O'er the Hills is Published!

There is nothing quite like taking delivery of a brand new book that has your name on the cover, and on Saturday I had the pleasure of opening up my parcel from Stand to Games to find my brand spanking new copy of O'er the Hills, Early Peninsular War Scenarios written by yours truly.

Of course the book, the culmination of few years gaming, is not just down to one person, as friends I know personally and others I have met through this daft hobby across the globe via the net, have all contributed in enabling a collection of twelve separate scenarios form the core of the work alongside some other goodies that were contributed by Adrian McWalter and Quinton Dalton, the chaps from Stand to Games to be brought together under one title.

I have also had feedback from friends who have just received their copy together with comments on Facebook from others who have similarly just received copies all saying how pleased they are with the look and first read through of the content so I thought, bearing in mind that I have also received and seen comments of disappointment from those about not getting in on the Kickstarter in time, it would be helpful to show what the end product looks like and to invite those interested in getting a copy to get in touch and I will see where we are in arranging things.

The cover of O'er the Hills was a deliberate choice showing as it does the 3rd Guards in action at Talavera as depicted by C.C.P. Lawson and courtesy of the Regimental HQ Scots Guards.

I first saw this picture on the cover of 'Talavera, Wellington's First Victory in Spain' by Andrew W. Field which formed a significant reference in my work reconstructing the five scenarios that cover this very important battle and really does mark the end of this first phase of the Peninsular War.

The picture captures the intense fighting that typified Talavera and with the mountains of the Sierra de Segurilla shown in the extreme background seemed to echo the title of the book itself.

I had the pleasure of discussing the cover of O'er the Hills and the battle with Andrew and I am really looking forward to walking the battlefield later this year about which I am planning to share my thoughts here on JJ's.

For those that have purchased copies of other recent titles from Stand to Games, the production quality is sound and nicely produced, following a similar pattern to the other books, composed of  heavy glossy pages and with the type setting set against a period map backing.

The one-hundred and one pages consist of the following sections;

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Background - British Involvement in the Peninsular War
Timeline of Events in 1808-09

The Twelve Scenarios
1. The Leopard's Debut, The Battle of Rolica 17th August 1808
2. Vimeiro Hill, The Battle of Vimeiro 21st August 1808
3. Flank Attack at Ventosa, The Battle of Vimeiro 21st August 1808
4. Elvina Ridge, The Battle of Corunna 16th January 1809
5. The March to Oporto, 10th - 11th May 1809, Retreat from Albergaria
6. The March to Oporto, 10th - 11th May 1809, Rearguard at Grijo
7. Assualt River Crossing - Second Battle of Oporto 12th May 1809
8. Casa de Salinas - Battle of Talavera 27th July 1809
9. Night Attack - Battle of Talavera 27th July 1809
10. Dawn Attack - Battle of Talavera 28th July 1809
11. The Pajar Vergara Redoubt - Battle of Talavera 28th July 1809
12. The Afternoon Attack - Battle of Talavera 28th July 1809

Army Lists 1808-09
The Peninsular British
The Peninsular French
The Peninsular Spanish

The text is accompanied by colour photographs of battle sites and figures from my own collection, Warlord Games, Perry Miniatures and Stand to Games and each scenario comes with a colour map illustrating the set up positions of the forces involved together with a picture of the table during one of our many play-tests to help give an even clearer idea of the look of the table envisaged.

Along with the pictures and artwork each scenario is structured in the same format with;

The Background account to the battle and why the forces were there to help give players that all important context.

The Scenario, laying out the forces involved and their set up positions ordered by the respective commanders, together with a description of the table, its size, key terrain features and a detailed order of battle giving the recommended specifics for using Over the Hills (OTH) to play the game.

The Battle Notes then looks at why specific formations were deployed as they were and what the respective commanders had in mind on how they were going to fight the battle, again designed to give the players as much background as possible to help them get into the minds of the commanders they are representing and the range of likely options they faced.

The Terrain section then describes the impact of key terrain features on the battlefield and translates them into the types identified in OTH.

Then The Objectives for each side are summarised together with which side takes the first turn as Player A as detailed in OTH and the number of turns allowed for the completion of the scenario before an assessment is made of who won or lost and the method described to determine that.

