Keep Your Powder Dry

The Museum of London Docklands currently has an exhibition exploring 700 years of executions in London's history; originally planned to appear in 2020 the exhibition fell victim to lockdown cancellations and disappeared from the Museum's schedule. It's finally here, but now on show at Docklands rather than the London Wall site. As I mention the London Wall site, it is about to permanently shut its doors (December 4th), in preparation for its move to the new site in West Smithfield (planned to open in 2026) and rebrands itself London Museum. The exhibition runs until 16th April 2023 and has an entrance charge. The Musuem recommends that the exhibition is suitable for 12 years and older. Obviously, the lack of interactive execution methods precludes the very young. The exhibition, unsurprisingly given its theme, is very macabre and probably isn't for everyone. The exhibition starts with a look at methods of execution and its use in medieval times, mostly the exhibits are ...

Next set of rules to come under the spotlight are Field of Glory Renaissance.  An interesting, and very different set of rules to those already reviewed here... Field of Glory: Renaissance (henceforth FoG:R) come, unsurprisingly from the Field of Glory (FoG) stable Slytherine. FoG originally was an ancients ruleset developed by Slitherine and published by Osprey in 2008. Big hardback generic ancient rulebook with lots of supplements that give specific theatre/period armylists. These were quickly followed by Renaissance and Napoleonic (FoG:N) variants.  Sounds familiar? The precursor of FoG was a series of rules from the Wargames Research Group called De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) - a set of ancients and medieval rules that spawned a whole host of variants and army list books including renaissance (DBR) and Napoleonics (DBN). The FoG games are very definitely the heir to the DBA games. A standard set of game mechanisms, tweaked for specific periods would be utilised by the now d...

Warlord Games' Pike & Shotte variant of Black Powder/Hail Caesar is the latest set of rules to come under the spotlight. Like Black Powder (and Hail Caesar), Pike & Shotte is described as a toolkit set of rules - there are not rules for every eventuality, players have explicit permission in the rules to tweak and adapt as they see fit (something everyone has probably been doing with every set of rules ever written since H.G. Wells was a lad). Pike & Shotte takes the Black Powder game mechanisms and gives them a C16th and C17th flavour. These are generic rules for the period covering everything from Henrician armies, 30YW, samurai, to the wars of Louis XIV. A number of supplements give specific conflict 'flavour'. In our case 'To Kill A King' covers the English Civil War. Of the 168 pages of the supplement, there are just 21 of 'new' rules, and of those only 4 are ECW specific rules (the other rules cover campaigns and sieges). The rest of the sup...

As painting season is now officially open, here's my latest paint discovery. Russeted armour? What's that I hear you ask? Russeted armour is armour has been allowed to rust (don't ask how it is encouraged to rust - trust me) and is then oiled and polished.   Russeted armour at Broughton Castle (just ignore the blackened English pot in the foreground) In between bothering tour guides and volunteers at stately homes and cathedrals across the land, I often longingly admire russeted armour, wondering how I could replicate the colour and finish on my 15mm figures. I know that I am not alone. Close up of my first 'new recipe' finished figure Well dear readers (hello all nine of you), I think I have hit upon a paint recipe that almost captures the colours of russeted armour. I have previously shared my first attempt at russeted armour in the e quipment painting guide post . But I always thought that I could do better. Here are the results of my experimentation For this exp...