week, and was kind enough to loan it to me right away, even before he’d had a chance to read it himself. A battered public library copy of this book was my first introduction to the idea of wargaming, when I was 9 or 10 years old! I was already into model building, and the idea of models you could use in games took root and hasn’t let go since…
It’s a fascinating look at what you might call the “early modern” period of wargaming, and demonstrates just how far the whole hobby has come in the intervening forty-some years!
I’m going to be using excerpts and favourite bits as material here as I read through it, but given my current interest in World War One and the Russian Civil War it was Featherstone’s short chapter on WW1 that I turned to first.
He had a novel suggestion for simulating the confusion and fog of war involved in a nighttime Western Front trench raid:
An extremely simple method—ensuring more than realistic confusion, since no one can see what they are doing—is to have the wargames table illuminated only by a small 5-watt lamp painted blue!
I think I’ll stick with Mud & Blood’s blinds, myself.
More quotes and excerpts from this book as they catch my eye!
A number of the TooFatLardies games, including Through The Mud And The Blood, feature “Blinds” — markers used on the table at the start of the game to disguise the exact location and composition of your force and introduce some fog-of-war elements with a minimum of bookkeeping.
A quick screenshot of the two styles of RCW Blinds
Richard of TFL recently put out a PDF with a couple of generic blind markers to support his recently released I Ain’t Been Shot Mum, 3rd Edition WW2 rules — they’re on the TFL Yahoo Group, assuming you’re a member. They’re rather elegant oval markers, designed to print about 6″ wide and 4″ deep.
These inspired me to fire up Inkscape last night and create blinds for the Russian Civil War forces I am building for Mud & Blood. There’s ovals very much like the IABSM ones, and on the second page of each PDF is a pair of rectangular blinds, which are much less elegant but likely a lot easier to cut out! You could, for added elegance, use a round-corner punch on the corners of the rectangular ones; this is likely what I”ll do with the ones I print.
Feedback below, especially if you have any suggestions for other blinds you’d like to see! I’m already planning Union Jack blinds for my British forces, for example.
There’s 43 Bolsheviks off my painting table and ready for action, finally! One Maxim MG crew, some officers and NCOs and a whole lot of ragged, barely uniformed riflemen. Almost entirely Copplestone figures, and I mixed freely from the regular rifles, greatcoated rifles and the partisan packs to get a suitable ragged look. I had just started painting (and thinking about organization) when this marvelous Lead Adventure thread opened, with all sorts of great contemporary photographs of both Red and White uniforms.
A Russian Civil War Bolshevik infantry force, finally marching off the painting table
24 more Bolshies to finish basing and then paint, at which point it’s on to the 60-some White Russians that are in the mail to me as I write this. All that painting will give me the core of two good-sized RCW infantry forces, nominally configured as platoon-sized forces for Through the Mud and the Blood but obviously configurable for other games as needed.
The Russian Civil War has well and truly taken over my painting schedule, and starting in November I should even be able to get some games in again, as a screwy work schedule settles somewhat and once again frees up my Sundays for gaming, which is of course the best possible use of that day. I’ll probably try to push hard to get enough Whites finished for a first Mud & Blood RCW outing by the last Sunday in November… we shall see!
(More photos of the Reds in the next few days, as daylight and weather allows…)
A miscelania of links, just so I get back into the habit of posting here!
Adventures of the 19XX is a pulptastic webcomic, full of zeppelins, giant airplanes, mystical oddness and villainy. Good fun, great art, and quite likely to inspire pulp gaming scenarios! (Warning: autoplaying music when the site loads…)
If you’re looking for inspiration for Great War/WW1 terrain, check this amazing Lead Adventure Forum thread out – thejammedgatling’s First World War Terrain Boards – it’s a long thread of a project that’s been a year+ in the running so far, but well worth it.
I’ve finally got my painting bench set up again after moving at the end of September, so more original content should be landing on the Warbard shortly!
“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies has written a fascinating post over on his Lard Island blog about friction in games and in reality. Short version: real war is full of things going pear shaped; most gaming systems aren’t. Go read the full article, I’m doing it a terrible disservice with my one-line smartass summary!