An example of the orders of battle laid out for a particular scenario with the respective sides colour coded and units grouped with their respective commanders

As well as the twelve scenarios the book comes with three new troop listings for OTH, British, French and Spanish specific to this period of the Peninsular War and offering some really interesting new Army Special Rules for depicting the Spanish on your tabletop.

Three new Army Lists for the Peninsular War in 1808-09

For those that have now got their copy of O'er the Hills, I really hope you like the end product and will see that I have attempted to put in this book aspects that I wanted to see included, to allow gamers to play, as close as is possible with a set of wargame rules, an historical scenario.

The scenarios are designed to present the players with the forces that each commander had on the day, the terrain they were either forced or chose to fight over and the background situation that drove them to make the choices they did.

How you decide to meet the same objectives they chose or were forced to meet is up to you but you will be constrained by the factors described and in some situations you will find it difficult to win the battle but if played thoughtfully still win the scenario by outperforming your historical counterpart and making better choices than they did, not to mention perhaps a little bit of fortune thrown in for good measure.

Just as importantly, we had a lot of fun testing these games to destruction, and the book is not an academic exercise in asset management but hopefully a series of games designed to allow the players to explore the history and have fun at the same time.

Two of the scenarios have been designed to link up as a mini-campaign, and I could see all five of the Talavera scenarios being fought in the same way to recreate the battle as a whole, but in more manageable bite sized chunks for those with a small collection and/or limited table space.

If you want to delve deeper into how we played these scenarios during the design and testing I can suggest no better place to start than referring back to the series of posts here on JJ's that were running at the end of 2017 and early 2018 and can be found by clicking the tab at the top of the page.

In addition you can find other stuff relating to Over the Hills in that tab that might be useful including a description of the materials we developed during play-testing to aid our games and the link to the folder where you can download them; or just use the link in the right hand column under 'My Resources and Downloads' and click on 'Over the Hills Resources' which will take you straight to the file.

The Over the Hills tab can be found at the top of the page

If you are looking for painting and modelling inspiration then click on the respective nation tabs for the Napoleonic forces I have modelled where I also give a bit of history together with ideas on how to create the look of the unit.

In addition to that you can check out my YouTube channel, that still sounds a bit weird every time I say or write that! But yes JJ's Wargames has a YouTube Channel, where I take a bit of time to talk about modelling specifics when creating units, such as paints, the colours I have chosen and the references I have used.

Finally for those who feel they need to contact me about a specific point then there is a contact form to be found on the blog which will allow us to correspond via email, and I try to respond promptly, and all email addresses are confidential to me.

You will have to bear with me if I am oversubscribed and I would ask everyone to take the time to scour this blog for the relevant information where it is very likely to be found before dropping me a question.

And for those interested in getting a copy of O'er the Hills who missed out for some reason, then feel free to drop me a line via the Contact Form stating your name and address details together with how many copies you might be interested in and I will look into getting that sorted and get back to you accordingly.

Thanks to all those who supported this, my first venture into publishing, and I hope you enjoy the book and let me know your thoughts, your first impressions and the games you have a go at playing.

JJ

Sarmatian Cataphracts

As mentioned, the second unit of Sarmatian Cataphracts is finished and I thought I would show them in company with the first unit and my King Decebalus command base to give an impression of how imposing these units will look on the table, especially bearing in mind that these are the first two units of eventually six composing the punching power of my Sarmatians.

In the previous post I spent a bit of time looking at the combat ability of this particular troop type when using them with Augustus to Aurelian.

http://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2018/12/sarmatian-cataphracts.html

With the completion of this second unit I thought it might be interesting to take a bit of look at who the Sarmatians as a people were, recorded between 600 BC to 450 AD and how I propose to model them in my collection.

The Sarmatians as a group of unified people appears to be a bit of a misnomer as they were composed of a number of groups of nomadic people who, emerging from east of the Don River and south of the Ural mountains in the 7th century BC, gradually migrated westward over the Eurasian steppe, a vast area of open plain, some 5,000 miles long and several hundred miles wide extending from China to the Hungarian plain.

