Persians v Celts

Yeah, it never happened in recorded history, but one can imagine that if the Achaemenid Empire had continued to expand, the sons of Zarathustra would have faced stranger and stranger enemies. In the spirit of such weird what-ifs, I give you: Persians vs Celts.

Persians! (mine)

Celts! (played by M, another of the Rilesoc boys. Because we got a late start, I didn't really get a chance to admire his painting and I sure am not doing it justice with these crappy iPhone photos.

 We had better scenery this time, with a cuople of quaint little farms to witness the oncoming carnage.

The beginning of this battle was all about failing command rolls. We each had 3 divisions and on the 1st round, we both had 2 commanders fail to command. We justified it by saying that both teams were paralyzed with shock at meeting such strange opponents. ("Why are you brown?" "Why are you BLUE?") In subsequent rounds, my guys did get a move on and this picture shows my center reaching the meager protection offered by a grove of trees.

 Failing command rolls was terrible luck for M, and it plagued him worse than me throughout the fight. His right wing sat pretty still for the first few rounds. My extreme left wing, which faced it, drifted towards the center to help out there, leaving his two warbands far from any meaningful action. Meanwhile, my right wing was having a similar problem getting commands, but M moved his left (cavalry) wing towards me to take out my elephant, meaning that my guys who weren't moving still got to contribute when the battle came to them.

Because of these factors, chiefly M's command rolls, I was able to fight how I wanted to fight: move to within bow range, pepper him with arrows, avoid clashes of hand to hand combat (pretty much how I fought D's Greeks a couple weeks ago -- Persians are an archery-heavy, maneuverable force, which translates to fighting pretty cowardly). I was able to do this a lot as the Celts moved very slowly into battle. But as much as the dice were refusing M a decent command roll, they were kind to him with regard to missile attacks: few of my slingstones, javelins, and arrows hit, and M  made saves against most of the ones that did hit him. Lesson to me: do not count on winning games with arrows.

 Long shot of the table. In the foreground is my lazy right wing, commanded by Bayazeth who wanted to kick back with a bowl of mahjoun rather than do anything productive.

 M is pleased to finally get his warband into contact with my Bactrian hillfolk. A Celtic warband hits extremely hard on the initial clash, but here at the center of the board, I had considerably more supporting units.

 The warband drives the Bactrians out of the trees, but where are its comrades?

 M's unfortunate division which more or less missed the battle.

 My light cavalry performed a beautiful left-to-center sweep, hitting several units in the flanks and even helping to break a warband.

 My Nubians are going to have serious problems with the cavalry and chariots.

That was about as far as we got that day. We started late, played past midnight, and M had worked a full day earlier so we decided to call it a draw. M still had a lot of lead on the table but I had better strategic position. His guys also had more casualties, wounds from bows and slings that hadn't broken his units but would make them a little easier to break later. Inconclusive, but leaning my way, the Celts and Persians both withdrew to ponder this strange new opponent. They would meet again.

I transported my metal based Persians in this wooden box with magnetic strips on the bottom and side walls.

Coming soon: the most beautiful, newly painted Persian cavalry you can imagine.

Fun with Persians

It's been a good week for me. I've met a new group of guys in my city (Richmond, VA) who play historical wargames and when I met them, one of them noted that he had a Greek hoplite army. I have a hoplite army too, as you know if you read this blog. But you may know that I also have a Persian army (it's been sitting around for a year), and Persians vs hoplites sounded like a better battle than hoplites v hoplites, although there's plenty of historical precedent for that and I'm sure we'll play one of those soon.

So, Persians in two weeks, eh? I strategically ordered some figs from Sergeant Major miniatures to beef up the front line. They would go well with the Indians and Assyrians I picked up in the last couple of months.



An Achaemenid Persian army would have had a wide variety of ethnicities,, each in his native dress and bearing the weapons of his culture. To me, that gives me license to sweep together any cool looking Middle Eastern figs that I want, even these anachronistic Indians (actually sold as rebels from the British Imperial era). In my army they became the Indian fanatics, a real workhorse of a unit. Note the difference in paint job quality between the guys in the yellow shorts and the guy in the white. That's my improvement over a year and a half. Note also the purple skin undertones. Crazy but it works for me.



