Kato Kiyomasa

 

1562-1611

My primary hero for my Midgard warband will be Kato Kiyomasa. If interested click on the link which will bring you to his Wikipedia entry. 

I googled his name looking for painted images of him and for an unclear reasons in at least 2 of the images he has an orange cloak. Even though a little bright, I decided to go with this colour. The rest of the colours picked are conjectural.

He is carrying a Katakana Yari.

The standard mon for Kiyomasa was an open circle, I have seen them in both blue and black. The parallel bars as seen above is a mon used by unit in Kiyomasa's army. I got bored of the open circle.

Uma-Jirushi of Kiyomasa

I will generate his specific stats when I have a better sense of the ruleset. He certainly had some interesting attributes from what history tells us.

Vietnam

I am slowly building up my Vietnam forces. From looking at the rulesets I am considering going forward with, I need to start to fill in some gaps. Chain of Command Vietnam requires a platoon aside as well as supports. I still not have received Nam68 "Tour of Duty" from Battlegroup so a little unclear in respect to figure requirement. I have a sense you need more VC/PAVN than USMC but I will have to see.

Most of my forces are from Rubicon, with some resin prints from the Gunslinger Kickstarter. I am not really enamoured of the Gunslinger figures, they are a little too heroic for me. The PAVN figures are not as  bad as  the US figures. If needed, I may buy another box of Rubicon USMC. I did need some specialised PAVN figures as well as some civilians so I recently purchased some Empress metal figures. They are nice, but maybe a little smaller than the Rubicon. 

The M48 from Rubicon was a little pricey so I bought a STL (Cults 3D) for $6.95 and the model printed well. I did have a lot of problems with the supported version which printed well in 5 parts except for the fact that no holes were placed which turned into a nightmare with the unfixed resin. I drilled holes in the model but it kept on weeping resin like a large carbuncle......lesson learned! I might print another turret because I still  having some problems with it.

DHsK HMG

M48 Patton 

Next up, I will do some civilians and I also have a PAVN Mortar team from Empress. I was hoping to put on my first Vietnam game at our club's games day at the end of January but unfortunately I will not have enough figures for a CoC Vietnam ruleset. I still do not have the POD Nam 68 game from Battlegroup, and I will not have time to familiarise myself with a new set of rules. 

Norwegian Platoon and 2025 Gaming Plans

My last partially completed figures, that I wanted to complete by the end of 2024, were my Norwegian platoon for WWII Chain of Command ruleset. These figures are almost all 3D Printed in resin. You can read about their manufacturer, organisation as well as painting scheme in 2 previous posts. I had painted almost 2 squads but I had all the Leaders, Supports and two more squads to paint to complete the platoon. I finished these on December 31st but by then the New Year festivities were starting to catch up with me, thus the delay in putting them on the blog.

Complete Platoon, the newly painted figures have yet to have snow on their bases.

Colt M29 MMG Team

Medic, Forward Observer, Sniper, 2 Senior Leaders and King Haakon!

Well it has been a pretty successful painting month, I have been isolated in the United Sates for the last month with another 2 weeks to go before I can get back to my native country. I am working on various playing aids/terrain pieces now, including for CoC, WaC, Midgard as well GdA.

2025 Aspirations

I usually do not do this, as really I play too many different rulesets now, have too many armies and warbands and have too much terrain. I have been really starting to thin things out so I basically have been subtracting rather than adding but there are some forces I would like to paint and rulesets I would like to add.

Vietnam

Still have not decided on a ruleset here, I already have several but I am looking at 2 that are still in development or I have yet to receive. A Vietnam version of CoC is being developed by John Savage, the author of What a Cowboy. He really does first class work, I am not sure if this version will be ultimately official but it looks like a lot of fun. I am waiting to receive Battle Group's latest ruleset Nam 1968. It sounds interesting and I have a sense that it is aimed at squad actions rather than platoon sized games. I am more attracted to the smaller actions but I will have to see. I still have to paint maybe 15-20 figures for a Platoon sized force for Vietnam but it is a nice project.

Midgard

This is an exciting new game which covers both historical and fantasy battles from the Classical Period to the late Middle Ages. I have a lot of figures that I can use for this including the Dark Ages in Europe as well as the Crusades. My LoTR figures which will be good for fantasy. I am also putting together a Sengoku era force for the game. Semi-official force list are presently being developed for Warring States gaming with the ruleset. This will be a long term project, as I have quite few figures to paint but I am attracted by the uniformology and well as the tactics of the period. I have printed off quite a few movement trays which the ruleset requires and am just terraining them now. 

SAGA Age of Chivalry

We should be receiving the rulebook within the month. I still have not decided on a warband or painted any figures but I see many of the players in our club already have several armies, so I am hoping to borrow some in the short term for gaming.

