Pendragon Diorama-rama (Again)

[This was my eighth entry for the Fifth Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, reposted here for folks not following that blog.]

In between painting my Epic Orks, I took the time to bang out a small diorama.

This is a project for a tabletop role-playing game campaign I'm currently running, the Great Pendragon Campaign for the King Arthur Pendragon RPG. This is a massive adventure that takes players through the entire sweep of the Arthurian saga, from Uther's downfall to the final battle between Arthur and Mordred. Along the way, the campaign follows the timespan of the Middle Ages, such that Uther's reign is similar to the 11th century while at Camlann the troops are accoutered in a manner reminiscent of the War of the Roses.

As a visual aide, I've been making these little dioramas to show the players as different types of arms and armor appear. Likewise, outside of enchanted Britain, the world goes along much as it did in our own 6th century, and whenever that element intrudes into the mythic timeline, I'll include a bit of it in the diorama.

Right now, we're in the "Conquest Phase", which takes its cues from Malory's and Geoffrey of Monmouth's descriptions of young Arthur's wars against the "Roman Empire" and the Irish. To reflect this age of war, this diorama features only military men (I usually try and include some civilians and ladies in the set pieces). I crafted a base divided into three parts, an homage to medieval maps that showed continental divisions with narrow little waterways.

On the "Britain" portion, we have Arthur's men, sporting their "early-13th-century" (the point where the campaign is currently at) arms and armor. Miniatures are primarily Curteys (as are the transfers), with the herald, er, heralding from Barony Miniatures.

On the "Ireland" portion, we have tribal Irish (from Crusader). This was my first go at painting plaid patterns, and I just had to muddle through as best I could.

And on the "continental" portion, we have late-Roman infantry (also from Crusader) ready to defend their crumbled empire.

A fun little project, and one that particularly emphasizes the at-times rather gonzo nature of the Great Pendragon Campaign - this is sort of the medievalist equivalent of mixing cavemen and dinosaurs! But that's what's in the literature, and we're having great fun with it. We've been playing for a year of real time and still have about nine months (and 40 game years!) left to complete...

"James Larkins" - My First Proper Foray Into Dioramas

[This figure was submitted to a "Bonus Round" (Riders & Mounts) of the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.]

Around this time last year I finally fulfilled a long-simmering ambition to make use of a certain online genealogy website to do some family history research. Imagine my surprise as I traced my paternal line, the Larkins family, and found out that my direct patrilineal ancestor came over from Ireland as far back as the early 1700s!

Even more of a surprise was that his son, James, served with distinction through nearly the entire course of the American War of Independence, from Brandywine and Valley Forge all the way through to Yorktown, where he received a near-fatal injury that put him out of the war for good.

(On an eerie note, the injury seems to have been of almost the exact same nature as the one that nearly did me in back in 2012 - a severed artery in the upper thigh region.)

James served with the 4th Continental Light Dragoons, one of the few cavalry units in Washington's army. After the war, he returned to civilian life and worked as a tailor until failing eyesight obliged him to apply for a veteran's pension, which he received (and is the reason we know all these details about his life). He named his first-born son (my great-great-great-etc.-uncle - I'm descended from his second-born son) Washington. He was a Patriot through and through.

All of this information came as total news to me and my family; somehow, somewhere along the way, the fact that our ancestor had served with distinction in the American Revolution had become lost to history. So naturally I wanted to do something to memorialize this finding, and just as naturally I turned to the world of miniatures.

I decided to go for 40mm, a scale I've never done before. The figure is from Miniature Service Center's range of 40mm "Trident Design" AWI figures. The figure required a bit of work to get it ready to paint, particularly when it came to the horse. Lots of filling and supplemental green-stuff work.

I've painted the figure of "James" as he might have appeared towards the end of the war, in the early fall of 1781. By this point he was a sergeant in the regiment, though I couldn't find any information regarding insignia of rank in the 4th CLD, so I didn't include any.

