Category Archives: Inspiration

Posts that potentially inspire gaming, terrain or other projects. Period photos or graphics, amazing gaming creativity elsewhere, and such.

Historicals, Inspiration, Tutorials

Transporting the SPAD

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Almost all of my gaming is done away from home, at other houses, up at the university on the weekend (our local miniatures group takes over a classroom up there every Sunday) and at conventions. So everything has to be portable or it’s useless to me. Given the relative fragility of the White Russian SPAD, especially that damned upper wing, I needed a solid way to protect it in transit.

Some scrap cardboard, a dip into my stockpile of cheap upholstery foam (normally used for lining figure cases) and some work with razor knife and hot glue gun, and I had the SPAD Caddy:

spad_caddy
A SPAD Caddy, for secure transport of my White Russian SPAD to games. Click for slightly larger version.

The base is a square of scrap cardboard, then two layers of half-inch foam with a cutout to accommodate the body and wings of the plane, and a deeper square cutout (through both layers of foam) at the front for the wheels and propeller. More scrap foam protects the tail and wingtips, and the two bits of foam forward of the tail hold the whole thing securely. The extra strip of cardboard across the front helps protect the propeller and landing gear as well as provide a convenient spot for a label.

I used the SPAD Caddy to get the SPAD and the rest of my Russian scenery and figures to Trumpeter Salute at the end of March, and it worked exactly as planned. There’s even room in my Russian Civil War scenery box (just!) for a similar caddy for the Nieuport I plan on doing for the Reds.

Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Red Airships!

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I am, as mentioned in the last post, neck-deep in prep for my Russian Civil War game less than a week away at Trumpeter Salute 2012. Nevertheless, something near and dear to the very core of the Warbard’s raison d’etre needs to be linked to…

Via the excellent Dieselpunk, who in turn got it from kitchener.lord’s spectacular Flickr stream, this Red Airships photomontage poster:

Nikolai Dolgorukov. Soviet Airships. 1932

I’ve long been a fan of pre-WW2 Russian design; there were some very talented people doing great stuff even in terrible conditions.

Anyway, back to final drafts of initiative cards, then painting the last 16 White Russian infantry for the game!

Historicals, Inspiration, Pulp

Spectacular Zeppelin Model

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Bit of a quiet week here on the Warbard. I’ve been burning up all my available hobby time painting Russian Civil War figures. There’s two dozen Cossack infantry finished, another three dozen regular White riflemen nearly finished, twenty Red infantry in progress, and a new unit of ten Red sailors well underway. Yes, if you total that up, it’s nearly 100 figures, all 28mm. I’ve been a busy chap. There’s six or eight half-written articles in the Drafts queue here on the Warbard, but I haven’t touched any of them in days!

Nevertheless, a short Saturday evening diversion from the painting table… we are well known to love zeppelins here. We have to bow down to the gentleman featured in this Popular Science article, though. (via Bayou Renaissance Man, who has more photos)

Even better? By my quick admittedly rough calculations, a 20ft-long model of the USS Macon is roughly 1:56th scale, ie 28mm… the gentleman in California has created a wargaming model, possibly without knowing it!

Tomorrow we game the Russian Civil War again using the Mud & Blood rules, photos and a game report tomorrow evening!

Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Zeppelins From Foam

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This has minimal bearing on the 28mm pulp gaming we usually do that might involve a zeppelin, but it’s such a cool and masterful technique I have to share: Creating Zeppelin bodies with foam insulation.

Basically, take long billets of foam, run a hot wire knife across a profile, and rotate the billet to create that distinctive “faceted” look of a Zepp body. Very cool.

Of course, I once calculated a 1/56 (28mm) scale of Graf Zeppelin would be about 19 feet long (nearly six metres!), so doing the gondola and a bit of the body in 28mm is (marginally!) saner. Only marginally, mind you. The small-scale foam zepps in the first link are a lot smaller and saner; they’re still about 3ft long, though.

If you are minded to do some zeppelin construction, in whatever scale, you could do worse than following the useful links from this Propnomicon posting called “Zeppelin Goldmine“, which has links to high-quality scans of a book of speculative 1920s designs for a Graf Zepp-sized trans-Atlantic zeppelin. The gondolas of those look fairly buildable as 28mm skirmish terrain, actually. One of these days…

Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Autogyros, Pulptastic Cars and Such

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Via the excellent x planes tumbblog, this rare cabin-equipped autogyro, the Pitcairn PA-19:

The PA-19 Autogyro, early 1930s. Most autogyros were open cockpit, so this cabin-class 'gyro is a rarity.

… and via the equally excellent Dieselpunk, this awesomely pulpy 1938 one-off Hispano Suiza Dubonnet Xenia 1.

