Terrain 11 it's all Ray's fault! The walls of Florence 1500

So Ray of the "don't throw a 1" blog is very good at covering shows and supplying copious photos, a year or two ago there were photos on his blog of a demonstration game with a renaissance city and a number of people said
" oh we could do with one of those" and  I made a comment saying I could do with one of those castles, "castles what castle?" Says Ray.
The castle in question is actually a toy castle I bought from Debenhams before they went bust, £13 and I have already posted the keep as terrain 6, I first saw this castle on the blessed Mr Awdrys 28mm Victorian warfare blog. When I say I bought it, actually my nephew bought it on my behalf as he was passing and then decided it was such good value he'd get one for himself too!
Unfortunately he realised that he didn't have room in his flat for the whole castle and just wanted the keep, so he gave me the walls and so I decided, I know I'll build a renaissance city! I didn't want a  city with slopping walls, really I wanted late medieval to suit 1495-1530 ish.

I wanted  Florence!

So starting with the pair of toy castle sets I needed to add a thickness as the step supplied with the castle was insubstantial. I had a redundant flush panel door which I ripped down with a skill saw and then cut to the right widths with a cross cut saw. In the ends of the cut down doors I filled them with sawdust and pea and gravel so that when I needed to add collapsed wall pieces it would look like a cross section of the wall. I also wanted all the pieces to be modular so that the towers could act as corners, which is why I didn't add any doors, in addition I had to fill in the large arrow slots but I think that works fine.  I was going for Dubrovnik style limestone (as Dubrovnik is a renaissance walled city designed by an Italian)

Apart from the Mediterranean church ( subject of a previous post) the buildings are work in progress of tt combat mdf Venetian buildings that I am coopting for more general Italian,  they're still wip because I want to add pitched tiles roofs to them as flat roofs are great for carnival (tt's game ) but not really correct for period. Still overall feel is pretty good and I look forward to a siege, maybe Rome 1527?

I'd be happy using it as a French city,100years war and with a change of internal buildings I can use it for ECW too,I just need a  bigger table! So it's all Ray's fault, thanks Ray!

Best Iain 

Flodden/ Irish 1 AHPC post

In June  my daughter bought me some Perry Irish figures from their War of the Roses  range for my birthday.  I'm planning on using them as Highlanders for Flodden as I appear to have enough renaissance figures for the Italian wars ( never!) and I want to deploy them elsewhere,  if I sort out some Highlanders and use my WOTR figures for the English ( with appropriate early 16th century command ) I can use Swiss for Scots and I'm good to go
This post is if you like a test with one of the Perry figures, a sword wielding ECW  Highlander from Foundry, an Old Glory Irish archer and finally a lightly converted Ral Partha Viking that,wait for it, I bought in 1977 to play basic D&D as a kid,there I've said it!
Well him and his two identical companions, cost the princely sum of 25p for the three of them!
He wasn't much use as a  henchman, chainmail and double handed swords didn't figure that much, he's been knocking around in a box  for over 40 years but finally he has had the horns cut off his helmet (it was the 1970s!) and been painted up as a gallowglass (scots mercenary in Ireland,or better equipped highlander)
Lovely sculpt and I think the disparate figures work well together

 Perry

 Foundry

 Old Glory

 Ral Partha

All together, and there should be more to follow during this challenge. 

So 4 28mm figures for 20 points
30 points for Millsy's millpond
 30 more for the geriatric scandahooligan
So a total of 80 points!
All the best Iain

Dux Bellorum 1 pagan English warband an AHPC post

I remember buying a wargames illustrated in Carlisle ,I'd just walked Hadrian's wall (which was great fun)
It  had an article on the War of the Roses and on the cover, an illustration of the battle of Barnet 1471 which continues to be a battle I want to cover again in better detail, but I digress.
 There was another article on a new rule set,Dux Bellorum by Dan Mersey covering warfare in  Britain between 400AD to the Norman era and seemed to have nice mechanisms of differentiating between each group of hairy psychopaths, and appeared to offer rather more than a shoving match with spears that dark age battles can become.
In the article there was an example of building two armies out of two of the new gripping beast plastic sets, at the same time another dark age skirmish game  Saga  came out and I duly bought the plastic boxes and both rule sets, clearly advertising in magazines work!
Some years later and very little/ nothing had happened, I'd bought some metal dark age figures on Ebay but that was it, I'd initially gone off the great idea because I didn't really want two dark age armies in chainmail,  it seemed a bit silly, anyway dux bellorum got bypassed by  Lion Rampant/Dragon Rampant and dux bellorum and Saga gathered dust .
I then went to Colours a couple of years ago and found someone selling lots of cheap Black tree design ancient Germans which I had no use for and late Romans, obviously I bought them.
  I hadn't bought the Picts which I deeply regretted and then saw the same chap at Salute and was able to buy the Picts, phew! With a few more purchases I now had enough figures to give me a pagan Saxon army , Pict army, Late Roman ,Irish and Romano Brits  the armies aren't that big ,the Saxon one is eight bases , I've chosen  ten figures a base ish , so there are 70 figures here, one more base to go, they're mostly Black tree design Germans with round shields,  the armoured chaps are gripping beast plastics in  the back rows are various unknown Ebay types. I quite like the barbaric hairy, fur covered pagan Angles, looking at them now they look a bit like a bunch of Game of thrones extras!

 A unit of companions.

 A noble unit

 Some back row chaps

 Another unit of nobles

 More back row types.

 Final unit of nobles.

 Back row types.

 Ordinary warriors

 Second unit of ordinary warriors

 Final unit of ordinary warriors.

Big mass of hairy pagan English.
I know the helmets are slightly anachronistic
 ( too late on the companians and too early on the nobles) having uniformed shield colours is also wrong but makes the disparate force hold together, plus they're my toys and I'm happy with them!
If it doesn't work out with Dux Bellorum there are plenty of other rulesets I could use them with so I'm just happy to have completed them!

Points 70 x 5 gives me 350 points so I'm halfway to my total.

 The shields are handpainted but were pretty straightforward so I wouldn't bother with extra points.
  I wont be doing quite so many in one go in future, I thought dark age figures, surely I can knock them out but that wasn't the case,  next post will be 4 figures!

All the best Iain