Assyrian slingers, may have already posted these blokes. Hilariously, I almost lost three of these guys in my freezer. I had put them in there to make the glue on their previous bases brittle.  Their tunics are plainer than they should be, but maybe as lowly slingers, they wouldn't have had access to nice patterned cloth. But if that were the case, wouldn't their tunics just be burlap sacks? It's best not to think too much about these things.


But I did get some satisfactory patterning on their companions, the Assyrian bow & swordsmen.
And if you like patterns, how do you like...

 Kablam! How's a unit of Nubians with leopard AND zebra for you? I had these guys sitting around unpainted forever with no real plan of how to use them. I do wish I had one more; supposed to be 8 in this unit.

This unit of Egyptian Sherden is the best looking of the units from the old Persian army. 

And here are some new guys, sparabara from Sergeant Major miniatures. I love the design of these guys but Sgt Major has some messy castings and I had to cut and clip and drill for a while before these guys were ready to take paint or even hold their own spears. 

Eeee do you see these guys wearing animal ears on their hats? Freaking adorable! I had to have these guys; they were sold as fantasy types but I'm fielding them as Bactrian hill tribesmen because who the fuck knows what a Bactrian hill tribesman looks like? They're also Sergeant Major.

The big fucking news here is that ALL THESE UNITS ARE MAGNETIZED. Every infantryman in the Persian army now sits on a steel square which itself sits with seven of its brethren on a magnetic base. Major trouble saver with regard to transport, setup, and movement during the game.

And now the Immortals! Those nice solid shields make them look like they could actually stand up to a phalanx of hoplites for five minutes. In my mind, Immortals would wear some kind of armor -- I'd love to find a unit of Middle Easterners in scale armor. But even in these robes they were the best immortals I could find. Three units with no eyeballs. I almost always paint eyeballs :/ but that may not be the best way to get a lot of guys ready quickly. 

Wanted to give you a shot from a higher angle to minimize shield glare. Blue/white/green/copper might seem a little garish to modern fashionistas but Persians liked bright & tacky and the boldness of these colors made my homeboys a pleasure to look at from above on the battlefield. 

And now, to the battlefield.

 Persians.

 Greeks. My opponent block painted his army, brushed it with "dip" (shading compound), and used transfers for his shield devices. I'm impressed by how nice he got them looking with apparently minimal effort. They're not gorgeous if you pick one individual model up and scrutinize it but in their blocks from a gaming distance they looked great. I think D might have to teach me something about, what do they call it, block painting? assembly line painting? On the other hand, I may love painting the individual pieces too much.

 Persians on the move. Note Xerxes' blinged out chariot and base.

 Ready to clash around the ankles of this bronze statue. I cannot tell you how many guys walked by the room where we were playing and asked whether the bronze statue was being used as a unit in this game. He wasn't. Just an obstacle.

 First clash! My Indian fanatics, supported by Nubians, smash into D's peltasts. The guys on the green tray aren't hoplites; they're missile troops, and what you see me doing in this picture is going to be more or less what I do for the first half of the game: avoid contact with the super-tough hoplite phalanx and take out all his ranged weapons and cavalry.

 Interestingly, we got into a situation where both of us had to retreat our front-line fighters. This is good for me; I wanted to minimize contact with infantry blocks. A lot of my front line fighters (sparabara and immortals) are also archers; his were not so obviously he wanted to be in melee as much as possible.

 My chariots take out another of D's vulnerable missile platoons.

 So this is what I Didn't want to happen: two phalanxes hitting my fanatics. The fanatics held out longer than they should have (thanks to the trait "fanatic" in Hail Caesar, the system we played), but perished soon after this.

 His light cavalry failed to take out a unit of takabara before my chariots turned and chewed him up.

 On my right flank I was kicking ass. That huge herd of cavalry has swung around behind his whole army.

 Still struggling with the melee in the center of the table, I'm just trying to dump as many troops as I can in there, elephant and all.

 My immortals sneak in and strike the phalanx in the flank!

My front line after the hoplites chewed up my sparabara. Those Nubians wouldn't have lasted long but at this point D threw in the towel. He had lost all his cavalry and ranged troops, and even those super-tough hoplites had a lot of casualties. He was winning the center at great cost but had been decimated on one wing.

