Lohwand Updated

Lohwand Map

(updated June 28, 2020 - twice!)

I realized almost immediately that the map I posted yesterday was not the most current, and I've just been making changes again, so here is the latest version of Lohwand.

Latest update at 20:26 today. 

My Lohwand Campaign Map: Created in PowerPoint

Lohwand

A friend used to always say that PowerPoint was "the poor man's graphic program" and he was right! This is a map of Lohwand, or at least its current iteration. I've decided to give 54mm Toy Soldiers a go, and have decided to do something akin to Tony Bath's Hyboria campaign from way-back-when.

As you can see by glancing at the place names, I've shamelessly stolen from a great many sources, be they Fantasy and Sci/Fi writers or role-playing games: Tolkien's "Middle Earth", MAR Barker's "Tekumel", Burrough's "John Carter of Mars", the "World of Greyhawk", Greg Stafford's "Glorantha", Michael Moorcock's Elric, Corum and Hawkmoon sagas, plus others. Some are from authors whose names I forget, and a few are even my own invention.

What is All Mine is the map, which as you can see, looks vaguely like Europe and the Mediterranean, only I didn't want to bother with a few thousand miles of Asia so I cut right through to the Far East. Its got "goodies" and "baddies", Law and Chaos, major protagonists and minor.

The map is made in PowerPoint. I sized the page to be 34" tall by 54" wide to give me plenty of space and went to work with the freehand drawing tool. I built it up in bits that are layered over one another. Using the fill tool I worked out a colour palette to show the major terrain types: generic open country, deserts, marshes, plains/steppes, dense forests or jungle, hills, high mountains, lakes, rivers and sea, plus active volcanoes.

I used the draw order tools to put things on top or in back as needed. The main background is a full sized rectangle set to be the very back/bottom of everything else. I added the red border to allow me to hide rough edges and give me something to align the edge bits against. Using edit shapes and selecting the edit points I could alter the freehand shapes as I needed, zooming in to 100% to make the task easier. Then checking how things looked by playing a slideshow. And not forgetting to Save Often. Nor the undo button, especially if I accidentally moved something. A proper graphics program would have a way to "lock" items in place, and maybe PowerPoint does, but I haven't figured it out yet.

This is still a work in progress, but I think the next step is to start detailing various areas. Maybe make a copy of the slide and focus on one area, deleting the rest and enlarging it to the size of the whole slide. Or perhaps take a screen cap of an area and use it as a background to layer more detailed information on top of.

If I tell you that the Tharkallan Empire is some sort of Dark Fantasy Roman Empire then there are enough clues on the map to work out most of the other protagonists. They "Celts", "Germans", "Greeks", "Persians", etc. Not everything is straight forward, of course, and I'm playing somewhat loose with timelines and "tech levels". I've always had an idea to play a campaign with the same areas and/or countries through all the various eras of history. Of course the details of the regions change but broadly speaking the landscape would remain roughly the same. So for this project I am thinking four or five  "Ages" - apologies to Tolkien!

First Age - The Age of Magic (with early gunpowder counting as "magic");
Second Age - The Age of Gunpowder (Pike & Shot);
Third Age - The Age of Reason (Horse & Musket);
Fourth Age - The Age of Invention (19th Century);
Fifth Age - The Age of Destruction (early 20th Century).
Sixth Age - The Age of Science (Sci/fi);
Seventh Age - The Age of Apocalypse (Mad Max or similar).

OK, that's Seven "Ages", but really they are all theoretical seeing as I am at the very start of number one.

For rules, I am thinking something with smallish unit sizes, so Studio Tomahawk's "Saga: Age of Magic", or Warlord Games' "Warlords of Erewhon", or one of the "Lion/Dragon Rampant" or "Pikeman's Lament" series of rules from Osprey. Or any of a dozen other less well known options. Its likely to be a solo affair, so I might cobble together my own set of rules as well. I need to look at my various Peter Pig rules again; they have a lot of good ideas in those rules, regardless of era!

At the moment, however, I'm more-or-less settled on "Saga: Age of Magic" and have been planning my factions based on those rules for fighting the battles. With modifications, of course! I've already been tinkering with the factions lists. I'll be ignoring some of the restrictions and adding some things of my own.

The "Tharkallan Empire" is being set up to be my main "evil" protagonist with the "Atlan Confederacy" (Amazons) as the main "good" protagonist. Tharkalla is patterned after Rome and I intend to use the Expeditionary Force figures, despite them being 60mm. I reckon they are just taller folk; obviously they are not patterned that closely on Ancient Rome! Ilmiora and Vilmar, and the others close by, are all going to be "Greek City State" proxies. Nemedia is, in my backstory, the first of the city states to be incorporated into the Empire. I decided to use the name "Nemedia" mainly so I could have my own "Nemedian Chronicle" as a sort of "Campaign Diary".

Anyway, that's where I got to so far. Lots more to do.

Armour of the Trigan Empire - Part 2

Progress so far...

Here is the progress so far on my camo scheme (see previous) along side some Crooked Dice female minions, their spiffy infantry caps newly attached. (That required a magnifier and a good light, but then my eyes aren't what they used to be!)

Still much more to do. Still haven't figured out the pea dots yet and want to add green, dark blue - but not too dark - and maybe some sort of red, terracotta, perhaps. There will have to be black pea dots as well, of course.

Wako part of Tekumel Club sale - 40% off until Jan 19th!

I have limited supplies of Wako on hand. ex-Forlorn Hope, ex-Cavalcade miniatures.

I am selling them @ $40 per 10 - a standard "Horde" pack per my Tekumel Club range.

