The Long Road to Partizan - The Plan

 

The Cunning Plan

So we are going to Partizan, but what game are we going to present? I knew I wanted to use the Reivers, but I didn’t know how.

I played several games with Rob Squires, Jordan Linton, Mark Taylor and Chris Bailey featuring an ambush using the Reivers figures that we had between us, and we began to gain a feel for how they worked on the table and slowly an ambush scenario started to evolve.

Then I painted the Queens Envoy set from FOW and that inspired the scenario. The Queens Envoy- a dark tale of Ambushment and Deep Skullduggery in the 16^th Century…

Pic the information board for Partizan

We played this through a few times but never had enough reivers figures to provide a balanced scenario and although I was pleased with my version of Slackbladder and his men, in practice they proved to be nearly invincible. Slackbladder was an excellent leader and a very capable fighter too which did not feel right for the appalling coward he is meant to be. It was back to the drawing board and eventually I arrived at a much less impressive, but more cunning Slackbladder and brought a dashing Lord Flashheart into the game to provide leadership and cahoonas.

It was only in the week leading up to Partizan that I realised that I had given my only Flash figure away as a prize at BIG Ruckus VI. I emailed Dan at Wi and he offered us a loan of the Wi GIM model…woof! 

 Now that we knew what we were doing, several of the Ruckusteers started creating Reivers Retinues. I wanted to have about eighty figures on the table which is what we had with Robin Hood last year and it looked about right. However, due to the vagaries of life only Chris was able to get some figures together which left me wondering if we had enough to stage the game. 

Pic the Irish always ready for a fight!

I thought of a plan B which involved a raid by Finn Mac Cool and his Irish as I have a lot of Irish and this would save a lot of figure painting which is time consuming. It was reassuring knowing that we had a ready-made force that we could take instead and we plodded on.

I carried on painting regardless. I had some very fine Garrion men printed from FoW by Chris and created a small Elizabethan escort for Slackbladder. With these and with Chris’ Reivers we have enough figures. Yay!

 

Last year I had no idea what to expect of Partizan, we took the same mat and terrain as we game on week after week, nothing special, we had a great day and to my everlasting surprise we won the Duncan McFarlane award for the best demo game.

This year I wanted to make more effort and create a demo game specifically for the show, a game that we could take to several shows this year. We will run it as demo at Partizan, but I also plan to use it as a participation game at other shows with up to 6-8 players and a choice of 4-6 different scenarios going on at the same time.  The scenarios will be drawn from a deck of cards for each player. As one player completes a quest or drops out we will have another step in and I aim to have continuous play throughout the day.

We will be taking the game to Attack at Devizes, Colours at Newbury and Crack Con in Derby.

 Having painted the figures and the buildings, created a new faux fur mat and some new hills  and renovated my tired old trees I turned my attention to the fluff and the playing aids.

The Profiles for each Character were printed and mounted on card. There are fourteen of them. They will be placed along the sides of the game and act as an aid memoire for the Players.

I also created some information boards. The Border Reivers is a little known conflict even among wargamers and I thought a little information might increase interest. The wonderful illustrations of Angus McBride always draw the eye!

One final detail will be 7 meters of brightly coloured cloth to cover the table which on the day before we depart I still don’t have! Lawks!!!          

If you are at Partizan please do come and look at the game and say hello, we are on table DG 34, next to the toilets.

If not , see you on the other side…                                                               

The Long Road to Partizan-The Hills!

 

The Hills! The Hills!

In January I began preparing for Partizan, poor, ignorant, happy fool that I was, I figured five months would be plenty of time to get everything ready. I knew I wanted to do a Reivers themed game but didn’t really know what we would use or what the story would be or what any of it would look like. I had a full set of Flags of wars Reivers figures bought for me by my lovely wife the previous Christamas, a few of which I had painted, and the one bit of terrain that I wanted to use- a big hill that I have had for years and was created by an old friend way back in the late 80’s from plaster and wallpaper.

pic : the Big Hill back in the day- before its first face lift

The Big Hill has evolved over the years gaining more and more foliage and character and has been used in many games of all scales memorably a Peninsular game in 15mm where the rock face presented big problems for my British opponent. It doesn’t get a lot of use because it is so big, it takes up half of a Ruckus table and dominates any game it is used in! Perfect, I thought for Partizan.

Great… we have a hill! But I wanted second hill, a slightly smaller brother of the Auld Hill and a rocky tump for the tower to sit upon like Smailholm does. 

The “small hill” Box cutters work well enough to cut out the XPS even the 25mm thick sheet but for chamfering and shaping you can’t beat the old carving knife. Keep a whetstone nearby, this stuff takes the edge off any blade very quickly

The Tump! How things have changed! No wallpaper and plaster here! XPS is a delight to use, light, strong, easy to cut and carve it’s a modellers dream!

