After-Action Report
A few
weekends ago I had the pleasure of recreating this classic CHAINMAIL scenario,
originally written by Gary Gygax!
I had the
opportunity to play this scenario on the Legends of Wargaming sand table at
GaryCon VI, thanks to Paul Stormberg and Kevin Maurice and special guest Judge
Terry Kuntz. I really enjoyed it and
gained a new appreciation for the CHAINMAIL Man-to-man rules as a result.
When I
started building my own sand table and wargaming room I was always mentally
aiming to make this happen, and quite a few years later, it finally did.
In the next
few blog posts I am going to discuss:
- The preparation for the game
- Army set-up and initial moves, and finally
- The main conflict and lessons learned
Needless to
say it was incredibly fun and everyone involved thoroughly enjoyed the
scenario, even the two 10-year-olds who more or less gave up on the battle and
just played with my other miniatures!
The Models
Firstly, it
took me quite a while to assemble all of the necessary miniatures for the
game. In total there were 60 Vikings and
49 Norman figures to collect. I was able
to find a few sets of painted figures as lots on eBay. Most of these had to be, at the least, (re)based
and flocked.
The miniatures were assembled from several companies and are mostly metal, although some of the Normans are from the Conquest plastics line.
The Norman Defenders
The Viking Assaulters
The Norman cavalry are all mine from flash trimming to sealing and I’m quite proud of how they turned out!
The Table
The table
set up was pretty straight-forward. The focal point of the map is the Norman
fort, set atop a small hill on a headland between the English Channel and an
unnamed small river estuary. In the
original scenario it was just a simple wooden walled fort with a single gate. In my imagining, the Normans made use of an
existing old Roman stone watchtower and added some dark age palisades to fill
out the hilltop.
To
accomplish this I had to wet the sand on the entire table to sculpt the right
contours. I stole the idea from
somewhere on the interwebs to paint the top of my table blue so that all that
is necessary to create water is to move the sand out of the way, and that is
exactly what I did for the ocean and river on this board.
I set up the
fort temporarily to get the dimensions just right, but then removed all but the
stone tower, which I had to party bury to get the scale right, so that I could
‘seal’ the sand.
I picked up
this trick over at TMP – The Miniatures Page (a fantastic resource for all
sorts of miniature wargaming). This
involves mixing a solution of PVE (Elmer’s style) glue with water (warm water
works best) in a spray bottle. A 50/50
mixture works best but sometimes will gunk up the spray bottle so I usually go
with something less, closer to 3:1. I add
in a bit of Evergreen paint to give a subtle grass effect to the sand as
well. Once the water dries out on the
sand it creates a ‘crust’ that will stand up to all but the most brutal finger
stabbing or digging of mini bases.
I let that
dry for about a day and then put the finishing touches on. The road is of a dark brown craft sand and a
simple ‘stencil’ made from cardboard to keep the edges crisp. The woods were not a part of the original
scenario but I thought they added a nice visual touch and gave me an idea to
add into the scenario as well, which didn’t end up playing much of a factor at
all.
Some loose
green flock thrown liberally around the table completed the effect of the grass
areas. I then went back and used dry,
un-sprayed sand swept up with a large brush to create the beach areas, which
don’t show up particularly well in photos but were quite good-looking in real
life.
The Final Result
The fabulous resin longships are from Adrian's Walls. Palisade walls by Wargames Terrain Workshop. Stone tower from Blue Moon Manufacturing.
In the next post I will cover the army set up and initial moves.
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