Lads! Lads, I've got a plan...

To quote Michael Caine.

This is probably going to be the last posting for 2012. I think its rather unlikely that I'm going to finish anything much before the new year.

However, I have plans for 2013. Here goes...

Finish the Pictish army (naturally, well, there's barely five minutes work there is there?)
AVOID building a Viking army!
Build a Sub-Roman army (this is predicated on Gripping Beast getting their plastic generic Dark Ages warriors out. Hint hint!)
Scratch up some earlier Saxons to make my Anglo-Saxon army more versatile.

And terrain... LOTS of terrain. I blame two books. Leslie Alcock's Arthur's Britain and the Warhammer Age of Arthur supplement.

Alcock's work is getting a little bit dated and the scholastic view is that there can in no way possibly have been such a person as King Arthur because of the tall, mismatched stories. But then, as Geoffrey Ashe put it "...as a warning to skeptics who argue that anyone credited with giant-killing and dragon-slaying must be fictitious, I would point out that (Davy) Crockett himself, a U.S. Congressman, became the hero of tall tales as far-fetched as any told of Arthur". So there!

Alcock's work and especially the ideas over warfare and the reconstruction of South Cadbury were just compelling. It hooked me and reeled me in!

 The AoA supplement is out of print and makes good prices second-hand on Ebay but is well worth it. The scenarios are quite broadly applicable - defence of a river crossing, attack on a retreating raiding force, siege of a decaying town, and are quite easily mutable to make the engagements bigger or smaller.

All of these require terrain. A dyke and a fortress wall. The dyke is a fairly simple construction. A deep ditch and an earth bank, with limited revetting, no obvious construction and without actual gates - just bits where there are no ditches. I need about four linear feet so I'll make it in sections, with the opening separate so it can go in anywhere along it.

The fortress wall, now this is a real project! Based on Alcock's various reconstructions, with the addition of corners, watch turrets and gateways! Again, I'll make this in sections to allow it to sit at various points on the board. I see about three linear feet of wall, in various lengths, plus the bits and pieces.

Luckily, I had a real find not long before Christmas. Feet and feet of pieces of the waste poly foam I use, in bits about six inches square! What more could I need?