The Tekumel Club discount applies and currently I am running a sale...see my posts elsewhere on this forum.

The range consists of 4 or 5 armoured Wako, well partial armour, really: some swordsmen, a spearman and an archer. These are, I think, intended as "command", or at least, senior warriors.

Then there are several poses of spearmen, swordsmen w. katana and archers with that distinctive Japanese style of bow. These latter are my favourite, esp. the guys drawing back the bow in classic fashion!



There are IIRC one or possibly two other armoured poses that for some reason I failed to get a picture of.

Email me if interested at green27 -at- sympatico -dot- ca

Armour of the Trigan Empire

Solido Patton tank. 

I've already ditched the decals.

WW1 German fighter "lozenge" camouflage.

WW2 German Waffen SS "Pea" camouflage.

My Trigan army forces are being done with a Germanic look, using early WW2 German uniforms, so as to have the boots. But for armour I managed to find a Solido/Verem 1:50 scale Patton tank. It is not from one of their special anniversary collections and so is a plain dark green colour.

Now the debate is whether I should try and paint it in camo or leave it plain. The options are:

1) plain green - as is - just add some sort of insignia. (I've already rubbed the original decals off with my thumb.)

2) camo inspired by WW1 German fighter camoflage. I particularly like the lozenge patterns and the colours used.

3) camo based on German WW2 Waffen SS "pea" patterns, like the one shown above. Again, I like the colours, but it might be too complex. And it also looks a bit too much like it would work, and the Trigan stories were a bit more fantastical than that.

4) the last option I am considering is something based on WW1 Naval "Dazzle" camouflage. It would likely use colours based on either of the others shown above.

What I might do, if I paint it at all, is a combination of dazzle, lozenge and the "pea" pattern. Hmm...

There's Gold In That Thar Space!

According to an article in this week's Economist magazine (Feb 23-Mar 1, 2019) scientists have discovered a treasure trove created by a kilonova, which occurs when two neutron stars collide. ("The ultimate nuclear reactor", page 77-78) Apparently they reckon some 10 x the mass of Earth in gold was created along with 50 x the mass in platinum. That's a tidy sum!

Unfortunately, it is located in a distant galaxy in the Hydra Constellation. And the event occurred a long time ago. But, otherwise, the next Gold Rush could be just around the corner!

Of course, flooding the market with that much gold and platinum would drive the prices down, however, spread across the many worlds of an Interstellar Empire some Mega-corp could stand to clean up a tidy fortune, or fortunes.

There's scope in there for some retro-sci/fi or pulp scenarios, methinks...

How Two Rice Huts Stormed the Walls of Troy...Part 1.

Two Rice Huts: Sarissa Precision

The Walls of Troy: Chris the Modelmaker

Next weekend I am hosting a couple days of gaming and on one of those days Troy will fall again. Or not, according to the will of the Dice Gods. Originally this was going to be a medieval siege using the rules in the back of Arty Conliffe's Medieval Tactica rules. This would allow me to dig out my Hudson & Allen castle and give the rules another go. They're great, BTW. Highly recommended, being both simple yet bloodily effective. 

However, I soon  remembered that my castle is only partly painted and being laid low for a couple of weeks by a bad cold meant switching to plan "B": the Fall of Troy.

Which actually works out pretty well as I happen to have nicely painted armies for the period - which hardly ever get used - and was also lucky enough to snag one of Chris the Modelmaker's masterpieces on eBay: the walls for a biblical era city. 

Perfect! Part of the walls is shown in the above pictures. It was actually the second time the set had been up on eBay. The first time I lost the auction but then a few years later the guy that outbid me put them up for sale again and I lucked out, getting them for what I bid the first time round. :-)

Of course, I still want to use the siege rules, so it may be that the Greek's won't need their horse after all. But for that to work I need a battering ram and a siege tower to make the game fun. Now I gather that back in the day siege engines were pretty primitive and so using a siege tower might be a little unhistorical. They are however, such a fun part of the "Medieval Tactica: Siege" rules that the Greeks are going to get one. Another one of Odysseus' bright ideas! :-)

So for the last week or so I have been mulling about how to build one. My previous attempt using cardboard and strips of wood ended in failure. I was looking at some spare pieces of balsa I had lying around and wondering if they might work and then it occurred to me that there might be useful bits in all the MDF kits I have; maybe some leftover cut-outs, or surplus pieces could be re-purposed.

I started out looking at the bits from the Sarissa Precision Gladiatorial Arena but I was reluctant to use them as I might actually need them in the future. Then I stumbled on a Test of Honour scenery set I had received as a gift last year. I had built the Torii gate and Bridge, and started on the Watermill, but hadn't even looked at the two Rice Huts that finish the set off. 

An hour of fitting and re-fitting the parts later and I have ended up with the outline of a tower as shown in the pictures. It is actually a bit tall for the wall, so I am going to trim back those exposed struts in the middle part to shorten the tower. As it is now does show how it might work if one had a taller wall. My wall measures 5-1/2" to the top of the crenelations. I'll have to allow for how much the wheels raise it off the ground, but the struts at the bottom I think account for that. I am planning on trimming a lot of the ends that stick out, as well as the pitched roof end-pieces. 

One thing I think I need to do is change the walls around. They are etched with wood planking on one side only (the outside of the hut if built as intended.) I think that, as it was common practice to hang water-soaked hides on the outside, I might just as well switch the panels so the etched panels show on the inside of the tower. None of it is glued at the moment. I'm still working out how it might fit together. I should be able to cut "hides" from cardboard and use the age-old modelers shingling method to create the effect needed.

In Part 2, I'll take the huts apart and try and take pictures of the components and how they fit together.