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!
“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.
An entire week since my last substantial post! The horror, how will our dedicated readership cope?
I’ve been painting up an English Civil War/Thirty Years War storm this week, filling that inevitable post-Lead Painters League void with 40-odd plastic pike-and-shotte foot and a dozen horse. You all saw 5 of the horse in one of my LPL entries, of course, the rest are taking shape nicely and all of the foot now have most of their basic paint on them. Sunday the 29th we’re running a 1000pt Field of Glory: Renaissance big battle, and I’m breaking one of my long-standing rules by fielding figures that aren’t even anywhere near finished just to get something on the table. At least they’re not straight-up Primered Legions — there are depths to which I will not stoop.
No pictures of my WiP paintjobs, but I’ll take the camera to tomorrow’s big game and try to get some reasonable shots to share here.
The Lead Adventure Forum is, of course, one of the greatest collections of creative wargaming minds I’m aware of. A random sampling of current coolness there that should be more widely known: Chicken Race on the Arumbaya, in which the estimable Hammers plans a pulpish steamboat race with a South American feel and some great-looking boats. Also, Boggler’s converted Improvised Back-of-Beyond Armoured Truck, very nice conversions of diecast toy trucks.
Elsewhere on the web (elseweb?) An Evil Giraffe has done his own versions of my riverbank pieces, and very nice they are too. He used broken cork sheet for his banks, so it has more texture (but also more height) than mine.
Finally, also via LAF but worthy of being mentioned on it’s own, Sarissa Precision have started selling a very, very nice looking line of 28mm laser-cut and -etched urban buildings that are perfect for pulp! Information here on the Sarissa site, and on sale here in their online store. I can’t wait to have some spare money to throw Sarissa’s way, the buildings are a good size (6″x4″ or 8″x6″ footprints and stackable for extra floors) and a fair price with enough detail to be interesting but not too fussy that they’re impractical. Hopefully at some point they offer their windows, doors and other details seperately, or even just the building fronts for those of us comfortable cutting our own side and rear walls.
Photos tomorrow or Monday of the ECW/TYW big-game madness, I promise!
Week 9? There was no Week 9. Well, OK, there was, but it involved me running my ECW Parliamentarian Horse again, and them getting beaten. Again.
However, I still like the models and the paintjob I managed on them, so here they are again for everyone to admire:
For God And Parliament! 28mm English Civil War horse charge down a country lane. As always, click for full size.
In better news, LPL5’s final, ultimate round, Round 10, with the bonus theme of “A Scene from the Movies” is running right now. All sorts of great stuff, including a bonus-worthy set of miniatures from me that I really like, and that other people do too, judging by the voting!
For the 5th Lead Painters League’s 8th Round, something entirely new from me: 28mm English Civil War/Thirty Years War cavalry!
These are Warlord plastic horse, nominally ECW Parliamentarian horse but really destined for our gaming group’s quasi-historical nominally-Thirty Years War games. They’re also the first 28mm cavalry I’ve ever done, the first plastic wargaming figures I’ve ever done, and the first non-20th C historicals I’ve ever done. All at once!
For God And Parliament! 28mm English Civil War horse charge down a country lane. As always, click for full size.
Unfortunately they got beaten soundly by a nicely presented and very characterful set of 28mm Middle Eastern figures.
Still, I’m pleased with how the paintjobs turned out. I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit this Games Workshop article on painting horses with making the horse painting and the resulting horses both more interesting! (I’ve just said something nice about GW, in public… this might just be a sign of the End Times…)
(I also just noticed that this is post number 100 on The Warbard! Now, that includes a lot of old website material brought over as posts, but it’s still been a busy 4-and-a-bit months here! Many more to come! — Brian)
“Whatever happens, we have got/the Lewis gun, and they do not”
— with apologies to Mr. Kipling, of course.
My LPL5 Week 7 entry was more Brigade 28mm British, this time a Lewis gun team and supporting riflemen. The Lewis gun team are very nice sculpts, slightly more detailed than the riflemen from the same range. They got matched up with a rather nice set of pirates, including a great pirate ghost, and defeated, though.
The Lewis Gun, my Round 7 LPL5 entry. As always, click for full size.
