A Pair of Blue Thureophoroi.

Thought I'd push the colour pallette a little bit with these.

These are Polemarch thureophoroi and very nice they are too. If you look closely at the left hand miniature you can see the Boetian style corrugation behind the cheek guard which is a nice change.

Antigonid Army Progress.

First up here are a few shots of the completed Heavy Cavalry. The wedge base will not be a permanent fixture, its just convenient for storage etc.

Here is the army as of today. Some work is still required on the smaller unit of phalangites, finishing off shields, adding Northstar pikes & finishing off some detail on the bases. But thats pretty much it for Doson and his boys, the light infantry and mercenaries will be sourced from my existing collection of thureophoroi & peltasts and I'll probably use my Foundry Thessalians for Philopoemon and the Acheaen cavalry.

As far as the Spartan army for Sellasia goes, most of these will come from the existing Hellenistic collection, but I am planning to paint up another 18 thureophoroi ( polemarch) to bulk up numbers.

I've been having a bit of a think about the Sellasia re-fight over the bank holiday and reckon the most viable way to get a decent game out of it is to concentrate on the Macedonian assault on the Evas Hill which formed the left of the Spartan position and the cavalry fight in the adjoining valley. These two parts of the battle at least have some bearing on each other, the Phalanx vs. Phalanx clash between Antigonus and Cleomenes is too isolated to add anything to the game.

Antigonid Royalty.

The latest miniature off 'The Workbench of Doom', a member of the Antigonid royal line sporting a pair of racy purple boots ala Demetrius Poliorcites.

Antigonid Heavy Cavalry.

Not even dignified with the title Companions, these are the Polemarchs representation of the later Antigonid heavy skirmish cavalry painted by me.

Until I took a punt on these as part of an order to Gripping Beast I hadn't realised what nice figures they were ( mainly due to the crappy pictures on the website). As well as their intended use they would make decent light cavalry or Politikoi for a contemporary Seleucid army, shields would have to be swapped for a thureos or aspis style though if I remember my AMPW correctly.

Greek Cavalry circa late 2nd Century BC.

Finished these fine fellows in the wee small hours this morning. They are Foundry World of the Greeks companions with wire javelins & Polemarch thureos added. Its quite difficult to pin down just how the lighter hellenistic horse would have been equipped at this point in time but I've pulled together the evidence presented in Duncan Head's AMPW and Nick Sekunda's Seleucid publication and come up with a nearest best guess using spare figures and bits from the mons plumbatum in the attic.

Another box ticked for the Sellasia project. Generic Greek Cavalry: DONE.

Nouveau Thracians Completed.

A unit completed in a week is un- heard of for me, but here is a nice even dozen of the black clad fellows:

These chaps are going toward the projected Sellasia re-fight at an as yet undefined moment in the future, soon to be joined by more thureophoroi and a unit of Antigonid shielded cavalry.
I'm still not 100% sold on the standard design, it puts me in mind of The Comedian from The Watchmen graphic novel somehow; but frankly I'm struggling to come up with anything more appropriately Thracian looking. Rather inconsiderately they forgot to leave any concrete evidence lying around, if indeed they ever bothered with such things.

Sunday Cthulhu Session. Murder in Shanghai.

Finally got round to playing Call of Cthulhu again after a break of four years. Messrs Bryant & Johnson spent a few days in the shoes of Detectives Proctor And Esterhazy of the Shanghai Municipal Police investigating a brutal murder on the houseboat 'Soochow Pearl'. After running the gamut of Bloody Alley, paranoia about Police corruption, the nefarious "Twenty One Dollar Mob" & the attentions of a camp brothel owner & occultist going by the unlikely name of Fairchild Golightly they finally end up in a Mexican stand-off with a tentacled horror seeking "The Box that Sings".
Ultimately temporary insanity claims Esterhazy & Proctor is put on indefinite gardening leave while his superiors instigate an extensive cover up.

A few handouts & props from the session:

I think we all had a good time playing through this, certainly worth all the effort that was put in making all the props and getting a day organized to all be in one place at the same time. I'd forgotten though what hard work GMing can be. Talking for eight hours solid and keeping track of numerous plot threads really takes it out of you, perhaps its a good job we don't get around to playing that often.

Later Thracians.

Got these Crusader Miniatures in the post a couple of days ago and couldn't resist painting up a few.

These will be going toward the Antigonid army for Sellasia in the, I hope, not too distant future. In absence of any other info I've gone with the colour scheme noted for Thracians at Pydna 70 years later. It has to be said its easy to do and visually effective, certainly a lot quicker than painting stripes & zig zags on the earlier version of Thracian.

Even More Phalangites & More Still.

Finally got cracking on the Polemarch Antigonid phalangites that I won off ebay many moons back, these plus their unpainted brethren will form one wing of the Macedonian Army for the planned Sellasia refight later this year.

Also got started on the infantry for my Parthian Army last night. I'm going with the mountain tribesmen look, though you could argue that those nicely oiled Elymaian beards might start to resemble these after a month on campaign.

These hirsute mountaineers started life as Crusader Miniatures Kardakes

but a little scalpel work on the tiara headresses and some green stuff later and hey! presto. Still haven't decided whether to use small round shields or the ubiquitous thureos, but they will definitely be javelin armed.