Grenadier Guards (Flames of War 600 pt force)

So there I was, broken in bed, studying the ceiling and trying not to feel overly sorry for myself.  My wife, sweet, thoughtful creature that she is, bought me a small stack of WW II books to read because she knows I like that kind of stuff.  And here my troubles began.  Over the next couple of weeks I picked up a few more new tomes, notably some volumes in the so far excellent Stackpole series, and rediscovered a few old loves, such as Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier.  I was quickly getting into a rut.  You know how it is.

Once I could get up and around, I got out my Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain DVDs.  I watched them over and over as I nudged a few minis glumly around on my desk, entirely unable to paint.  And then there was the internet.  The verdamnt internet.  Always sitting there in predatory silence.  Patient, watchful.  Wanting me to get on it and buy things.    And at last, with little else to do, get on it and buy things I did.  Tiny tanks and tiny men.  Too many of them.  You know how it is.

Anyway here are some of them.

A long time ago, I discovered something on the FOW site that got a big, fat iron  fishhook in my attention; these little 600 point starter forces.  I became fascinated by them and of course I had to have some of my own.  So now I've got late war British armor and American mechanized infantry, and German Grenadiers to fight them.  I'm starting out at 600 points with each army, and then I'm going to build up each army in 300 point blocks, until I get bored.

So here we go:  My British Armour Company, 600 pts:  (I'm using the FOW Armies book that comes with the new edition rules, not the high-speed Atlantik Wall and Overlord books; I'll acquire those eventually, but don't have 'em now.)

HQ Platoon:
2x Sherman V:  125 points

The CO and XO.  The extra tread should probably be green, but I sort of like how it looks painted as bare steel.  These are the plastics from the boxed Open Fire set, but purchased separately from bits merchants online.  Somehow, I got frames that all had the same commander figure.  I tried to get 1 tank with a distinctly different commander by buying one of the resin-and-metal Sherman Vs, but the commander figure that came with it was too short and skinny to look realistic next to the others.  Certainly, his smaller size would have poorly represented his Boss-Man stature.

Combat Platoons:

1st Platoon: 
2x Sherman V & 1x Firefly VC:  210 points

 I originally wanted my lads to be denizens of 11th Armoured Division for no other reason than that the 11th's division patch looks, frankly, badass...

Am right, no? 

But the decal pack I ordered seemed to be an older version that did not include the raging bull patch.  It did, however, have the somewhat disturbing all-seeing Eye of Sauron device of the Guards Armoured Division, so I was ok with that. 


2nd Platoon:
 2x Sherman V & 1x Firefly VC:  210 points

I would have preferred that my Guardsmen had been of the Irish regiment, (had images in head of Michael Caine as Joe Vandeleur, wearing that pained expression of quiet and dignified desperation as he tries to cram his regiment up the accursed single lane highway to Nijmegen) but no, the decals I had only supplied the '51' of the Grenadier Guards, and I was anxious to get started.  Grenadier Guards it would be.

 Giant hole in the back of the Firefly's turret that I didn't notice until just now. Grr.  Will have to go back and fill that in.

The decals look pretty good once you slop them up with 'mud' and when they don't catch the light in the wrong way.

So the compulsory units of my British armoured company were assembled.  I had a bare minimum HQ platoon, and 2 bare minimum combat platoons, and already it added up to 545 points out of 600 points.  What can you buy with 55 points in Flames of War?  Not much.  The one thing could do was to outfit all my tanks with AA Machine guns at 5 pts each. Good for fending off wandering Stukas, and, perhaps just as important, I think they look cool.  So that's 585 points.  Next:  German Grenadiers.  Right after I finish my Oldhammer Gobbo stickas.

 "Oh...Bluddy Hell.  Men, we've come the wrong way.  Turn around, objective's back that way.  Christ, are we ever going to get out of this bocage country?"

Flo's Field Kitchen (Orc and Goblin Baggage Train pt. 1)

 "Ya know wot?  I saw Sumfin da uvver day, and I couldn't believe wot I wuz seein'.  Wanna know wot it waz?  I'll tell ya.  Big fight out near da mountains, roight?  Crossed da big river, followin' Big Blackie's handsome backside...Wahhh, he's a looker, 'e is...anyway, got over da river wif only a few lads drowndin' and up frough da treesie countrie, into da hills, headin for da mountains, tall mountains where da funder gavvers on top.  Stunties, der.  Loads of 'em.  Wif gold!!  An' Humies, too.  Nasty little rotters, dem pinkies, dey stick togevver, you can count on dat.  