I'm quite satisfied with how the figure turned out (I even researched horse coloration of Revolutionary America!), but there's...something more that needs to be done with the base, I think. Since these photos were taken, I've added some fallen autumnal foliage and bracken, but there's a bit of empty space that could use some filling, methinks. Maybe a tree, or a broken Union Jack standard on the ground, or...? I dunno. I'll think it over, and in the meantime this bad boy is up on display in my office.

[Pendragon] Diorama-rama

I'm currently running The Great Pendragon Campaign for one of my tabletop RPG groups (which you can listen to here, if you're so inclined as to listen to RPG actual-plays). For those of you not in the know, this is an epic campaign for the King Arthur Pendragon game that takes players from the rule of Uther all the way through to the death of Arthur.

Part of the conceit of the game's framework is that as you move through the Arthurian saga, you move through the history of the Middle Ages. When you start out, technology and social mores are equivalent to the time of William the Conqueror; by the end, everyone's running around in Gothic armor and there's chivalry and chaste amor and all that stuff.

The campaign is divided up into Phases, and with the advent of a new Phase generally comes a shift in technology and fashion. The Great Pendragon Campaign features little vignettes at the beginning of each chapter showing a typical knight, squire, and lady of the Phase. As this venture represents a significant investment of time on my part, I decided to do the thing properly and take that vignette idea and turn it into little three-dimensional dioramas.

At present, I've so far made two dioramas: one for the Uther/Anarchy Phase, and one for the Boy King Phase. There are four more remaining to be made, and I'll post them on this blog as they come along.

First up, then, is the Uther/Anarchy diorama. These phases are not only evocative of the Norman period, but also feature some elements of the historical late-5th/early-6th century time that the phases nominally take place in, so I had fun researching Dark Age fabric dyes and colors. This is a time of pugnacious knights, Saxon invaders, and high social mobility.

Next up is the Boy King Phase. As the name implies, this is the period of King Arthur's appearance and  subsequent consolidation of his rule, and this is when the Medieval gloss fully overtakes the Dark Age period. It reflects the time of Henry II in England and the appearance of concepts of chivalry and tournaments. Hand-painting those chekers was fun!

Paint Table Saturday (8/9/14)

Hmm, it looks like this is turning into more of a bi-weekly thing... Who thought it was a good idea to have this be on a Saturday? I'm always so busy that day! Ah well.

At any rate, not a whole lot of new stuff on the desk. I ended up ordering the remainder of my WarmaHordes Skorne army thanks to a couple nice online sales, so those are all assembled and primed, but since they're primed black, they sort of fade into the background. I've also started on that Pendragon diorama project, as well as my 40mm AWI diorama.

I took some close-up shots of my completed Titan Gladiator, but I didn't like the way they turned out, so I'll have to try again in a future post.

At this point, I've got more than enough to be getting on with, so I'd best be getting on! Hopefully by the next update, there'll be far fewer minis on the table and a few "glamor shot" posts to show for it.

Paint Table Saturday (7/26/14)

I missed last week's update due to being out of town and away from my computer all day. In the interim, my table's been filling up! Let's take a look:

Starting from the left of the frame, we see my growing WarmaHordes Skorne force. I finished up my Titan Gladiator this week (and will be posting photos soon) and am moving on to the others currently in my collection. This progress has stoked my enthusiasm for this project, and I've already started adding more figures, with some more on the way.

Moving to the right, we see a couple diorama projects I'm working on - a foray into 40mm scale that I'll be posting about at some point in the future, and then an RPG-related project for the King Arthur Pendragon campaign I'm working on.

Then, we've got my two Ronin factions that I pulled out today, figuring I might as well get a start on them.

Finally, peeking in from the right-hand frame, my remaining Legio Metalica titans for my Epic40K collection. They're half-painted at this point and waiting patiently for my Epic muse to return. Right now, I'm pretty gung-ho on the Skorne, and so the Skorne shall continue to hold my attention for the time-being.

As always, photos of completed models will be forthcoming as time allows. Til next week!