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Do you play Dystopian Wars Sigur? I've always been fascinated by the game and watching you paint the models over the years has certainly peaked my interest in it.

@Gitsplitta: Cheers. I am known for making great decisions.

@Camkierhi: Thank you. Oh yes, and on top of that the 15mm stuff is really nice to paint. And to me it feels perfect for playing platoon-level WW2 stuff.

Well, I didn't get much done (holidays stuff to do, and I got Fallout4 as a gift from a well-meaning person), but behold, IT IS RED NOW:





...and here's a WIP shot of Doc Proteus Treves:



There's absolutely no purpose to this mini except for the fact that I really, really like him. He's spooky and scary I think.

For some reason I can't get your pictures to load... that may be an internet issue on my end though.

Common Sigur I just finished watching Elephant man again, and I have to see your pretty Doc to make me depresed again haha! Great Work on him, and the dragon!

Brilliant, excellent, perfect and BLOODY SCARY!!!

Can't get that eye out of me head. Just brilliant.

@Gitsplitta: Must be your internet acting up a little. Does it work now?

@Rogue Wolves: I aim to depress. Sorry, mate.

@Camkierhi: Thanks very much! It's a beautiful sculpt. in fact the whole range is amazing.























He's a proper big 'un at 7.5cm foot to eye. A beautiful sculpt and rather creepy. What do you think, Sirs?

Definitely creepy...definitely.

Whatever that is... I love it! But alas no, still can't see the pics in that one post.

That big creepy guy is indeed big and very creepy! but your paint job on that one in particular is really showing how bloody talented you are with a brush! the model is mainly dirty clothes/rags and you've managed to differentiate each part beautifully as well as having the green flesh underneath not get get lost amongst it which would be a challenge!. The cloth head covering is something I really like on this miniature, dirty greys with a real strong contrast from light to dark and subtle textures makes it really special especially with the rheumy eye peeking out! well done mate you never fail to inspire me!

@SlaveToDorkness: Thanks. It's an amazing figure. I had to stop myself from diving right into the next figure from that range.

@Gitsplitta: Yeah, me too. Thanks for the comment. Weird thing about the pictures, but it's not that important. It's just WIPs anyway. But I'll keep an eye on the issue.

@nerdfest09: Thanks. Yeah I was a bit worried when I saw the amount of patches on his cloak that I may mess it up by either doing them too contrast-y or with too little contrast, but I think it ended up rather well. Glad you like the model, Thanks for commenting!

Contemptor:



The dread himself is done, all I need to finish is the World Eater who is encouraged to "talk to the hand".

Watched Star Wars last night. I was thoroughly pleased. The baddie is a great character. Also loved Al Borland - rebel pilot. In fact, there wasn't a single annoying character (even though the orange CG creature was pushing it) was annoying, and most interestingly the ones with the biggest potential to annoy (the rebel pilots) I really enjoyed. They really looked like regular people. Even Finn wasn't annoying or all too bland. The humour was done as well as it can be done I guess. There seems to be some kind of ordered number of gags per 10 minutes and I guess they have to fill that quota these days, but it was bearable. Could have done with half the jokes though. At least they never were out of place, but added to the characters.

Oh wow the Doc Proteus is eery. The green on your Sallies is lovely.

@sockwithaticket: Thanks very much.

Okay, this Friday will see the first incarnation of a series of little demo events we intend to run at a local club to advertise sets of wargaming rules we like a bit better than others and which we believe don't get quite enough attention compared to the rules sets we don't like quite as much. Of course we're going with the brilliant Chain of Command first, which drummed up a lot of attention at VIVAT2015.

This of course is a great opportunity to get our WW2 campaign going, based on the struggle between elements of 21st Panzer Division / 125th Panzergrenadiers as part of Kampfgruppe von Luck and British/Canadian Paratroopers in the early hours of the D-Day Landings on June 6th 1944. The Paratroops had been dropped down to capture strategic points and keep German reinforcements away from the beaches while local German forces have to aim to throw them out and recapture important approach routes to Normandy. As my friend immediately went for the Paras I'll do the Germans.

The whole thing will be based on the recently released 'pint-sized campaign' supplement by Too Fat Lardies, Kampfgruppe von Luck:




This means basically I have to collect and paint the following:
.) A platoon of 1944 Panzergrenadiers consisting of: 1 Officer, 1 Panzerschreck team of 2, 3 squads of 10 Panzergrenadiers
.) A bunch of these mostly improvised rearmed originally French vehicles cobbled together by engineer Major Alfred Becker and his staff
.) A bunch of other support. Additional staff, egineers, heavy wepaons, vehicles.