A smaller kitchen knife is a useful tool for roughly hatching the craggy cliff faces

I filled the gaps and smoothed the edges with some polyfilla. 

and painted them with a mixture of Burnt Umber and Mod Podge

and let them dry in the sun…

…before covering some areas with sand glued with PVA

The road to the tower gate. I was not really happy with this, it seemed too small and had a wicked camber 

I tried them on the mat. And then I tried the Tower on the tump and I did not like it much. So…

…I started again. This time I left some space at the foot of the Tower walls, and I made the road longer with less of a slope which necessitated making it snake down the tump.

a compact ball of tin foil is an excellent tool for creating a rock face look on the XPS. This one, like the Auld Hill, has been built up over time. 

the rock face after being battered by the ball of foil

Rock painted in various greys dry brushed in lighter and lighter shades

Road sanded and all flattish areas and ledges earthed with Krautworks Copious Earth, all my Reivers figures are based with the same stuff

The Noo Hill getting its first static grass application 

The Noo Hill after it has been grassed and planted with vegetation including a few clumps of heather appropriate for the Border Country

My daughter did most of this while I carried on with some other bits and pieces. I think she did a great job, look out Two Shed Fred, we are getting ideas.  

The Tump vegged out. I thought I would tart up the tower while I was at it.

  A drybrush highlight of Citadel Ushbati Bone on the road finished it all off nicely 

I couldn’t resist greening up this little window.

I dirtied up the rooves of both buildings with Citadel Moratorium Grime

the View from the Tower! 

A little embellishment for the hill...

Now I am nearly ready. My trees are in a sorry state and need a makeover and there is all the fluff to write! Crack on! 

Partizan- The Bastle and Barmkin

 

Partizan- The Bastle and Barmkin

Oh what a great name for a pub! The Bastle and Barmkin, I bet they serve a lovely brown pint of traditional bitter and chilli Hoglumps.

A Bastle-Illustration from the Reiver website

The characteristics of the classic bastle house are extremely thick stone walls (about one meter thick), with the ground floor devoted to stable space for the most valuable animals, and a vaulted stone or flat timber floor between it and the first floor with internal access such as a stairway or ladder. The family's living quarters were on the floor above the ground, and during the times before the suppression of the reivers, were only reachable by a ladder which was pulled up from the inside at night. The windows were small or even only arrow slits.

Bastle houses have many characteristics in common with military blockhouses, the main difference being that a bastle was intended primarily as a family dwelling, instead of a purely military fortification. They were often built in a compound with large wall, the Barmkin, encircling it

Chris Bailey the printing wizard found a bastle and printed it! It was excellent, it was realistic, it was impressive, it was…  massive! At two feet square and twenty inches high it would take up a quarter of a normal Ruckus board. It would certainly attract attention at Partizan. When I started putting it together however, I could see that it was possibly a little over scale. The steps were over two feet high! The wooden beams in the roof were a scale six foot across!

the Bastle dwarfs the 28mm Reiver next to it

It would not do, it was just too big. I told Chris who bless him did not mind at all and found and knocked out a new bastle and a Barmkin wall to go with it with a very grand gate 

 This time I chose not to spray and undercoated with a slate grey. I have found that painting these prints seems to require a lot more paint than I would expect, I did it twice before I achieved an adequate coverage.

I used the same paint scheme as the Tower but in lighter shades

I painted the roof grey although they are clearly pan tiles not the flat slate that I would have expected

The interiors of these buildings are excellent, with some great detail and are fun to paint. I used a similar scheme to the Tower. 

The walls received the same black/ brown undercoat only this time I used Army Painter Primer first. I found that priming the walls made a huge difference and that I used a lot less paint to get the same coverage after priming. 

I used increasingly lighter tones on the walls and picked out the occasional block in a mid-brown or a light brown. Then I dry brushed with Citadel Ushbati bone. 

Then I used Citadel washes, Seraphim Sepia, Agrax and Fleshtone on the odd block to introduce a variety of hues

The Gate 

I decided not to use the impressive gateway that came with the wall, it seemed a bit out of place for what I imagined the Bastle to represent

  So I made one using 3 layers of walnut veneer glued together and pressed to make the correct thickness. I used four strips of 3mm walnut strip glued together to make gate posts. (The wood came from Antics)

I made the gates to the height of the wall.

I scored the gates to represent planking and the used the 3mm strip as rails. I cut some small triangular blocks to mount the cross bar on. I fixed these with Evo-Stick

I mounted the walls on thick card and varnished them. 

I like the small details in these projects so despite being pressed for time I decided to create some hinges from plastic rod and whisky lead foil for the gates

I am pleased with this, they will paint up well enough, although something seems to be missing…some little detail…

I took some 1 mm plastic rod and shaved off some tiny discs…

the fiddly bit! I found it best to drip very small drops of super glue on to the hinges and pick up the discs on the tip of the knife. It really only needs a smear of glue for each as they are tiny so I would carefully dip each disc into a drop of glue before placing it on the hinge 

The finished gate. The hinges have been painted black with Citadel Dark Reaper highlights. Some of the clumps of vegetation are little bits of the test piece I used for the mat

The outer aspect of the gates. The yellow shrub Forsythia? came with a terrain pack that I bought from a German company many moons ago. 

A wall corner piece. The moss is simple flock.

I like the shooting slit idea

I used a lighter shade of flock here, on top of the flat green to give the moss some highlight.

I am considering using some moss on the house but really can’t decide. I have two days to go and still quite a bit to get finished, the house looks ok as is so probably won’t get mossed!

Wednesday! On to the Hills!