Reduce, Recycle, Reuse

When I started getting into shiny, old school 40mm figures, I was thinking about various historical, mid 19thC, campaigns, British wars in India, the various rebellions in Canada and the US Mexican War and the Oregon Crisis over the west coast border between Britain and the US. In my eagerness to do them all at once, in no time I had parts of all of these ready to go, BUT none ready. Well, the toy soldier approach was starting to appeal to me and so I made up a fictional setting and bent the narrative to justify finding ways to find a place for all. 

Faraway's Belmont Fusiliers, and the Young Buffs have been ordered to trade their old Havelock's for ordinary Pork Pie forage caps.
These OS 40mm figures are from Historifigs War of 1812 range. They are listed as Americans since that's what the Scruby catalogue said, but are actually wearing British uniforms with the Waterloo shako. The Havelocks and Porkpie Forage cap are epoxy putty over a trimmed down shako. 

The idea worked once I adapted my brain to the setting and I still think its a useful approach but since I'm trying to reduce the size of my combined collection and to focus on a smaller number of settings so I can go a bit deeper, I decided to rethink some parts of the plan. The result is that the "Colonial" theatre is now the unique setting for the early 20thC while the  mid 19thC will be constrained to the Oberhilse and Faraway wars. A few units will need a bit of tweaking, but nothing serious.

A shot from my 2009 playing of 'Forlorn Hope' from Asquith & Grant's Scenarios For All Ages
See my 'Playing The Redbook' blog series

Slowly, the plan is forming!

Mom! He's at it again!

"At what?"

"Oh! Rebasing! What a mess!"

I'm not sure if its something cosmic or just the looming shadow of the end of my 7th decade and the signs that my body and mind are starting to slow down,  but over the last month or so, I've been reconsidering my hobby plans and aims and what will someone have to handle  if  when the inevitable happens. Over the last 15 years, I've re-homed several thousand mini's in 6 scales but since I haven't stopped adding, there's still a few thousand painted and unpainted miniatures for someone to dispose of some day. 

But that's a longer term issue, in the short term, I've revised my plans with an eye to reducing the number of my active collections again so that I concentrate on pinning down my rules and running some mini-campaigns of one sort or another. 

The new regulation.

More on my revised plans later, for now, I'll finish rebasing enough units to get a game on the table midweek.

An Origin Story

How my old 15mm French Rev collection became a new 40mm one.

Really, it was all Rob Dean's fault!  (See his  French Revolution Project blog post). This was back at the 'turn of the century'. Rob had introduced me to homecasting so I naturally went from commercial moulds to making my own masters and moulds. One of the earliest projects were some 'sans culottes' for his Scarlet Pimpernel skirmish games. 

The peasant figures, sculpted, cast, modified, and painted by me some 20 years ago.

Those were very entertaining games with each player having secret missions from smugglers, young officers seeking promotion,  a marching band gaining points for playing La Marseilles (out loud) to as many French units as possible (incidentally preventing that unit  from doing anything that turn), and so on.  Naturally, one player was the Scarlet Pimpernel helping a group of escaping emigres which would be disguised as one of the French or civilian units, while one player was a spymaster trying to identify and arrest the dastardly Englishman. 

Good memories. 

Rob's French band, based on the Meisterzinn moulds.

We started planning to get them out again for a larger Scarlet Pimpernal game at Huzzah in 2020 and I started painting up more figures but COVID struck and then schedules got tangled. 

Well, we'll just have to seek to field him here, or there, or somewhere.