Warm Ale and Mud

I always loved pikes, and in hindsight I should have started with a unit of 15 pikemen rather than a unit of 15 helblitzen, but bills/halberds etc are also very cool and in terms of models easier to get hold of. Anyway, after playing a number of games versus my wife’s undead it became very clear that losing even a single round of combat was a killer, fear is very powerful in 3 rd edition. So without being too gamey I needed to minimise my chances of losing, the easiest way to do this was to increase the unit size to ensure I get the full rank bonus for a few turns even after having sustained some loses. So. I increased my 15 helblitzen to 25. This gives me the ability to lose an entire rank and still claim the maximum rank bonuses. A bit gamey maybe, but is also makes the unit look cooler. No fancy pictures this time but here are a couple of basic ones to give you the idea. I think I may look at a block of pikes in the future, maybe a detachment sent from Wurtbad. But ...

  The villagers worship The Mother (Rhya) and The Father (Taal). Apart from the sacred stone circle which is used for religious festivals they also use small shrines which are dotted about the village and fields. These are kept to help ensure a good harvest and ward off blight. Common offerings are food from the land and small dolls stuffed with oats, herbs and seed. Plants and the Sun are common symbology but we can also glimpse a crude painting of The Mother, seen naked with yellow flowing hair and a crown of leaves. The larger shrine will have offerings placed inside relevant to the particular festival which will be being celebrated at the time. I quite enjoyed both making and painting these, I will be making some inserts over the next few weeks for the bigger one.

I am not sure if this is the sort of thing people want to see, do let me know in the comments. (Also I did not intend for this to be a blog post, so the images are few and crude in presentation, so please factor that in) I played a game with my normal WFB opponent a few weeks back, but he used my undead rather than his normal Orcs. I did not take a single casualty in that game, but I lost as every unit routed from the battle. So I made some tweaks that would hopefully stop that happening again. Today I played a short game with Samantha. (my wife) Some random images:     What Happened?   My idea to make my Helblitzen 25 rather than 15 strong worked. Always getting the maximum rank bonuses meant they never lost a round of combat. Losing a round vs undead in 3rd means an automatic rout with free hacks and everything. Very painful. Having a separate army banner also worked. Area radius LD bonus. Samantha's zombies lost every round of HTH but when rolling for instability...

I   want to take about something related to my Warm Ale and Mud project; Inspiration. As gamers and modellers we almost all surely find inspiration for aspects of the hobby from here and there. What sort of stuff inspires me? Films, TV shows, Books and History mostly. Other than Oldhammer my other great love are Hammer Horror films. These are a source of inspiration for me in terms of names and personalities of the villagers, in terms of plots and storylines, but especially in terms of appearance. The costumes and sets of some of the Hammer Horror films are outstanding, so much so than the multimillion dollar CGI slop we are served today. Now, before I go on a ramble about Hammer Horror films I will list some of the films that I find inspire me. Of course there are no Warhammer TM films, but many films can be viewed as such. In some cases, just change the names of places in your head to those in the Old World and they work. Other films require you to swap relig...

I decided to increase my Helblitzen from 15 to 25 models. But with my own project rule of no duplicate figures and all the soldiers and villagers having to be oldhammer GW models, finding another 10 different old models was not especially easy or cheap. Having said that I did manage to pick up 4 more for £10.00 which was a bargain. After having a ponder and reflecting a bit, well, a lot, I decided a unit filler may be fun and cheaper. Now, with the unit filler not being a soldier or a villager, it did not have to be an oldhammer model. This is handy as I had a modern model pig lying around which I was going to use in Mordheim. So. I set about converting the pig into a unit filler, a War Hog. I wanted to have something a bit daft and also something that sort of reflected my love of Hammer Horror films. (I have the Karnsteins in my undead and also have a banner with Ingrid Pitt on it.) I have been tempted to buy a goblin fanatic and lend it to my main WFB 3 rd edition opp...

Wife to Count Halven, the Countess Carmilla Halven is the apple of the counts eye and as pretty as they day they were wed. With the Count spending time in the capital, patrolling the locale and otherwise keeping the area safe (and partially in some measure to him not being that way minded) , the Countess looks after the Halven estate. From the day to day running, including but not limited to book-keeping, magisterial duties, tax setting and collection, inspections, hearing petitions etc, to also marshalling and inspecting the garrison in times of conflict. She is a mostly content woman and has no desire to increase the Halven lands. Like the Count she follows the old faith of The Mother (Rhya) and The Father (Taal). Here we can see her with a small doll stuffed with herbs and seeds and so on, which is to be placed in one the villages many small shrines. Heiligsheld has a number of shrines dotted around and these are kept to help ensure a good harvest and ward off blight. T...

Heiligsheld has always been near a river and I wanted to model the river in a single section as I thought it would be nicer to look at than a river in bits with joins. The perfect way would be to have it sunk into tiles as I always used to do, but that would mean making tiles and I am already well into this project and can't be bothered with starting a new table. Now, I have made a river before, for my 15mm fantasy games and I wanted to try and get my river to look as nice as that: However I mucked it up. :( I won't bore you with the details here, but poor planning lead me to making a mistake which I hurridly tried to fix but made it worse. I then had to wait for the 'fix' to dry and then essentially start again with inferior products. The end result is not a million miles away from what I intended, though the mistakes are visible and it also took a whole weekend to do the water effects rather than about 3 hours.. IF you are interested, you can read about the journey HE...