"An' me and da gurls, wot we doin', eh?  We got dis whole lot wantin' us ta feed em!  Now I got me a fine big iron pot, dat's fur sure, nobody east a da big rivver got better, but still, you got to feed a hunnerd lads, you're gonna have a ruff time of it!  We gotta boil up four, five pots a stew a noight!  An' where you gonna get da stuff for dat, eh?

"Huh.  Whereevver yoo can, eh?  Huh huh huh.  Now after a big foight, it ain't so bad!  Lotsa dead peeple and wot, you got no worries, da boys can eat all noight!  But when you're on da march yoo gotta get it where you can.  And here's where I'm gettin' to my point, see?  Dis is da fing I saw dat I couldn't believe...

"Big fight, roight?  Der's our boys and der boys laid out bleedin' all over the meadow and Big Blackie and dis one stuntie wiv a big helmit got bloody great horns on, de're still fightin out near da creek wif a few boys wit 'em, but everybody else is about done for da day, dey jus creepin' around pickin froo da dead boys lookin for sumfin good, and each side kinda keepin an eye on da uvver.  I'm grabbin' up everyfing I can fit in me pot for the big eats, an' crammin' everyfing I can't cook in de wagon, save it for later, ya know? And den I see the humies and da stunties are gavverin ders up too...ya know...da ones dat ain't quite dead yit?  And I see der puttin' rags on da holes our boys put in em!  And I fink, now why dey do dat?  Ya can't keep da blood in!  Spoils da meet!  Ya gotta led it out or it goes all larmy too fast!  Now dat's mighty strange!  

"And den I see 'em layin' all da ready-for-da-pot boys out on da grass, and der's some humie and stuntie girls comin, and I fink, Oh, dey'll  be comin' wiv da knives an' da pot!  But no!  Dey give dem pot boys tasty drinks an put pillers under der heads an' dat...and dey pet 'em on der hair and is all real sweet to 'em...disgustin' really!  And den dey load 'em in da cart and dey take em away...all comfertable like...like dey was gonna KEEP 'EM  ALIVE...and I fink...you know?  I bet dey don't even eat em!  Couldn't beleive wot I was seein, even doh it were roight here in frunna me own eyes...  Now...I ask ya...ain't dat just like a pinkie?  Too rich dey is...spoiled...got too much, dey don't 'ppreciate good meat when it falls in der laps!  

'Hand me dat knoife, will ye, Gertie?  "An quit squirmin', you gimpy lil Gobbo, you!  You'll dull me blade!  Wot's dat, ya say you can still walk? Well not fast enuff, I'll warrant!  Nod if we can ketch ya! Eh Gurls?"

(raucous laughter).

So here's my first section of my Oldhammer Orcs and Goblins baggage train, with the cauldron counting as the wagon. It adds um...zero points to Big Blackie's horde, but it was fun to do.

"OY!  Get yer fingas outta dere, it ain't ready, yet!  ...'Less ya wanna leave em in dere permanent...heh."

"Snots is good fer flaverin' up yer pot when ya ain't got nuffin else...De're really quick and slippery, tho...hard ta get yer hands on.  I just get 'em likkered up real good and dat makes em lot more easy ta catch..."

"Arright, boys...soup's on, get in line, already!  Er, by the way...anybody hurt?  Sick?  Wounded?  Hrm?  Anybody?"

Corporal Steiger's Squad

Jackbooted fascist thugs come to oppress the workers and farmers of Mother Russia?  Latter day Teutonic Knights determined to spread the gospel of National Socialism throughout the world?  Hm.  Probably more like nine alarmingly normal guys who just want to live long enough to get back to their home towns in Saxony, assuming those towns still exist.  No matter.  Corporal Steiger is determined to get as many of them home as possible.  That's the only thing he cares about...when, in certain rare moments, he finds that he is still capable of caring about anything.

In the blackness of a Courland forest night, the squad falls back to yet another defensive position.  Lars, Lothar and Fritz pull security as their comrades make a dash across a forest path.

Corporal Steiger highly recommends the rugged Soviet ppsh submachine gun for leading your squad through the thick Baltic forests.

 Along with Corporal Steiger, Heinrich here is one of the 'Old Gang' in the second platoon...which means he's survived over a year of combat on the Eastern front.  He's never quite recovered from the winter of '42, though, and always stays bundled up, even in the middle of summer.  Even in severe heat, he's always complaining that he just can't seem to get warm and stay that way...