I ended up winning this one, but I can't hold anything over D. We didn't count points for these armies and I brought a lot more toys to the game. We reasoned that hoplites were better and costlier units than any of the infantry I was fielding - but we didn't think too hard about an elephant, some chariots, and some medium cavalry that I brought, and so I'm pretty sure I had an army that was both numerically larger and built off more points than his. To add to this mismatch, the dice just liked me better all night. D did make mistakes, playing too aggressively with his ranged troops and horses instead of guarding them, mostly -- but I made mistakes too, mistakes like trying to charge infantry into cavalry (never try this in Hail Caesar) and at one point plumb forgetting to use any ranged attacks, just skipped right over that phase. Next time we'll have to make sure that our armies are equal points-wise, or play a scenario that gives a tactical advantage to the poorer army. 

Hail Caesar is a great, straightforward war game,  I like my new friends in the rilesoc crew and I can't wait to  battle some more.

Making mud huts with dryer lint

Are you prepared to follow me into crafting madness? Be certain, for in this blog post I will detail a formula so strange that it will violate everything you hold sacred and leave you gaping at the heartless black void with no illusions of God or logic to comfort you.

Well, it might not be that difficult to grasp, but it's certainly outside the proverbial box.

So, dryer lint, right? I have always wanted to find an industrial use for dryer lint. It's cotton -- a valuable commodity. It built the South! And now we're throwing it away? No, sir. Not in my domain.

 Figure 1 is a clump of dryer lint sitting in a plastic bowl.

 Figure 2 is a blurry picture of me pouring a glue-water solution into the bowl of lint.

 This is dryer lint -- not just cotton fluff, but also human and cat hair -- sitting in a pool of glue and water. Hey, anybody hungry?

 Glob by glob, I picked the waterlogged lint out of the solution and stuck it all over this half a box, a box that cough medicine came in. Just squish it on there. There's no need to make it even because what you're going for is a wattle-and-daub look.

 Here are two huts-in-progress, lint smooshed into place. I left space for doors.

 Primed white, doorways painted black, roof made of gluing sticks side by side.

 Doors by same method. Miniatures for scale. Don't think you're taking down a Greek with slingstones, kids.

Is anything ever done? I'm pretty happy with what I'm seeing here. I initially wanted to give it a tan wash, and I probably still should because even though the white looks good, rain or moss or blowing dirt would give it at least a little color in any environment. Right? I also belatedly wonder -- do mud huts have windows? I don't think so. I think if you live in a mud hut and you want some sun, you walk the hell outside.

I'm thinking about sticking these huts on a terrain piece, maybe with grass, trees, and a pen with a goat, maybe a shepherd, maybe a shepherd's wife. It'll be quaint.

Building terrain: broken green hill

I've made a few fun terrain features before, but nothing that my little friends can really climb on and fight over, so I got it into my head to make a hill. Nothing fancy here, but I'm happy with the results so I'll share my process with you, Internet.

I envisioned a hill with several terraces or tiers so that soldiers could inhabit it at different levels. Units the size of my 40-man phalanx would never be able to use this, unfortunately, but smaller units could. So I cut up and stacked some regular styrofoam.

I needed some brown paint -- a lot of people do green on green for hills, but I was going for a look with plenty of exposed dirt. A less lazy person would have gone out and bought some brown paint, but I noticed that there was some wood stain in my basement, so I figured I'd try that.

And this was the result. Looks like an ill-made chocolate cake and took a long time to dry. Regular acrylic paint probably would have been better.

But, once dried, it was a very serviceable brown lump.I had a layer of glue-water solution on the flat areas before I started sprinkling flock and afterwards I went back over the greenery dripping glue solution on any place that seemed to need a little more stick.  I have a bag of light green foliage material that is held together by tiny strings -- if you want loose flock, you have to stretch the clumps between your fingers until the green falls loose. However, this rain of green fluff gave me really nice coverage -- the flock fell not just onto the big flat areas I was planning to flock, but also into cracks and niches.  This reminds me of how plants grow even in inconvenient areas such as rocky slopes.

Here we are more or less finished. There are 4 tiers of height on which minis can stand, including a "king of the mountain" highest position that can only hold 1. I glued on a few fake plaster rocks to break up the green, but in the camera flash their whiteness is just too jarring, so I'm going to give them a light brown wash. Think I need some trees?

