Ed Allen

Model armies of painted 28mm medieval miniatures, older metal, probably mostly Gripping Beast brand, on a scenery table depicting a dry part of Spain’s, with The Barons’ War rulebook in the bottom right.

View of the starting position from behind the Almoravid army as an Almoravid force ambushes the head of a Spanish column. Both armies are leading with spears in the center, archers on the right Almoravid flank, crossbows angled out behind the Spanish dismounted knights with spears, and both sides with their cavalry in reserve. Painted 28mm miniatures of El Cid’s era.

A higher view looking down on the Almoravid army from behind

Looking down on the Baylee from over the Almoravid right, where a unit of five archers is posted to fire from a rooftop. This is mid battle with the flanking cavalry having charged the crossbows and chased them back and bounced charges by both foot knights and mounted knights that charged through the crossbowmen.

Got in a learning game of The Barons’s War with Reconquista troops painted mostly by Rob Schmitt, with some basing work and tweaking by me.

Batch of minis for Guards of Traitor’s Toll in progress.

That looks more like A to me. It seems more peaceful than B which has a bit more menace.

It depends on the feeling you want it to evoke.

My first proper rules were age ~12 in an adult club setting where they were running different rules pretty much every week. So I don't remember if Chainmail or Fast Rules or Fletcher Pratt or Frappé or Colonial Skirmish or something else was first. I remember bits of games but not the order.

His book is one of my very early wargames things, but I’ve never actually played the rules in it.

Thanks. Glad it works for you.

Yeah, I did a lot of Hexengarde printing in the last couple years. Still need to do some more unruined stuff when I get back to printing.

There are some good videos about it on YouTube. That’s what first caught my attention.

HUMAN ARTISTS OF EARTH! use only one photograph of tiny painted toy soldiers to convince people to follow you.

Yesterday I painted up the cobblestone mat I made last year and did a layout for Guards of Traitor’s Toll with it. It’s only 2’ x 3’ so I need to do another 1’ x 3’ to fill the table without using something else. Followed techniques from a Black Magic Craft video-rubber mat, caulk, texture roller.

Painting lately for Guards of Traitor’s Toll. This is yesterday’s batch.

Opened up my wet palette for the first time in some months and discovered that while the copper wire had prevented ordinary mold, a yellow slime mold had grown and eaten some of the palette paper.

Nice. I really enjoyed painting the Foundry Cossacks too.

Later edition of the same
map Patton used, so I remember reading back when. Seems plausible, as I saw an official U.S. campaign map in the U.C.B. map room in the 80s it and had copies of the little road rise and fall chevrons from the Michelin map.

A simple, little dungeon is the last finished map in that notebook. I did quite a few in this stone barrow style. #dungeonmaps #dndmaps

Chaos Lair from the same notebook #dungeonmaps

A cavern map from the same notebook. #D&Dmaps

Another D&D map I drew in the teens. Heavy on the underground river theme.

Hand drawn dungeon map in ink dominated by an underground river that pours into a large crevasse.

Came across this map I made about 10 years ago while looking through an old graph paper book. #d&dmaps #oldschooldnd #dungeonmaps

Wilds encounters are determined when first triggered in a hex unless it is a quest goal or otherwise previously hinted. I roll in Knaves, OD&D, Worlds Without Number, a D30 book, Ultimate Toolbox, or do binary question dicing to get basically what is encountered, and riff on that.

The world around began with just theater of the mind interpretation based on the nearby settlements sketch provided by DunGen, eventuallly elaborated into a hexcrawl map centered on Sallowfort Hall, starting with the known, and dicing for terrain and encounter size/frequency of hexes as I drew it.

I’ve leaned into procedural generation for the Sallowfort dungeon contents, starting each level by generating it with my DunGen OD&Dish point crawl generator (meta-studios.com/dg/dungen.html), rearranged, tweaked, remixed loot to be more inline with Knave, and added details and interpretation.

The party is third level now, having spent the longest time I’ve seen in my 50 years of DMing at first level and a much shorter time at second. It seemed like they were actively dodging my efforts to put treasures in front of them, back in front of them after being missed in a couple cases.

Another episode of my “This Old House” meets “Dark Shadows” Knaves 2 campaign done for the night. Peregrine Sallowfort, inheritor of a ruined manor that happens to have a large dungeon beneath it and his four ne’er-do-well friends continued exploring the second level. Lowish stakes, high weirdness.

Ha ha, have a Knaves 2 game to run tonight, and a bunch of stuff to do over the next few days & weeks. Probably in July...

Nice. My itch to assemble some more Stargrave guys from my backlog of sprues is growing.

Had baboons wipe out my expedition once in Source of the Nile back in my halcyon youth when I mostly ran RQ.

Shades of Clippy.

I enjoyed the books. Will give it a watch.