The new guy.  Nobody has bothered to learn his name...they all know he won't last long.  I mean, look at him!  Doesn't even have his weapon at the ready.

The gun team.  The machine gun is the heart of the squad's combat power, and is affectionately known to the kameraden as 'Greedy Gretchin"  Hey, new guy, keep up, will ya?  Still got that extra ammo or have you fucking lost it already?"

With most of the squad safely across the track, Fritz prepares to make his own move.

  "Security set?  Ok...Quietly now, boys...and quickly...Go!"

Partisans!

Stealing through the seemingly endless forests and swamps of the Eastern lands, they come...infiltrating and fighting their way ever westward, in ever greater numbers...Partisans!  But who are they?  Heroic defenders of Stalin's Mother Russia, taken to the woods and fens to carry on the Communist dream and to fight the Fascistcapitalistimperialistreactionaryplutocrat invaders to their dying breaths?  Certainly that's the official Soviet version.  (See video below.)

Other people, many of them German, seem to have felt that the term Partisan was open to a degree of interpretation. Sometimes it meant civilians turned soldiers and actual Red Army troops trapped behind the lines and still fighting more or less in concert with the rest of the Soviet Army.  Sometimes it meant bunches of damned thieves and bandits who spent more time robbing and murdering their own people than they did fighting the Germans, the term Partisan existing solely to give their criminal depredations a veneer of respectability.  And there was a huge grey area between these two extremes into which most partisans seemed to fit best.

And to make it all even more annoying and confusing, lots of them weren't even Russian.  Many were Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish patriots to whom the Russians and Germans were all bastard foreigners and invaders who just needed to go away.  No matter.  The Germans shot at all of them, and all of them shot back at the Germans and, sometimes they shot at each other.  Chaos, randomness and woe.

 Peering at these Partisans as they stand at my desk top, I can't decide which side they belong to, but I suppose it doesn't really matter.  Whoever they are, I'm pretty sure they will be harassing the hell out of my Bolt Action Wehrmacht guys here in the near future.

Over the last few weeks, I've had quite a few painting disasters, including some AD&D Wereboars, some 15mm Wehrmacht Stug Gs and infantry, and some Warhammer Orc boys, all of whom have had to go in the strip jar as my stupid wrist has been so stiff, trembly and clumsy that I keep making mistakes and dropping things, but I think I've finally turned the corner on this broken arm thing, and I don't think these West Wind guys, painted mostly with Flames of War paints, came out too bad.  Eyes are still tough, though...just can't keep my hand still enough to get in there without leaving a huge blob of paint in the figure's eye socket.  (You might have noticed that most of these guys don't have eyes.) Oh, well.  At least I'm getting stuff done again.

Mewlip

THE MEWLIPS
by
J.R.R. Tolkien

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool's borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

 

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they've finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips - and the Mewlips feed.

...Got my hard cast off but I'll be wearing a brace on my wrist for a really long time which makes it challenging to take on really big projects, so I'm going to stick to painting up individual monsters for a while, like this wonderful old MITHRIL Mewlip, here.  Always loved The Mewlips.  I wonder where the Merlock mountains are, exactly?

                                                                  Peeping out slyly...

O is for Otyugh

The fact that refuse, carcasses and other waste left lying about can harbor diseases of every sort is not one which is well understood by the peoples of the Western Kingdoms.  That such refuse can attract Ghouls, Giant Rats and other, more visible agents of misery is VERY well understood, and it is for the purposes of discouraging such  unwanted company that the Western Folk carefully burn or bury their leavings.  Monsters tend to be less interested in taking such precautions, and the great, stinking garbage pits and putrid cesspools in and around the Caves of Chaos are well known to be havens for whole colonies of such creatures.

Amoung the most feared of such monsters are the Otyugh.  Thankfully, the relatively fastidious Human and Demi-Human communities of the West rarely encounter these weird and ravenous beasts, though the occasional rogue Otyugh crowded out of it's feeding grounds near the Caves will sometimes wander through a town, leaving chaos, misery and a very bad odor in it's wake...