Should you want to read old von Clausewitz yourself, Project Gutenburg has an English translation of On War, Vol. One free to download. The short chapter Richard refers to in his post is Chapter VII. Friction In War — even for those of us with short attention spans, well worth a read!
This counts as another prod to get more figures painted for Through the Mud and the Blood, too!
Created a new Historical Gaming page, which has replaced the ECW/TYW page in the top menu; there’s also a matching Historicals category now to populate the page.
With my interests wandering into the Great War, Russian Civil War, English Civil War/Thirty Years War and elsewhere recently, a new catchall page was needed. I’ve retroactively added old posts to the new Historicals category as well.
There will, of course, be a lot of overlap with my long-standing Pulp interests, which is only natural as most of my developing historical interest grew out of the quasi-historical pulp games we’ve been playing for the last several years! Expect strongly pulp-flavoured history, as well!
Having recently picked up a copy of TooFatLardies’ Great War large skirmish rules Through The Mud and the Blood, I went looking for further reading. The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is, it turns out, a treasure-trove of period manuals, books and documents for the Great War/World War One era.
If you’ve never heard of the Internet Archive, it’s a huge and sprawling website full of all sorts of material. Probably the most famous section is the “Wayback Machine“, an attempt to collect, curate and archive huge swathes of the internet. Looking for an interesting old wargaming website, perhaps one hosted on Geocities or another vanished host? Fire the old URL into the Wayback Machine, you’ll probably find something!
What I’m focusing on for this article, though, is the Texts side of the Archive. It’s an attempt to preserve, digitize and distribute huge numbers of old and new books, and make them available in as many formats as possible. Google (through Google Books), Microsoft and dozens of university, public and national libraries are involved. The collection is already millions of books and still growing rapidly. It can be hard to find things, though, which is one of the reasons I started writing this article — it began simply as a list of interesting Archive.org URLs I wanted to save for future reference in case I couldn’t find the same books again!
The Great War On Archive.org
Title page, Training of Platoons for Offensive Action, 1917.
I make no claims to have here a comprehensive list of the era’s books and publications available on the Internet Archive, but what follows is a sometimes arbitrary list of items that caught my eye!
There’s a whole bunch of official publications of various sorts, mostly American but a few British as well. Of particular note for Great War gamers is Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action, 1917 – this is an American re-publication of a famous British military manual. Straight from the source, as it were. A good chunk of the British background material in the back of Mud & Blood is straight from Training of Platoons, as are several of the scenarios presented in the Stout Hearts & Iron Troopers supplement.
Many of the rest of these books are published by civilian publishers; the main market seems to have been American officers in the newly-raised American Expeditionary Forces and to a lesser extent new officers of other nations. There was a certain amount of repetition and even flat-out plagarism in this market; some of the authors also regurgitate chunks of Training of Platoons straight into their own books.
Trench Fighting (1917) is a British book, noteworthy mostly for lots of good diagrams.
Elements of trench warfare (1917) – more good diagrams, although of even more idealized trenches than normal in some of them!
Tactics and Duties for Trench Fighting (1918) – One French and one American author, both infantry officers, longer book but written to be easy to read, lots of interesting details that could inspire scenarios.
Probably the most useful format to get these books in is PDF, especially as that preserves the original diagrams, illustrations and page layout better than any of the other formats the Internet Archive offers. Most books have a link straight to the PDFs on the left of the page; some (especially the ones via Google Books) don’t. The Google Books ones are especially frustrating, as going to the Google Books page does not actually give you an obvious link to the PDF file. Those PDFs are still in the Internet Archive, though – instead of going to Google Books, click the “All Files: HTTP” link at the bottom of the left-hand box, then look for the .pdf file on the resulting basic index page. Voila, the PDF, without messing around!
The US Army Obsolete Military Manuals Collection
The US Army’s Command and General Staff College has a Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) with an Obsolete Military Manuals collection. It’s at least as awkward a website to use as the Internet Archive, though…. lots of good material, some of which is also in the Internet Archive but much that isn’t yet.