I ordered all the required stuff weeks ago, still not sign of the goods. So until further notice, I'll make do with a platoon of just two squads and I'll scrape together as much support as I can. Here's what I got in the making so far (those are all still WIP):



1 Officer
Panzerschreck team of 2
2 squads of Panzergrenadiers

Support Options:
MG42 MMG on tripod team of 5
Panzerschreck team of 2
Engineers Flamethrower team of 3 (one not pictured as he hid on my table )


Here's a closer shot:


It is very probable that the rest of my minis won't arrive until Friday, so we'll have to make do with less Germans than required. We'll just bend the scenarios in their favour a little or just give them extra support of some sort.

Hope you like them so far.

Das good!

Do you build the bases as well or do they come textured?

Thanks. I did the bases as well. They are in fact 1-, 2-, and 5- Euro cent coins (the MMG team is sat on an English Twopence coin).

How clever.

@Solar_lion: Coins make excellent bases.


Some WIP German tanks for our France 1944 stuff:



So tomorrow I'm running a demo game of Chain of Command at the local games club. Slightly anxious about that, but it'll be fine I'm sure. Good times.

Hoard-o-tanks-n-trucks!

That is quite a few tanks, indeed. How'd the CoC demo go, Sigur?

Oh, and happy new year.

@Gitsplitta: a-yup.

@Dysartes: Cheers. The demo did go rather well. We had two tables run simultaneously and several people watching throughout the afternoon and evening.


Chain of Command demo day at WoW/Keepers Vienna

On January 8th 2016 we had the first 'VIVAT Presents...' event happening at World of Warhammer (they came up with the name shortly before that video game that sounds kinda similar. Unfortunate, I guess.) / Keepers of Dice club in Vienna. VIVAT of course being the annual event for historical wargaming 'round here. The organizers came up with the great idea of having smaller get-togethers throughout the year and demo historical rules sets which maybe get more attention than we believe they deserve. Presenting alternatives to the more 'mainstream' rules sets, showing something different, stuff like that.



At 4pm we met, tables were already set up using the excellent terrain provided by the club.



Virago, who pretty much organized the whole thing, and I handed out some quick reference sheets and jumped right in.

The scenario we played was Attack & Defend from the Chain of Command rulebook, virago's British elite Paratroopers versus my Panzergrenadiers. My platoon was one third (one Panzergrenadiers squad) short as my minis hadn't arrived in time. The British had three squads of paratroopers (one of them with two light MGs instead of the usual one), two snipers, a light mortar team, two senior leaders, forward artillery observers and a 3" mortar battery off-table. I had two squads of Panzergrenadiers, one senior leader, a MG42 MMG team, a sniper and a small engineers team with flamethrower. I was to defend, the British were on the attack.

Here you can see the table along with the patrol markers:


This was the first game in a Western Front 1944 setting. Usually we play in the early desert theatre of war. It was also our first game featuring Elite troops on one side who proved to be very strong indeed. In terms of fighting power, but mostly in terms of organizational effectiveness and thus initiative (simply put: They activate more and more flexibly). On the other side Panzergrenadiers of course pack an unholy amount of firepower.



This being a demo game, of course the dice gods decided to have a little fun and it turned out to be - out of the many games of CoC we had - probably the most extreme. The British Paras got to go five or six times in one go at one point, which of course got the Germans in serious trouble.




The British set up a firebase on top of a hill, covered by trees.



Early on I had made it my foremost objective to take possession of the buildings, which I achieved too, but then my guys got shot up so badly that they pretty much were lost right away. The rest were kicked out in bloody hand to hand combat by Paras with sub-machine guns. The buildings in use are Battlefront ones and I have to say that they are pretty neat. Removable roofs are rather handy.


British Para teams advancing along the roads towards the buildings Germans occupy ...




....houses cleared, Paras sitting in the lower levels.

With this they also made my central Jump-Off point (from which you deploy troops in Chain of Command) unusable. The good thing is that I rolled really well for morale rolls throughout the game. Both sides started with excellent Force Morale, when ever Bad Things(tm) happen (leaders wounded/killed, teams/squads wiped out or routed, Jump-Off Points lost, etc.) you have to roll for how this impacts Force Morale. The lower the Force Morale the less well your force works, have it drop too low you lose. I happened to roll really well on these, so no matter what happened, my brave little armymen refused to give up even though they took a nasty beating.