I've recovered most of the strength in my hand, but still have my hard cast on, which makes it impossible to do any detailed painting.   On the other, erm...hand...I've discovered that I can at least work on washes and dry-brushing, so I've decided to try simple and very small scale projects for a while, mainly D&D monsters that don't have fiddly details.  The Otyughs here are my first attempt to get back into hobbying mode.  Might try to get a few tanks for Flames of War painted soon, too. Used a lot of  FOW colors on Mr. and Mrs. Otyugh, here, and in spite of the frustration that goes along with not being able to move my wrist and having to steady my weak, girly, trembly right hand with my more functional left one, I had fun with them.  Got to love a monster that lives in a cesspool.  Probably need  to re-paint the rims of the bases, though.  The FOW German Middlestone looks a lot more green against the grey of the dungeon floor than I thought it would.

Mr. and Mrs. Otyugh wish everyone a merry Christmas and a crappy new year! 

(Remember, to them crap is a good thing.)

MST3K - Patrick Swayze Christmas

A little bit of nerdy tomfoolery for you this holiday season.  Only very questionably in the spirit of a holiday dedicated to peace and goodwill, but this IS primarily a wargaming blog, isn't it?  And anyhow, it's damn funny.  Merry Christmas and see you in the new year!

Ye Aulde Tyme Sword and Sorcery Toys

This is what happens when an old, sad bastard sits around the house all day and night with two broken arms and some booze.  He drifts back to those "sunny slopes of long ago."  Yeah.  The other day Springinsfeld posted an interesting bit about old 80's plastic toys that  bear a suspicious resemblance to a lot of the classic AD&D minis we know and love and that sort of put a bug in my head.  Today I spent a good amount of time researching some D&D-esque toys I loved in my boyhood, and here I share what I've re-discovered.

Before we go any further, let me say that none of these photos are mine, most of them are taken from two very cool web pages:  Little Weirdos, and Virtual Toy Chest.  They are worth checking out, if you like this kind of thing.

In the very late 70's and very early 80's an obscure toy company called Dimensions for Children made some some very lovely toy playsets.  They had an American frontier set called Fort Courage, and a Battle of Anzio set, but what they really put their hearts and money into was developing a series of kids' playsets with a sword and sorcery theme, done in the good old Marx Toys style.  They succeeded admirably, if you ask me.  Clearly DFC was inspired by the burgeoning Dungeons and Dragons movement, but their toys realized a unique and delightful vision of the Sword and Sorcery genre, and I still remember with electric clarity opening my Dragonriders of the Styx set on Christmas morning.

There were 5 DFC Fantasy playsets that I know of.  If anyone knows of one I've missed, please let me know.  I'd still like to collect the whole bunch.  Someday.

#1:  The Fires of Shandarr:  My buddy Pete got this one from Kmart when we were in 4th grade.  This was the first I'd heard of DFC, and damn was I jealous of this new country which Pete had discovered.  I was still excited about the pack of Andrew Chernak Grenadier Goblins I'd gotten for my birthday, but here Pete had a damn D&D wargame in a box!  It's amazing the memories that stick with you.  I vividly recall a weekend at Pete's house spent watching his video dub of Excalibur on an interminable loop and wargaming the Shandarr campaign endlessly around his room; bloody last stands around the forest of the legs of Pete's desk, stirring final assaults on the bureau plateau!  And the whole concept is so great for a kids' game!  The fires of Shandarr: What a title!  And look at all the stuff you got:

Knights, men at arms, Wizards good and vile!

Devils, Demons, a dragon and..."lava monsters" that bear an uncanny resemblance to the Monster Manual illustration for the Shambling Mound...

...here is the Grenadier official Shambling Mound...the resemblance is not as obvious here as it is in the Monster Manual Illustration...

The terrain cardboard punch-outs for the Shandarr Volcano and Castle gate...wouldn't look out of place on an Oldhammer table!

Pete, in his fighting reconnaissance of Kmart, had claimed that he'd gotten the last of the Fires of Shandarr sets, but that there was still a set there called "Forest of Doom" that featured evil trees instead of lava monsters.  Naturally this led to my eagerly and unceasingly inquiring of my mother when it would be necessary for us to go to Kmart again. Alas, it was a long time before it was deemed necessary, and when I did at last venture into the Kmart toy aisle, there were no DFC playsets of any sort in evidence! Verdamnt!!  Foiled!!  Months passed, and I began to grow cynical. I began to think that Pete had made the whole damned thing up, and that there had never been a thing so wonderful and mysterious as a "Forest of Doom" playset.  Many years would pass before the internet provided the evidence necessary to at last vindicate poor Pete.