Gaming

I am going to try restart some games with rulesets I have not played for a while, almost exclusively from the TFL stable of games. These include Picketts Charge, Kiss me Hardy as well as Algernon Pulls it Off. 

I will of course continue CoC, GdA, WaC , M&T, Congo and SAGA as well as the Alternate History games I play including Pulp Alley, Draculas America and Carnevale. 

That should keep me busy for 2025!

Deep Ones

 

Next up are some figures from Bob Murch, they were a lot of fun to paint. They are from his Cthulhu kickstarter. Terrific Figures!

Primed white, painted with Xpress paint Orc Skin, wash with GW Antonian Camoshade. Dry brushed with VMC Bright Yellow. Eyes teeth and details picked out with various Acrylic paints. Pretty simple but I am quite happy with the result.

Movement Trays for Midgard

 

The latest offering from the TFL stable of wargaming rulesets is Midgard. The ruleset covers gaming from the Classical Period to the Late Middle Ages in both a historical and fantasy setting. It looks like an interesting game and I believe it to be quite accessible. If you have the appropriate historical or fantasy figures you are all set to go aside from needing the rulebook and some playing aids. But you will need some movement trays, in most cases 120x60mm in dimension. 

The ruleset appears to be extremely well supported by both the author on a dedicated Website as well as a Facebook group. There is also a section for Midgard on the TFL Forum. I find generally that TFL rules are well put together and since I had the figures I thought I would have a good look. 

There is quite a lot about the movement trays on the above sites with actually instructions for a magnetic type on the author's web site. Since I have a FDM printer I thought I would design some trays in TinkerCad and print them.

I have a fairly large Dark Ages collection of figures as well as figures for the Crusades so I was all set with at least 2 historical forces. Additionally I have a large collection of LoTR figures which would fit into the Fantasy setting for Midgard. 

I do have some painted Sengoku Period figures sitting about doing nothing as well as several unpainted figures and although these are just outside of the Late Middle Ages Period I felt they would work for Midgard. There are no lists for this period in the book but there is already many fan made lists for Midgard in existence and I understand that the Warring States battles are on the radar of several players so I thought I would start there. It will certainly encourage me to paint some more Samurai!

The foot figures were bought painted 15 years ago, I painted the mounted figures.

Midgard forces require 3 heroes, here is my first.

A unit of Warriors, they will be classed as Heavy Infantry

Heavy Riders

Another unit of Heavy Infantry

Tray Design

I have made 4 basic designs; one for Warriors, one for Skirmishers as well as one for Cavalry. I also have made a tray for the Japanese Heroes as they are all associated with standard bearers. The tray above accommodates 7 warriors as well as a 12mm wound die. My Japanese figures are on metal bases so I put a recess for a 5x1mm magnet in each. As you can see they are slightly above the recess for the 25mm base. I did this as the metal bases are quite thin and I wanted them to be level with surface of the tray. I can use these same trays though as slots for standard 25mm bases without the magnet for non-metal bases. You can use the dice recess or not, if you dod not want to use it then it can be covered with terrain material. I do appreciate that there are only 7 figures on the base but the number of figures in this rule set is not important and 7 will give the same mass effect as 8. The Cavalry trays will be 3 or 4 figures, while the skirmishers will have 4 figures.

Time to start printing some more trays and prime some more figures.

Some New Figures for Alternate History Games

The Dreams in the Witch House

Next up are some figures to add to the Alternate History games I play. I have really tried to limit this but I have had a lot of fun with these games and they are quite popular in Montreal. Aside from the games represented below, I also play Pulp Alley but we will see some figures for this game in my next post.

Two Hired Guns for Dracula's America. These are both North Star figures and they painted up quite nicely. Unfortunately I can not use them in my present posse but they were there so I painted them. On the left is a Skinwalker Archanist and on the right is a Carpathian Guard.

I can us this figure now for my Rashaar Gang in Carnevale. The Karcharos is a Hero in this gang. I have left it with gloss varnish as he is a water creature. 

Finally up are two figures from my Devil in the Wilderness game, I have not had much success in introducing this game in Montreal. It was locally developed and I think it is quite interesting and a lot of fun, but there are some gaps in the rules that require further development. I am told this will happen but I am not so sure.  More about the game here. I am a Lovecraft fan so I could not resist these 2 figures from Dreams in the Witch House: Keziah Mason and her familiar Brown Jenkin.

Some New Figures for What a Cowboy

 

Over the last couple of weeks I have added to my What a Cowboy collection by adding some mounted figures, as well as some Sioux, a famous gunslinger and some scatter terrain. The figures are all from 3D Breed and resin printed. The terrain is FDM printed. 

I am happy enough with all the figures but I found the 3 Sioux figures some what difficult to paint but they will do for gaming. Thanks to PY who did some of the figures and Graham who gave me the terrain pieces.