The prize find there, at least for a Mud & Blood player, has to be Instructions for the Offensive Combat of Small Units (Direct PDF link), which is a mid-1918 American adaptation of a French tactical guide. Training of Platoons, way up at the top of this article, was a British publication simply reprinted by the Americans; this one is extensively rewritten to use American tactical formations (the AEF used much larger units than either the French or British did by 1917/1918). Nice illustrations and diagrams, too.
Infantry and Tank Co-operation And Training is a very short British pamphlet reprinted by the Americans, discussing tactical co-operations of tanks and infantry forces, with some very useful tactical diagrams.
There are almost certainly other interesting resources tucked away in the CARL files; I’ll keep looking and either update this articele or write a followup at some point in the future.
Other Links
There’s also Druid_ian on Scribd but all his content is straight from the Internet Archive or the US Army sources listed above, just uploaded into Scribd’s sometimes useful but mostly frustrating interface. He has discovered some interesting documents buried in these sources, although note that only people who sign up for Scribd accounts may download from Scribd. Search for the same titles at IA or CARL and you won’t have to sign up for yet another website…
A number of these books are available on paper from various sources – search Amazon for them. I have no idea of the quality of these reprints; I prefer to keep my money for figures and scenery where I can! There are a number of good collections of trench maps and of course Great War/WW1 photography out there, but that’s for another article, this one is already long enough!
Found something interesting on the Internet Archive, the Obsolete Military Manuals collection or elsewhere? Leave me a comment below and I’ll add it to the article!
Picked up a cheap towel to use as thatching. Here it is in a quickie late-night photograph, glue still wet on the roof of the half-timber barn.
Towel strips as thatch on the half-timber barn. As usual, click for full size.
The roof has a base of sheet styrene. I used white glue to stick the towel strips down, then more thinned white glue to soak the towel, which (when it eventually dries!) should solidify it nicely.
The barn has also been given a base of mattboard and mostly primed. My usual scenery primer is a 1:1 mix of white glue and black paint, mixed right on the model. It seals and protects the scenery surface nicely, even fairly fragile stuff like styrofoam toughens up a bit!
The main arched doors are also in progress, but I forgot to get a photo of them.
Still to-do for the roof, trim the edges and glue them under the eves for a more finished look, then paint and more paint. I also need to do basswood rafters under the roof, both for looks and for actual structural support, as the roof will still be removable when this building is finished.
The roof still looks a bit too towel-like right now, hopefully finishing the edges and painting will sort that!
Something for the English Civil War/Thirty Years War table, as well as for pulp games set in the quainter parts of the UK or Europe! All those crops gathered from my fields have to be stored somewhere, after all.
A stone-and-halftimber barn, work in progress. Click, as usual, for larger.
The whole thing is highly inspired by Warlord Game’s rather nice 16th Century Barn. Actually, scrub “highly inspired”, I’m outright copying the building, as a learning piece! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?
The basic structure is foamcore. The stonework is soft foam salvaged from a takeout food container; I’m going to have to swing by our local (awesome) plastic supplier to see if they have something similar in sheets, as one takeout container at a time is a rather slow way to accumulate building materials! I scribed/carved the stones with a sharp pencil, and quite like how they’ve turned out.
The timbering is 1/8th x 1/16th inch balsa strip from the Stockpile’o’Doom. I have about six lengths of it, and it is entirely possible it’s leftovers from our family model railroading setup in the early/mid-1990s when I was in junior high. I think I’ve carried that balsa around long enough — time to put it to use, right?
Doors, additional timbering at the corners of the building, and a base are still to do. The inside will get a bit of plastering just for texture, and probably a lot of straw strewn around and such — details to add interest without getting much in the way, ideally.
The roof will be towel thatching over a styrene base.
I’ve heard the suggestion that you try one new-to-you technique per project; I’m afraid this simple-looking building breaks that “rule” good and proper! Foam stonework is new to me; likewise half-timbered building construction, and I’ve never actually used the towel-as-thatch technique before either! Wish me luck!
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.
