Sunday, February 10, 2013

Plans, Dreams, Schemes...

In this post, I share with you my plans - both baked and still squishy - along with the attendant variables and tangents.  Let's see if I can keep this on track, shall we?

Core Idea: Create 3 forces - Stark, Lannister & Greyjoy - in 28mm mixing and matching miniatures and parts of miniatures across such reputable and generally comparable lines as Perry, Claymore, Fireforge, and Black Tree. 

Game Systems: Initially, my plan is to use Dux Britanniarum with Stark and Lannisters following Romano-Brit and Greyjoy conforming to Saxon force composition, career tree and cards.  Having Stark AND Lannister allow me to introduce two gaming buddies - Jay and John - to the DB rules as I play parallel campaigns against each as the Greyjoy raiders. (Greyjoy's Rebellion)

Four classes of troops in DB will translate to: Household Knights (elites), Men-at-Arms (warriors), Bannermen Livery (levy) and skirmishers.  Initially, we will play un-modified DB with only cosmetic changes to the nomenclature until we're conversant with the original rules enough to know what we want to modify.

Additionally, I will build enough levy-level troops to also try a few games of a translation of Studio Tomahawk's Saga to the Westeros setting from Tabletopdeutschland with dice boards for Stark and Lannister.

Painting:  This is a dilemma for me.  I'm a respectably good painter but I'm slow, don't have scads of free time and I don't do free-hand (shields and banners).  I am seriously considering painting only test models and farming them out to a painting service.  I give up the personal pride in exchange for having them finished in our lifetimes.

On a related note, I have a friend who is a graphic artist working up some paper banners for these three factions and their primary bannermen - Karstark, Glover, Umber, Piper, Clegane, etc.  If that goes well, we'll move on to complimentary art that can be translated into DIY water transfers for shields. 

Achieving this will be plenty of project for this year. But some thoughts for what lies beyond are:

  • Scale up to massed battles in 28mm using Hail Caesar and maybe, maybe Impetus which my group has not explored.  
  • Pursue massed battles using "Grand Scale" - i.e. 10mm or 15mm with Warmaster Ancients/Medieval translations on the Specialist Arms board. There are two versions; one by Wellspring and another by Happymcclap.  Both have great ideas.  I've wanted to game in a more command and control scale for some time and doing it with this project appeals to me.  We'll see.

Coming soon: Photos of Stark men-at-arms conversions...

5 comments:

  1. I can't speak for Hail Caesar, but Black Powder handles small units/actions quite well, so I'm guessing it's the same for HC, so your mass battles don't have to be that 'mass'...

    It should handle DB sized units without too much trouble, so you can use the DB campaign rules and switch between rules for your games to keep it 'fresh'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jim have a good point there, I have run small games with both BP and HC and both rules handle them very well.

    Nice to hear some of your future plans !

    Best regards Michael

    ReplyDelete
  3. As a die-hard fan of combining and repurposing plastic kits, I approve wholeheartedly of this endeavor!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The idea to do Game of thrones armies is really very good. As for the shields etc..couldn´t you useself made decals? Thereßs a bit of initial effort but in the long run it will Save a lot of work

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Paul,

      My graphic artist friend who is making my paper banners will attempt the shield art for DIY decals.

      He's never done anything like this but he's clever and I have hopes he'll come through.

      Naturally, I'll be happy to share the wealth when it comes to reality.

      Wade

      Delete