1938 Hispano Suiza Dubonnet Xenia 1

(Dieselpunk had in turn snagged it from kitchener.lord’s Flickr stream – click the image above to go there, lots more great period images there!)

A few things to brighten your Sunday!

Historicals, Inspiration, Terrain

The Next Building Project

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I don’t usually like to talk about plans and ideas before there’s at least some progress to show off, but while I was away over the New Year I had time to do some quick sketching and thinking about a building that would be at the centre of any Russian village or hamlet during the Russian Civil War, and which really is iconic when you want to remind players the game is, in fact, set in Russia.

notebook_jan2011
Some pages from my notebook – possible plans for a feature building for my RCW table!

Google Image Search is really indispensable when looking for prototypes and inspiration, although it’s very easy to get a building that’s just too big for the table. The church at top left would have been over 8″ long and 4 wide, far too big for a scenery piece that is basically just a Line of Sight blocker. The design shrank from there (top right page) then grew slightly on the bottom page and I’m fairly confident the finished result will be something like the two-part double-dome design on those pages, with a footprint roughly 5″x3″ and an overall height somewhere around 6″.

I saved this image from the web but forgot to write down where I found it or any details of the actual building, but it’s become my main reference. I also can’t currently find this picture again via GIS…anyway, it’s a perfect-sized building for my purposes and should help me get a lot of details right.

rus_church
Russian Church found via Google Image Search, except I didn’t save any info on where I found the image… sorry.
Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Templates for Cards

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Because I happen to have a stockpile of them around the place, several years ago I started using pre-punched Avery business card sheets as gaming cards – Encounter Cards and vehicle cards in .45 Adventure, stats sheets for minor characters, more recently the Russian Civil War initiative cards for Mud & Blood. Even if you haven’t got pre-punched sheets around, the 2×3.5″ size is easy to use and handle printed onto ordinary cardstock and cut out.

There is of course a Microsoft Word template available right off Avery’s own website but I created my own templates from scratch in Inkscape, first because Word is a lousy program for actual graphical work, and secondly because the Avery templates are set up with vertical (portrait) orientation of the sheets, while for most gaming cards having a landscape setup makes more sense.

Accordingly, I kicked Inkscape to life, took some measurements from the Avery sheets and from their template and created a new template with the cards set up on a landscape (horizontal) sheet, which makes laying the cards out like small playing cards much easier.

I’ve uploaded three versions for people to use: a PDF version, a PNG version (probably the most generally useful) and finally, for those of you who have taken up Inkscape, an SVG version, which is in a ZIP file as WordPress doesn’t like SVG,

If you’re not sure which version to use, grab the PNG version, any modern graphics program should read PNG. Most should also be able to import PDF, which might get you a more accurate template.

CC0 To the extent possible under law, Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Card Template Blanks (various file formats). This work is published from: Canada.

The little grey block basically means that whoever downloads these can do whatever they like with them, including use them in commercial products. Go nuts. And if you’re from that rather large part of the word that doesn’t use Letter-size paper, sorry, but you’re going to have to come up with your own templates!

Historicals, Inspiration

RCW Cards & Blinds In The Flesh

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Finally got around to printing and cutting out a full set of the Russian Civil War Mud & Blood cards I created a few weeks ago, as well as the earlier Blinds.

Here’s the full set spread over my painting desk.

rcw_cards
They actually exist! Printed versions of the cards and blinds I’ve created for playing Russian Civil War games with Through The Mud & The Blood.

You can, of course, find the PDFs for the cards and the blinds in earlier posts here at The Warbard, so you can print your own.

Corey and I will be doing our second session of RCW M&B today (Sunday) at our regular games club meeting up at the local university. Game reports and possibly photos here, as usual.

Inspiration, Links, Misc

Links of Interest, 9th Dec 2011

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If you haven’t already read Sidney Roundwood’s excellent 29 Ways to (try to) Stay Creative: A Wargamer’s List yet, you really do need to. The accompanying short video is not wargaming specific, but still has good advice. Do you know where your notebook is?

Incidentally, there’s a great collection of links to blogs, podcasts and other inspiration in that post of Sidney’s. Among other things, it’s introduced me to Porky’s Expanse, an entertainingly wide-ranging blog nominally centred on gaming, and suggested a bunch of podcasts I’m going to have to try out. I prefer music while painting, usually, but podcasts are perfect for figure prepping and basing sessions, I’ve found, and with more RCW Russians in the pipeline I’ve have a couple of long prep sessions coming up!

The always-excellent Make Magazine website now as a Tabletop Wargaming section. Not a lot there now, but this could become a very interesting repository for the hobby and also a source of some publicity, as Make has a very broad readership.

Seen anything interesting lately?