Their language is thought to have been an Iranian one similar to that of the Scythians and closely related to Persian, and there origins draw strong comparison to their eastern neighbours, the Parthians who would emerge using similar methods of light bow armed cavalry supported by heavily armoured horsemen to become a major power contesting further expansion of Rome into the east via Asia Minor.

The best known of the Sarmatian groupings are the Sauromatae, Aorsi, Siraces, Iazyges and Roxalani of which the later two figure largely in the intermittent and finally large scale military clashes with Rome that would drag on long after the defeat of the Dacians, seeing the Iazyges joining forces with the Marcomani and Quadi in the wars with Marcus Aurelius.

Thus my Sarmatian forces are set to be an army in their own right, yes operating alongside Dacian and German allies, and who knows perhaps alongside Romans when my collection reaches the shores of Britannia, but also as an independent force in their own right.

With these two units completed I will be moving on to construct three units of lighter bow and javelin armed units and eventually the Sarmatians will be able to field alone, four divisions of some eighteen units, which will present an interesting challenge for my Romans.

The other interesting aspect from a wargaming perspective is the nomadic structure of the Sarmatian peoples which means that my armies will need to be accompanied by several groups of wagons representing the homes of these people carrying their valuables and families in their wake.

The Sarmatians make a really powerful and exotic addition to my barbarian forces and with just two of the units here together with King Decebalus giving an idea of what six or so of these units, alongside their horse archers and my Dacian warbands, will look like emerging onto the battlefield, you can almost feel the ground trembling under all that heavy horse flesh!

As previously my cataphracts are composed using figures from the Warlord Games range of figures and very nice models they are, and those kontos are as fiercely sharp as they look, being made of brass rod and more than capable of drawing the blood of any clumsy hand picking them up thoughtlessly.

Next up Part Two of the Breached Walls, Terrain Build project.

Terrain Build Update - Breached Fortress Walls

My last post on terrain building and my modular sloped hills ended rather cryptically about what my next terrain project would be about, and that was because I was still working out how I was planning to do it.

When I say planning, I had the basic idea sorted out but was still looking at lots of examples of other people's work together with artwork to come up with my own finished article.

It was back early last year that I sat down to put together my collection of MDF Roman buildings and city walls from Warbases.

Even back then I was drawing ideas about creating some damaged breached sections of walls to allow them to reflect being shot at by Roman siege artillery or from undermining attacks to their foundations and facing stonework.

My walls are designed to stand in for both Roman and Dacian fortresses and at some stage I will look at putting together some sections of ditch to cover the front, but my first thoughts were turned towards damaged breached sections to allow my Romans to have a go at Sarmizegetusa at some time in the future.

So just before Christmas I ordered up another couple of sections of Warbases walls and started to mutilate them with a Stanley knife, working to a drawing I put together, imagining the look of my new breached sections.

When I'm enjoying a rich vein of creativity I like to just roll with it and so now seemed as good a time as any to get started on a plan that is still very much in my head developing rather than set in stone, if you'll excuse the pun.

The pictures show what I was left with after the knife work and note that I did not separate the wall entirely as I wanted the rigidity of the section coupled with a base underneath to give the whole structure some strength now that a third of it was missing.

The walls are a typical Roman design with a plaster finish over the facing stone that finishes off the core stonework and so I decided to give a hint of the underlying facing stonework by fixing some small panels of foam board inside the MDF which will allow me to hint at that with painting.

As I say this design was still developing in my mind as I went, so marrying the new pieces up with the standard sections helped me to visualise how they would look as part of the whole.

I have seen other people doing scratch builds of existing wall models and the need to create a base to facilitate the rubble spill requires the other sections to be equally based if we are to avoid the breached sections being slightly but noticeably higher than their intact neighbours.

Thus I ordered up some base sections from Leon at Minibits that will allow me to add a bit of terraining to the model walls already built and to marry them to the breaches.

With the breaches cut and prepared it was now on to the filler that will allow that broken rubble spill to be modelled around the MDF structure.

For this next step I turned to a can of expanding foam filler, a product I had used in the Oporto Table construction for filling awkward spaces on my cliff sections and the picture below shows the 'meringue' that developed amid the breached sections after a quick application of foam.

