Posts that potentially inspire gaming, terrain or other projects. Period photos or graphics, amazing gaming creativity elsewhere, and such.
The Atlantic magazine is running a ten-part World War One in Photos series with some very interesting images I’ve not seen before. They’re doing a post every Sunday for ten weeks.
The most recent post, WW1 in Photos: Technology has some great photos of obvious interest to wargamers, although the whole series so far is very high quality and has a great selection of photos.
As usual, avoid the comments, there’s far too much stupidity and pointless arguing…
Not a roleplaying book, although it sounds like it, and an RPG set in Danzig could be pretty cool, actually, now that I think about it, but the Free City Sourcebook is just-launched site collecting primary source material on that very odd interwar phenomenon, the Free City of Danzig.
Created by the various post-war treaties and governed by League of Nations mandate, the basic theory behind the Free City of Danzig (which is now the Polish city of Gdansk, and the site where the first shots of World War Two were fired) was that because neither Germany nor Poland would let the other rule this important port city on the Baltic, neither of them would. Like most compromises this pleased neither side at all and was constantly undercut by both the German and Polish governments (and by the general weakness of the League of Nations), but the basic theory had some sense behind it.
I haven’t looked at the Free City Sourcebook in massive detail, but there’s a good basic timeline and it looks like an increasing number of links to primary sources, some through things like Google News, some on other third party sites and a number hosted right on the Sourcebook’s own site. It’s always nice to find more people who don’t treat the Interwar Period as some oddball interruption to the two World Wars but as a proper, strange and fascinating historical period in it’s own right. I’ll be following the Sourcebook’s progress with great interest!
(hat tip to the always-fascinating Metafilter, which had a short article on the Free City Sourcebook a few days ago.)
Back in late January, two of the gamers of our group put together a 28mm Napoleonic “Retreat from Moscow” game that was a blast – everyone had a small group of French officers and soldiers, all the main officers had personal side missions or special motivations they could do for extra VP, and the GM ran all the Russian forces.
Pretty much every Frenchman died by the end of the game, mostly run down by the pursuing Russian light horse, often after being distracted by their side mission or after attempting clever things like cutting through the forest instead of just following the road. Oh, and at least one was bashed over the head by an angry Russian peasant!
I contributed my nominally-Russian Civil War buildings to the game; the rest of the figures are from the collections of the two guys who ran it, and the base rules were GW’s out of print Legends of the Old West (LotOW) which are a good, flexible, sane set of blackpowder skirmish/light RPG rules that work well with small parties of figures.
The four photos I took are all up on Flickr; click on any of these photos to see the full-size version over there.
Here’s a nice Christmas present for those of us interested in the Russian Civil War, the Great War and related events: siberianexpedition.ca is a huge digital archive of photographs and other material related to the little-known Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, specifically the 4200 Canadian troops sent to Vladivostok after the RCW kicked off.
There’s over 2000 photographs (although some are duplicates) and it’s all fully searchable in English, French and Russian. Some of the photos are actually modern photos from Siberia of some of the locations depicted in the original 1918/1919 images, which is kind of cool. There’s also a brief history of how exactly a bunch of Canadians who’d volunteered to fight in Europe wound up in Vladivostok and Siberia, and some learning materials for teachers at different levels.
This isn’t a completely new site (started in 2012, it looks like) so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops — it looks like they’re trying to do some map-based stuff and a few other developments. Further bonus for me, there’s a local angle here as most of the Canadian Siberian expedition left by ship from Victoria, and it’s our local University of Victoria who are behind this site.
I’ll be mining the photos and other materials on here for inspiration for RCW scenery and such for a long while!
In the meantime, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and such to all readers!
After I was done taking photos of my Lead Painters League Round Five entry, I figured the setup I use might be of interest to others. So here’s a photo of the highly sophisticated setup I used for this week’s Russian Civil War-based entry!
Some leftover 3mm MDF balanced across a couple of junk chairs a roommate pulled out of the basement for some reason, on a porch that badly needs repainting! My little tabletop tripod at lower left is balanced on top of one of the banker’s boxes I used to store and transport scenery. The ground is a square of craft felt I sprayed with brown ink a few years ago; the colour backdrop is one of the ones I have available here on the Warbard for anyone to print.
The building is of course my scratch-built Russian onion-domed church; the wagon, hedge and tree should all be familiar to regular readers. The Russian Orthodox cemetery is the most recent addition, with it’s laser-cut crosses.
