I have managed to sort out the technical difficulties, and the RCW Cards are now released. Check out the RCW Cards Released post for more information.
Tag Archives: RCW
RCW Cards Released for M&B
You saw the preview here a few days ago, and now they’re ready: the first release of my Initiative Cards for playing Russian Civil War conflicts with Through The Mud & The Blood by TooFatLardies.
The PDF file is 7 pages and 4.3Mb, and is RCW Cards (PDF).
The first three pages are the basic cards you’ll probably need for smaller games, the three pages after that have some of the more specialized cards you probably won’t need all the time (and some duplicate cards for larger battles), and finally there’s a sheet of partially blank cards for you to customize for your own purposes.
This set just has the basic cards from the main M&B rules, with none of the specialized cards suggested in any of the supplements. I’ll probably include them in an update, and if you’ve got any other suggestions or things you’d like to see included, please leave a suggestion below!
If anyone is able to help with Russian-language or just Russian-flavoured text, please leave a comment below. I’d be especially interested in alternate text for the Snifter, Storm and Air Support cards.
RCW Cards for Mud & Blood
The TFL rules “Through the Mud & the Blood” use a Game Deck of cards for initiative and game events. The construction of each deck will vary for each game depending on the forces available but there’s a limited total number of cards and many of the same cards will appear in every game.
With that in mind, I’ve started work on a couple of sheets of Russian Civil War cards for the White Russian and Bolshevik sides. Nothing in publishable form yet, but here’s a quick sneak preview for your amusement — and because blogging about this stuff encourages me to actually finish it!
Minimal Maxim Basing
I’ve long been a fan of putting figures on the smallest bases they’ll fit on and that’ll keep them upright, when you’re doing individual bases for skirmish gaming.
Almost all of my 28mm pulp and historical figures are based on Canadian pennies, which are about 18mm across. You can’t beat the cost, they’re big enough for nearly any human-sized figure provided you don’t mind the occasional toe or heel sticking over the edge a few millimetres, and the small size makes it far, far easier to get your figures into scenery, especially buildings and larger vehicles like ships.
But what of guns, and larger-than-human figures?
Pennies and Milliput epoxy putty again there too. Why change what works? I’ve used that method before for monsters (werewolves and Yeti, just for two examples) and decided to stick with it when basing up the Bolshevik Maxim HMG from Copplestone. With the gunner prone behind the weapon, the whole thing would have required a base of about 60mm diameter to get him to fit — see above about wanting minimal footprint bases!
Pictures being worth a thousand words and such, see below for the Bolshevik and White Russian Maxim guns.
The Copplestone Bolshie Maxim (on the left) has the gunner and gun on three pennies in line; the prone loader takes up two and is arranged on one edge of his base so he can reach the gun. On the right, the Brigade Games White Russian Maxim with seated gunner only needs two pennies; the kneeling loader is on one, again arranged to one side so he can reach his gun. Having the loaders and other crew on separate bases also makes casualty marking dead simple, as a bonus.
Incidentally, Copplestone and Brigade Games RCW figures work perfectly together, no size mismatch at all. I have a longer post comparing the two lines in the works — stay tuned.
Russian Civil War Blinds
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.
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.
You can download both letter-sized versions for North America and an A4-sized version for the rest of the world. They’re tiny PDFs, two pages each but under 6Kb in file size.
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.
The Reds Are Coming!
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.
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…)
Pulpish Links of Interest, 13 October 2011
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…)
Need a World War One or Russian Civil War force? For the next 24hrs or so from the time I write this, Brigade Games has a great bulk deal, 7 packs for the price of 6, which works out amazingly cheap per figure. Nice figures, too — check out my White Russian riflemen from earlier this year.
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.
Also via LAF, these amazing fake fur grasslands by Elledan. He’s got more on his blog, and also a small tutorial on his fake fur terrain. I badly want to do more fake fur terrain, done well it looks great!
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!
Testing, testing…
Assuming this works, I can now post to here from my shiny new Android smartphone, in other words from pretty much anywhere, anytime… Be afraid, be very afraid…
Proper wargaming content soon, I promise. Been painting a new batch of Copplestone RCW Bolsheviks, quite pleased with how they’re coming along. Photos soon!
A Few Bolshies!
These guys started out as a Lead Painters League entry, but didn’t get finished in time, and besides, I’d already run too many groups of riflemen in khaki to want to run another in LPL5!
They’re a mix of Brigade and Copplestone Red Russians and Red Partisans; I’m not actually sure which figure is from which company as I bought them in a mixed batch from a fellow Lead Adventure Forum member who lives over in Vancouver. There’s a standard bearer and another dozen riflemen still to be painted, making these the nucleus of a decent little Red Russian skirmish unit.
In website news, you might have noticed the black menu bar along the top here changing a bit. Always a challenge trying to fit everything in, make it findable and sensible without being too complex!
LPL5 Week 6: White Russians!
No, not the (very tasty!) drink, but White Russian Rifles from sometime in the Russian Civil War; the figures are 28mm from Brigade Games and very nice.
My Whites will, by the time you read this, have been fairly comprehensively beaten by an Irish medieval/Dark Ages warband with very, very nicely painted freehand shield designs, and Round Seven will be underway!