Here are my new peasants mixed with my old peasants, 125 angry Eastern European farmers. Quite pleased with the overall effect.
In this pic, I added a command base and some skirmishing musketeers to make it a proper rebel rabble battalia.
Here are the Peasant Levy / Dark Age unit builder mashups for my Khmelnitsky Uprising angry serf rebels.
First are seven of them that I just kinda think turned out neat. The Baron's War peasant arms don't quite match the Dark Age bodies but it's not a huge problem
These three guys sport looted German-style gear from Warlord Games' ECW/TYW plastics.
I wanted at least some to be in more casual, non-attacking poses. These guys could be objectives or civilians in a skirmish scenario, or even staffage for the terrain.
These four are armed with maslaks, a pretty region- and period-specific weapon for the poorest of peasants and tatars, just a horse or donkey's jawbone attached to a stick. I use the curved blades from the old Wargames Factory Persian Infantry to represent the jawbones, and greenstuff for the little straps holding them in place.
I've been meaning to for a while, but I finally bought a box of Peasant Levy and a Dark Age unit builder from Wargames Atlantic to combine into Eastern European rebellious serfs. The former has some delicious peasant weapon arms, including a variety of axes, billhooks, pitchforks and flails, while the latter has oodles of basic bodies and hairy heads.
I just took a handful of pics here for scale comparisons and to give a sense of the greenstuff usage this involves. These guys should go great with the Gripping Beast conversions and TAG minis that make up most of my previous peasant hordes.
Here I Stand is a boardgame of Early Modern Europe, combining military, theological and diplomatic action into a very complex card-driven map-based game. My brother rounded us all up and learned the rules, and also put together themed music playlists and drink options. It was a blast.
I decided to chip in by building miniatures to replace the standees that represent the military commanders on the board. I initially thought there was just one per faction, but there's more! I did have a couple preexisting minis that were relevant, but I had to do a lot of converting. It got a little rushed but overall they turned out quite well enough for the group.
The game standees have tiny portraits, so I explored Wikipedia and sometimes Google image search to get fuller pictures of the individuals in question. I did get a little creative to distinguish some of the plainer-dressed commanders. Fun fact: Montmorency's tennis racket is not an anachronism (except maybe very specifically in the details of form, he was Francis' tennis buddy), but Dragut's telescope predates their actual invention by decades.
The game itself was a blast! We called it at the end of turn 5 or 6, since it was 2 in the morning, and my Ottomans had the most VPs (by one!) at that point, but I doubt I would have won if we played to a proper game end.
I did feel bad about the Papacy not having any commanders to model, I had meant to bring some of the Catholic minis from my previous post so the Papal player wouldn't feel left out... but it turned out he had a better way to represent his faction:
Cossacks from Old Glory, I greenstuffed shirts and hats on some of them.
Bulking out my Crimean Tatar horde with a batch of Old Glory sculpts. Gotta say, I don't really get their whole short-sleeve jacket thing, doesn't match any other miniatures or images of Tatars that I've seen, and the full beards also seem odd, but painted up they blend in just fine with the rest of my collection.
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Here are all the infantry casualty counters I need for the next time I run my Tczew/Dirschau game. Models are my own. I need to cast a few more for the next batch which will cover cavalry and gun crew.
The little dice receptacles are just paper, I didn't want to worry too much about exact fit, the paper has some flex so it was easier to manage than hard plastic or whatever.
Well 2024 was a busy year for me. Not a lot of hobby stuff getting done for real-life reasons, but now that we're settled into our new place and gotten past the holidays I expect to do better with mini stuff and the subsequent posting.
I got another batch of Assault Group minis last year that I didn't get a chance to work on at the time, and it includes my first "real", i.e. non-kitbashed, Tatars. However, I also have a bunch of leftover Wargames Factory bits for making kitbashed ones. I decided to do them together just to keep building my Crimean force in general.
Unfortunately, I don't know if I'm just rusty at hobby tasks or what, but I screwed up the priming and sort of textured them with some splatter. It's not super noticeable on the table, and it fits their aesthetic okay I guess, but I'll probably relegate these to back-rankers once I have the numbers to do so. I do think the real and fake tatars look ok mixed up like this, which is good because I have a few more of both.
These armies are basically the MVP (minimum viable product) for the battle I want to refight. Since I'm not going to try to host this until summer, I've still got time for both practical additions (movement trays, casualty/disorder markers), and aesthetic ones (staff for commanders, some rebasing, pennants and cavalry flags), but the armies shown here could be used as-is for the battle if I wanted to.
Interesting to me is that the current lists put the Polish army at a slightly higher points value, despite a noticeably lower figure count. However, the terrain for the battle favors the Swedes substantially, so the Poles are probably still the underdogs as they were historically. More on army lists and the scenario later.
(technically the Polish-Lithuanians are missing one commander, and the Swedish one artillery piece, unfortunately I didn't make those calls until after the army shots)
36 plastic musketeers here, all from Warlord Games, with a bunch of Warlord's metal helmets and a handful of their metal swinefeathers. The swinefeathers don't fit that naturally with the figures, I had to get creative (even greenstuffing a couple right hands) to use them in minis that aren't actively firing.
Rounding out my recent cavalry work, I've completed 9 Wargames Foundry hussars to mix in with my Warlord hussars. The size matches well enough, even if the gear looks to be from different eras, although I think technically the Foundry lancers are more appropriate to the Dirschau period than the Warlord ones, which are more Relief of Vienna looking.
With these sorted, I'm actually pretty close to having everything I need ready for Dirschau/Tczew. I've got 5 more reiters to paint, then a handful of cannons and their crew, and 36 muskeeteers. Oh, and the Swedish commanders! All doable by March I think, although between Omicron and my fiancée's upcoming surgery I probably won't actually host the game until later in the year....
Another new cavalry unit, 11 warlord games cuirassiers. No conversions, the only deviation is a single TAG horse mixed in. I couldn't decide on blackened, russeted or polished armor, so I did a few of each.
For Dirschau, the Swedes will have three units of Cuirassiers, but since I don't feel like buying any more, I'll mix in some medium-armored cavalry to make up the difference, with units looking something like this...