Lighting was provided by that convenient nearby fusion reaction (eight and a half light-minutes away is nearby by cosmic standards…) and agreeable meteorology.
A home-made lightbox has been on my to-do list for… about a decade now. When the weather allows, an outdoor setup works nearly as well.
There are a number of great photo-taking tutorials aimed at wargamers out there; check Google or YouTube for more details. One of these days I should do a links post to my favourites!
First “Links of Interest” miscellaneous post for 2013, so it’s a long one!
The fantastic blog Wargaming with Silver Whistle is, like I was recently, also making fields. His are spectacular, and might inspire me to re-visit the subject again in the near future! He’s got fields and allotments, large wheatfields, and finally some haystacks, all lavishly illustrated.
TutoFig.com is a multilingual European website that aggregates links to all sorts of tutorials – figure painting, sculpting, terrain, and all sorts of other stuff. Lots of high-quality links there, and I’m flattered they linked to my hot-glue fields tutorial, which is how I discovered them in turn.
Staying with the scenery theme, The DM’s Craft Youtube channel has lots of short terrain videos, focusing on the quick-and-cheap (but effective!) end of terrain making, and especially the many, many uses to which one can put a hot glue gun!
Moving on to the Russian Civil War and World War One, the Photo Palace blog, WW1 & RCW Photos Found is a post about an amazing collection of photos by an American who was working with the YMCA in both France and Russia during World War One, and who then escaped the Russian Revolution via Siberia and China – and he took photos the whole way, as well as buying photo postcards and such as he travelled. There’s only a few photos from the collection up online right now, which is unfortunate, but they’re really neat, atmospheric photos! The same blog also has French WW1 Photos Found Still in Camera, but again, too few of the actual photos posted online so far!
The US Army’s famous West Point Military Academy has, unsurprisingly, a first-rate History Department, who have put online their Atlas of Military History. There’s no maps of the Russian Civil War, despite American forces being involved both in Northern Russian and Siberia as part of Allied Intervention forces, but there are great clear maps of World War One on the Western Front, as well as maps for nearly every other war the Yanks have been involved in.
Looking for information on Russian armoured cars I found PDF archives of the “Armoured Car Journal” from the early/mid 1990s, with several interesting World War One articles, although nothing specifically on the Russian Civil War.
Finally, if you’re doing up artwork, cards or other handouts for gaming, another source of nice textures and background images is always useful, so here’s some Free (CC-BY Licensed) textures collected on Flickr – hat tip to Sidney Roundwood for the link.
The website Hipkiss’ Scans of Old Maps has the 1920 London Geographical Institute’s The People’s Atlas scanned as fairly high quality images.
It covers the whole world, but with larger and more detailed maps for the British Empire/Commonwealth and Europe. It also includes details on transport infrastructure and routes, travel times and similar which might be of interest for those planning a tabletop game campaign or RPG in the interwar era, and a number of maps of World War One (the Great War) and it’s aftermath.
The same site has Bartholomews Pocket Atlas and Guide to London from 1922 available, and a huge variety of other stuff on his Maps page.
Even better, the site owner points out that all his maps are from before 1923, therefore as far as he can tell, they’re public domain (out of copyright, that is) so there are no restrictions on what we can do with them.
Well worth looking at; I’ll probably get the files at work and print a few out too!
The often-fascinating website BibliOdyssey has just posted a glorious selection of World War One posters from the US, UK, France, Greece and elsewhere.
I’m hard-pressed to pick a favourite, but purely for graphical awesomeness and a slightly surreal message, it might be this American poster telling people to fund a hungry machine gun.
BibliOdyssey is also over on Flickr, too.
“Aviatrix” is the feminine version of “aviator”, but of course you knew that already. This fabulous pair is courtesy Kemon’s Flickr stream, which has a huge array of mostly aviation-related stuff, a lot of it from the interwar pulp era!
Dorothy Sebastian (Wikipedia link) was apparently an early Hollywood actress.
Joan Blondell (Wikipedia again) was also a Hollywood actress, active from the 30s right through to post-WW2.
Need inspiration for a pulp-era glamorous female aviator? Here you go!
Rummaging through other people’s blogs (as one does) I tripped over this nice two-part series on Eastern Front gates: Part One, Part Two from August 2012 on Miniatures & Terrain.
These gates with the tiny shingle roofs over them seem fairly common in Russia & parts of Eastern Europe, and I’ve been meaning to make one as part of a larger churchyard for my Russian onion-domed church.