I brought on my sniper (Obergefreiter Wilhelm Busch) and the flamethrower team.


While the sniper didn't hit anything (just like the sniper on the other side though, until the end when they brought the second one in) the flamethrower team's range was just enough to smoke out the Paras in the larger building, killing everyone but their leader who retired towards the British Jump-Off point.


In typical tip-top preparedness, virago had also whipped up some great looking scenic jump-off points for his fellas.

With my second squad of Panzergrenadiers I made an attempt at flanking the British, but was met with (in my opinion) a disproportionally large amount of bullets and a 3" mortar barrage. :p At this point the morale of even the stoutest Panzergrenadier started to slip and the game ended in a British victory.

And it was a very, very interesting game indeed. Lots of new stuff to learn even for us (mostly exotic stuff like snipers, flamethrowers and such). The massive impetus of the British attack with several phases in a row of course was an extreme situation, but it happens. An attack of a full Paras platoon is supposed to hit like a bag of bricks (with a red hat on top). As mentioned before - Chain of Command isn't a tournament game, it's probably not for people who believe that in battle there are certainties. In fact there is very little predictability. It's one little crisis to manage after another.

I have to admit that we probably got a little caught up in the game and all the new bits we had to get used to ourselves, so at the beginning explanations about how the game works fell a bit short at first, but that was remedied quickly.

The second table featured British again fighting Germans:







In the meantime a few of the guys who had watched the first game had a go themselves at the same scenario


Pat-rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin' .... ( yes, I indeed am down with the music of the hip cats)

The game went even worse for the Germans, but the whole scenario wasn't balanced to begin with. No biggie. It worked well to get the general mechanics over I believe. The whole event went on until midnight. All of the guys present remarked on really liking the game mechanics. The usual disputes about what scale to use emerged immediately (all the tables were played with 15mm figures, but many people also got 28mm collections and will go with that) and many of the guys present looked up how to order the rulebook, markers, campaign supplements and so on.

I enjoy Chain of Command immensely and it's great to see it catching on like that. I would like to thank the organizers as well as everyone who attended and the club for letting us use the premises on the day. Good times, looking forward to the next VIVAT Presents...-event!




There are already two more such days planned for January, one showcasing an American Civil War version of Black Powder, the other one doing Ancient Roman(?) stuff.

Nicely done. Looks like they were into it. Love the commentary!
but I miss your talking bubbles!

Thanks for the overview and battle report Sigur. Haven't played any historicals since college and it's fun to see. Love the batman panel... very funny!

@Solar_lion: Cheers! Yeah, you're right. Well, it's not a full battle report. Next time I do a proper batrep again I'll do the bubbles again!

@Gitsplitta: Thanks for reading! Yeah, I do have my moments....


Okay, you've been good and made it through all that historical stuff. Have a HH-era Landspeeder WIP:





Not to toot my own horn, but t looks the pimpest. Hope it will look fine in the end too.

Man, that jumps off the page! Love the extreme edge highlighting. Really like the way you tied in the color of the power coils to the flames on the front.

That is an awesome looking Sallie-speeder, Sigur.

How was the kits to work with?

That is hands down the best 30k speeder I have seen. It is fantastic

@Gitsplitta: Cheers.

@Dysartes: Thanks. I got the model built and primed, so I'm afraid I can't say anything about how it builds.

@IGtR=: W00t, thanks very much! A kind thing to say.



Hey, guess what the postman brought me today!



A platoon of Panzergrenadiers, 2 sFH mounted on Lorraine Schleppers, 2 Pak40 mounted on S307(f)s and 2 Unix 304(f) armoured troop carriers. Got all my stuff together now, at least as far as the short and eclectic list of supports go for the Kampfgruppe von Luck campaign.

LorraineSchlepper is an unusual name for a unit, even for the Germans.

 Dysartes wrote:
LorraineSchlepper is an unusual name for a unit, even for the Germans.

It's not a unusual name for a unit. "Schlepper" is just German for "tractor", which the French and Germans generally used the vehicle as.

@Dysartes: Oh well, they ran out of the snappy ones towards the end of the war, I suppose.

@sing your life: Indeedly. This Major Becker I mentioned above pretty much had a stash of old french artillery tractors and tank chassis and quickly improvised by putting anti-tank guns on top to form the exotic Sturmgeschützabteilung 200 (IIRC). Around the end of the war it pretty much was all about making anti-tank guns movable by any means necessary.

Land Speeder finished!















What do you think, Sirs?