RMS LUSITANIA
Today, the 7th of May, is the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, which presaged the USA's entry into the war. Why that date, and that event should stick in my mind I have no idea. And I wonder why that particular war, out of all the wars of the past century or so, is the one which looms largest, like some dread malignancy, on the edge of our collective consciousness? I suppose it is because it was the first war with such a huge 'butchers' bill' - though if you analyse the statistics, an infantryman in the Normandy campaign of 1944 actually had a shorter life expectancy than one in the trenches of WW1. The difference between the two wars though, is that during WW2 the poor bloody infantry made up a much smaller proportion of the armed forces as a whole than in WW1 - and the Normandy campaign didn't drag on for four years either!
Anyway, that isn't the reason for this post, interesting though it may be. In fact I'm not sure there really is a reason for this post, other than various bits and pieces of news. Several people have ordered shields from me now, though I've only heard back from one, who seemed pleased with them. I think I may advertise/announce them on TMP sometime soon - I could do with selling more, to try to cover the costs I incurred in producing them.
Work on 'my' - now 'our' - new set of ancients rules is proceeding well - at last. Col is good to work with - he makes me think properly about each item, and, because his opinion is often different to mine, forces me to justify, and argue logically for, my choices. This has to be a good thing. At the moment, things are heading in a rather different direction to my original aim. The rules owe some mechanisms to TooFatLardies - their rules are good for modelling 'battlefield friction' and 'inertia' - and something to Black Powder - a set which has some good, simple, elegant rules for 'the rest' - movement (though I don't think movement will be quite so 'sweeping' in our game), shooting, melee and, to a lesser extent, morale. So we're heading for something modelling slightly bigger battles than my original aim. The big 'battle' now is to achieve this, whilst writing rules which are simple and easy to remember, but without losing the distinctive 'flavour' of warfare during the Roman principate. The latter is a pet hate of mine - so many sets of ancients rules are awfully, boringly, bland.
I am currently trying to deal with several painting projects at once - trying to finish off a Warlord Games Testudo, painting some 'Big Men' (i.e. leader figures) for my 'Fire in the East' project, and starting on a 'hush-hush' project for Warlord Games - painting something else that I'm not allowed to tell you about now. There's been quite a bit of that lately, and they haven't yet released most of the things I've painted, so I'm not at liberty to blog them - yet.