Back to Base-Sicks

Once again, a legacy wargame from my past may potentially be in my future, resurrected, Lazarus-like, by the son of a friend.

My first love was always the sci-fi setting of Warhammer 40,000, but the "rank-'n'-flank" mechanics of Warhammer Fantasy Battle had a undeniable appeal all their own. 

With densely packed units of infantry and cavalry wheeling and marching across a largely open tabletop, rarely questioning which units or models have line of sight to the others or who has cover , while evoking the pre-20th century maneuvering of historical battles such as Gettysburg and Waterloo, WFB was a classical wargamers dream - but with dragons and giants and wizards to keep things lively.

The game was discontinued shortly after I left Games Workshop in 2007 in favour of a wildly different skirmish game (Age of Sigmar) set in the aftermath of the destruction of WFB's setting, a fantasy-tinged, vaguely pre-renaissance Eurocentric globe simply called "The Old World".

So when GW announced a return to rank-n-flank with a ruleset called Warhammer: The Old World, I was happy so see it, sure, but didn't see any real applicability to me. When my young associate said he was getting into the game with a Goblin army and asked if my Empire force might be interested in a small scale scrap, I had to give it at least a look, didn't I?

Defenders of Averland, where social order is defined by hat-size

The very first thing I discovered was the crushing revelation that pretty much my entire Empire army would need to be re-based. You see, the infantry of my human-sized army (and anything simliar or smaller size, such as Elves or Goblins) was mounted on 20mm x 20mm square bases, where larger figures (Orcs, for example) were mounted on 25mm square bases. This meant a row of four Savage Orc warriors took up the same frontage as five of my Empire spearmen, giving me a slight advantage over this larger, sturdier foe.

On the other hand, the larger bases would make it far, far easier to rank figures up tidily, and made them less vulnerable to template weapons, such as dragon's breath or exploding cannonballs and the like. So I didn't have any philosophical opposition to the idea, but the effort to recalibrate to the new regime might be prohibitively labour-intensive.

Now, if re-basing woes sound familiar to you, you may recall a similar lament when the current edition of Warhammer 40,000 was released in 2003, complete with free rules and army lists. This had an undeniable appeal to my budget-conscious wargamer soul, but nto only was it a lot of rebasing, it was a lot of different rebasing, and the potential enjoyment never seemed to equal the expenditure of effort required, so I never started, and now a new edition is already on the way anyhow, so bullet dodged perhaps?

I feared a comparable outcome of my survey of WOW, but in searching out the quickest way to rebase entire armies, I came across an intriguing prospect: since formations of soldiers are typically moved around on holders called movement trays, what if you didn't rebase your figures? What if you adapted larger trays to hold smaller figures, achieving almost exactly the same effect?

A Spanish hobbyist on YouTube demonstrated how to achieve this with corrugated cardboard and tape, moving from a ruler approach to pre-printed templates he generously provided at no charge. But cutting out 100+ individual slots for my figures didn't seem like a huge improvement from re-basing them, to be honest.

Thankfully, I was not the only individual feeling that way, and a helpful soul has made 3d-printable files for trays precisely like these available on the interwebs. 

For such things, it is remarkable to have a friend with overlapping interests, in this case, miniatures and 3d printing. Did I mention he is also my young associate's father and is likewise being drawn along in this young man's wake? Delightful - the more the merrier!

At any rate, he graciously printed up a set of trays that should enable me to re-purpose my Averlander army in a much, much shorter timeframe than rebasing them.

Certainly, painting and texturing these trays to match my existing armies will be somewhat time-consuming, but compared to all new bases?

I am still perplexed as to what to do about these 4-man bases I put together around 2005, the cuitting edge of wargaming expediency at the time. I have five of them...

Now I have to decide if it is easier to somehow cut the base into four pieces or maybe sand down the slot ridges in the tray - but the uneven columns that would result make me shudder.

At any rate, the idea of an army I painted two decades ago and which hasn't been touched in probably 15 years returning at long last to the battlefield has a lot of appeal to me in terms of both spectacle and effective recycling. Wish me luck!

Ancient Lead I: The Half-Orc and Other Specialists

Watching the fifth season of Stranger Things last week, there is obviously lots of room for nostalgia if you were a nerd who came of age in the 1980s, as the main characters are. The one that jumped out to me in the first episode though is where Mike shows the minature of his D&D character, a paladin, to his younger sister Holly. When he did, I blurted out, "Holy shit, I think I still have that figure."

But tonight, when I went though my old metal miniatures, I found a lot of figures from the same period, and even most from the same set, but that paladin model was nowhere to be found.

It's strange for him to be missing when so many other figures from that period are still lurking about. It is a bit ridiculous, actually- if I ever had an encounter where the party needed to fight a dozen or more holy knights, I can probably pull it off without substitution (although the scale - as always - would be highly questionable). 

I think my friend Brent may have used that miniature for his paladin Nigel d'Artagnan, in our one-on-one campaign in high school or junior high. Nigel later on became a bard, unfairly dismissed from his order, but who gamely kept on adventuring around the City State of the Invincible Overlord. I haven't spoken to Brent since my dad's funeral a decade ago, but now I find myself hoping that figurine sits on his book shelf or in a curio cabinet somewhere, and perhaps prompts a fond reminiscence from time to time. I can't be the only one who does this, can I?

But in looking at the other miniatures I had dug up, I was struck by one in particular - the half-orc fighter in the middle of the second group.

Initially, very few people I knew wanted to play half-orc characters, having been conditioned to despise them due to multiple readings/ viewings of The Lord of the Rings. But there he was in the Grenadier Models set 2006 - Specialists, with other heroes, including a cross-wielding cleric and a skullcapped wizard clearly evoking Nicol Williamson from Excalibur.

I remember painting him when I was perhaps 13 years old and thinking, 'who'd want to play this ugly git with the sloppy armour and broken shield,' when I thought, wait - maybe the shield is a choice, reflecting his fighting style...

I imagined this fellow, whose -2 to Charisma (a dump stat to everyone besides paladins back in the day) afforded him a +1 to both his Strength and Constitution scores, cagily lurking behind his shield, watching opponents weary themselves against it, perhaps even resting his own sword against the lip of his shield, patiently waiting for an opportune moment to strike, maybe even ending the combat in a single blow.

This was largely impossible, of course - fighters in AD&D (and in many ways, the system itself) were pretty much incapable of ending most fights quickly. But something about that combination of pose and equipment spoke to me in a manner that evokes strong memories even now, four decades later.

Sadly, with miniatures increasing significantly in both quality and scale over the years, it is hard to fathom an opportunity to use this intriguing fellow in the future. 

But I am in no hurry to give him up, either!