Assyrian Slingers

As much as I love my Greeks, I love my Persian army too. Initially made as "something for the Greeks to beat up on", I found it titillating to build it with a lot less regard for historical accuracy than I did my Greek army. While I would never dream of including a Roman or Byzantine among my Greeks (I do have a few Trojans), for my Persian army I decided, since Cyrus's reach was so expansive, that I could include any miniature that suggested an origin of the Middle East, South Asia, or Africa. So I have Zulus (with their distinctive shields replaced so I can call them Nubians or Kushites), medieval Saracens, turbaned Indians originally meant for use in the colonial era, all in my Persian army. If I knew any wargamers who were particularly expert in the satrapies of the Achmaenid dynasty, they'd probably hit the ceiling, but since I don't know any, i have a highly multicultural Persian army. Maybe I'll show it to you one day; a lot of those guys are probably due for a touch-up since I improved my Greeks recently.

For today, eight new Assyrian slingers join the Persian army. I'm pretty sure this lot is historically accurate for Persian levies; the Persians did hold Assyria, although these guys may be sculpted for the Biblical era rather than the era of Xerxes' wars with Greece.

Feeling pretty good about these guys; they're Foundry, which has never done me wrong. Look at those action poses on the guys who have just released their stones. Teh drama! My only concern is that real life Assyrians (and Persians) liked to wear patterned clothing and I'm afraid to add patterns for fear of screwing up the shadows I have achieved on their tunics. What do you think, gentle readers? Do these guys need some fabric patterns added? Any tips on putting patterns AND shadows on a garment without ending up with a smudge?

28mm girl on girl action

When I paint women, I find it useful to fall in love with them. What would they be like if they were life sized and alive, or if I were 28mm scale and metal? What would our relationship be like? Our lovemaking, would it be playful? Soulful? Slippery? This trio was part of the Celtos line, I forget what manufacturer makes them.  They're not necessarily my favorite line of figs because their tendency is to be a little cartoonish, with swords as broad as ironing boards, and features like the gigantic hair of their barbarian queen.

 I'd like you to hum "barbarian queen" to the tune of Billy Ocean's "Caribbean Queen" while you read this post. If you can't remember the tune, here's a link.

While not my favorite line, Celtos did make a pack that was hard for me to resist buying (off eBay): Two warrior-maidens carry their queen on a big shield. These girls are easy to love. A Vallejoish design philosophy informs the sculpts. The servility of the maidens is balanced by the dominance of their queen. The queen has a breastplate and the servants each have a tit-napkin covering their chests, and nobody is wearing pants, yet, in a wonderfully Celtic dichotomy, everybody has cold weather boots (a contrast which I have intensified by putting white fur on the boots). Big tits and big hair call to me, a child of the 80s, with the dulcet tones of a Motley Crue power ballad -- or the soundtrack to Heavy Metal.

 I didn't do anything too innovative here. I did take my first attempt at what the mini painter's Internet calls "Bette Davis eyes" . Here's the process:
1) Paint eyes early, whites first, pupils second.
2) surround the eyes with a ring of a very dark flesh color (here I've used black, which looks okay if anachronistically mascara-like on these girls, but won't be my preference for future Bette Davis eyes).
3) paint the face in as your normally would, making sure you leave a that dark ring around the eye area. A dark circle around eyes makes them pop, as anyone who wears makeup would know, but I'm just finding out.

Here Bette Davis eyes were difficult  because all of these ladies had canopy-bangs that made it tough to get precise brush strokes in there.

You'll note that the darkest areas on these women's skin are reddish. The shadow/basecoat on a Mediterranean are olive, the shadows on a Persian's skin are brown, and on an Indian they're purple. In doing this, I realize that I am painting my skin tones partially realistic, partially expressionistic.

 Hair is solid color, darker wash, final drybrush with a slightly lighter than original version of the first color. Metal areas got light base, dark wash, highlight with the same or lighter light base.

Regrettably, these saucy wenches don't have anything to do with any game I play or any army I field. They were just too fine not to paint. Stayed up til 5 in the morning with these wenches, but this was all done in a single day! The toughest decision was which hair color went where. My personal fondness for dark hair made me want to put the brunette on top, but in the end, red hair is so much more dramatic that there really was no argument.