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.
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.
The Russian Civil War figures I’ve been painting had their first outing Saturday evening, as Corey and I lined them up and tried out Through the Mud & the Blood out for the first time.
Whites at the wall, Reds in the field
The evening was only a partial success, but I have to say it wasn’t the fault of the rules, it was our fault as players! We’ve been playing .45 Adventure and other pulp rules the last couple of years, which are fairly low-lethality and overall fairly forgiving when it comes to morale, fully automatic weapons and that sort of thing. Mud & Blood is… not.
As mentioned in the previous post, we used Scenario One, “The Platoon Attacking a Strongpoint” as the basis for our game, with Reds attacking instead of British and Whites defending instead of Germans. Both games, the Reds got clobbered. I think the closest a Bolshevik trooper got to the White trench was about 14 inches or so, and that was for all of a couple minutes until the White Maxim HMG unjammed and blew the Reds away.
Let’s just say that under the M&B rules, a unit reduced to 5 troopers from 9 and carrying 12 Shock Points is not going to be useful for quite a while, if ever…
Whites man the wall
We actually played the same setup twice in one evening, switching sides for the second game. Two games in about four hours, with stoppages to reread the rules, rebeer the participants, mutually mull over tactical choices, swear at the dice and such is very respectable. The card-driven activation keeps things moving at a good clip, even when you’re brand new to the rules.
Basically, we spent the evening drinking beer and recapitulating, in 28mm, the mistakes and lessons of the first years of the Great War. Do not charge machine guns. For Dog’s sake, have something resembling a tactical plan. “Charge that emplacement!” is not, in fact, an actual viable tactical plan. Pitting ordinary riflemen against an entrenched machinegun is more than slightly unfair to the riflemen. Things like that.
We want to try it all again, with slightly different forces as I finish painting more Russians for both sides. Look for more mud and more blood here in the future!
Quiet around here lately, primarily because all of my hobby time has been taken up painting White Russians for this evening’s first outing of Russian Civil War-flavoured Through the Mud & the Blood.
We’re using the first scenario from the TFL scenario book Stout Hearts & Iron Troopers, “The Platoon Attacking a Strongpoint”, with the defending Germans swapped out for Whites and the attacking British swapped for Reds. The British platoon in the scenario has all the Lewis guns, dedicated bombers and rifle grenades of a fully-evolved late WW1 Western Front British unit, all of which the Reds lack, so the Reds might get a fifth rifle section to make up the lack of specialized firepower.
Off to pack figures and head for the game, report here tomorrow, hopefully with photos if any of them turn out!
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.
A couple of cards for both sides for RCW-flavoured Mud & Blood gaming.
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!
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.
Minimal Maxim bases – pennies and Milliput.
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.
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!
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!