The fun bit is then to cut the foam to shape, stopping occasionally to allow some uncured sections to 'cook' a bit longer when exposed to the air and then coming back to reshape the expanded areas again.

The picture below shows some of the air bubbles that can form in the deeper recesses but that is not a problem as I will be going over any really strange looking holes with filler at the end of the shaping process and the bubbled foam creates a really effective undulating effect of all that rubble core spilling out once the facing stone work has collapsed.

Once the basic shape of the breach had been carved it was then time to start sprinkling large pieces of stone work that would have stayed close to the surface in the spill of core rubble and for this I used pieces of the original flat stonework of the MDF model mixed in with pieces of left over foam board chunked up to look like pieces of facing stonework.

Once the larger pieces of rubble had stuck I then applied a generous smear of plaster to create my slope effect and left the pieces to dry thoroughly over night in preparation for the final stages of PVA sealing with scatter and ballast and a paint job, to come in part two.

Next up, the second unit of Sarmatian Cataphracts is nearing completion and I am just finishing off a post looking at Taunton, the county-town home of the British army regiments of Somerset and the town's and County's history.

Terrain Build Update - Modular Sloped Hills, Finished

Carrying off from my last post I had a very pleasant weekend bringing this next stage of my 28mm terrain collection to a conclusion with the finishing off of my set of modular sloped hills.

Terrain Build Update - Modular Sloped Hills Part One

For those interested in how I put these together I have picked up from the first post and show the stages with a brief description of what each stage entails.

So once having everything sealed down with plaster and masking tape, the next stage was to add the first coat of scatter using a 50:50 mix of PVA and water painted on and then applying different grades of grit, ranging from the very fine 'Chinchilla Dust' a a very fine sand available in pet shops to a slightly more granular ballast available in most builders merchants.

Because these slopes will in the main have stuff put on them I kept the more gritty scatter located in the indentations I made to the polystyrene and then covered the bulk of the surface in the fine sand.

This first scatter cover is important as it not only provides the first layer of sealing and protection but also provides a layer of groundwork which provides texture for the paint.

Next stage is, once the scatter has had a good amount of time to thoroughly dry, to seal the whole thing with a mixture of equal parts chocolate brown house paint (the acrylic stuff that washes out with water), water and PVA.

When applying the watered down paint/PVA mix be careful not to go over areas already covered in the mixture, as water reactivates the original PVA causing your ground texture to be liable to move and form a sludge, hence giving the original layer a good amount of time to dry out and not re-touching areas already painted.

Next morning it was on with the highlight colour of golden brown acrylic craft paint simply wet-brushed over all that lovely texture to complete the look of the ground work.

This stage will really make those strategically placed areas of extra larger pieces of ballast really pop and contrast the areas of broken ground showing through the turf.

Soon after the wet-brush we can then paint on another 50:50 PVA wash to allow us to get on with applying the scatter, which in this case is Javis turf colours; which come in three shades consisting of dark green for putting around my broken ground, light green, generously randomly scattered over the exposed slopes, followed with a top scatter over the whole slope of medium green to finish.

Again this stage needs to be given ample time for drying and properly fixing the scatter before finishing the work with a final spray of  1:8 PVA/water which will lock down the scatter and cause the colours to leech into one another and give a more nuanced overall colour to the slopes.

The slopes now show of their gentle curves that will allow my figures to traverse them easily and the scatter right down to the edges soften their look on table whilst the areas of broken ground add a bit more realism to the look.

The final proof of the pudding is to get them on table with other terrain items to see how they look.

This initial work has now created a good base for my terrain collection and now means I can easily create games here in my room with my permanent table and now with a new slightly smaller cloth from Tiny Wargames take part of my collection to club to put on games there as well.

Obviously this is very much the first basic stages that creates a start point and over the next eighteen months or so I can add to this with other important terrain items that will gradually give a better look which alongside a growing figure collection will enable the creation of more interesting games.

So there we are, the first modular hills completed and now its on to the next piece of terrain, but I will keep that up my sleeve for the time being and focus next on getting the next unit of Sarmatian cataphracts put together, plus a post looking at historic Taunton.