Character Cards

Being a skirmish game, Song of Drums and Tomahawks allows for individual figures to have their own statistics, sort of like a role playing game.  In the scenarios, each character or troop type is given certain values to represent their fighting and activity abilities.  While I was waiting for some round bases to arrive in the mail, I decided to make Collectible Card Game (CCG) style cards to go along with the figures I'll be painting up.  My hope is that this will make it easier for players to find the stats needed for their troop types during games.

John Stone and his English crew

The artwork is "AI Generated" using a couple of the free art generators available online these days.  I'm not crazy about the pirate-ness of them, so I'll likely replace the images with photos of the actual figures once I'm finished painting them.  These work for placeholders however.

Each card gives all the statistics needed for game play.  At the top is the character/troop name, and their point value as calculated using the standard rules.

In the main area are any traits and weapons the character may have.  For weapons, I've included the range and any modifiers the firearm may have (short, medium, long).

In the lower left corner, on the gold coin, is the character's Quality value, given as "X+" indicating the die roll needed to make a successful activation roll.  In the opposite corner is the character's Combat score, given as "+X," or the amount of points added to a combat die roll.

Finally, at the center bottom, is the character's troop type.  Depending on the troop type, characters may have certain abilities that differ from other troop types.

Overall, I like this first draft.  For the natives, I think I'm going to use a different background color.  I may also do this for different nationalities, for example, I may use dark orange for the Dutch, and change the English to something like dark blue.  For now, though, these will work for game play.

Building John Stone

I realized the other night that many of my friends don't know much about this little hobby of mine.  They've seen photos of painted minis, and maybe some AARs of games, but not much of the behind the scenes.  Below, I'll outline the steps for building one of these little figures that I'm so addicted to.

For the Pequot Indian War project, I've decided to use the scenario book from First Command Wargames, written specifically for the Song of Drums and Tomahawks ruleset.

The first scenario in the book represents the battle between the crew of John Stone, an English privateer, and a band of native Indians in 1634.  From my reading, this encounter seems to be the generally accepted start of the Pequot War.

Basically, John Stone and his crew were killed by natives.  There's some fuzziness about which tribe actually carried out the attack.  In fact, there's some fuzziness in who started the attack, Stone, or the Indians.  The fact, however, is that Stone was killed, and the English used that as a catalyst to attack the Pequot.

It didn't really start there though.

Apparently, in the early 1630s, the Pequots were on good trading terms with Dutch colonists around what is now called the Thames River in Connecticut.  Things went sour, however, when other local tribes also began trading with the Dutch.  Sometime around 1633, in a bid to gain back their trading power, a band of Pequot warriors killed some Narragansett Indians.  The Dutch, in response, took the Pequot Sachem, Tatobem, hostage.  The Pequot, to get their Sachem back, paid the demands of the Dutch, however the Dutch killed Tatobem, returning just his body to their trade partners.

Back to John Stone.  In 1634, John Stone, an English colonist/pirate from Massachusetts is killed, along with his crew.  Stone, to put it mildly, wasn't very well liked by the English.  In fact, he had been banished from their colony.  The English, though, seeing an opportunity, blame the Pequot for his death, though some sources think the killers may actually have been Niantic.  The English demand retribution from the Pequot, who state that, if the killers had been Pequot, the killing was revenge for the death of Tatobem.  The English point out that the Dutch killed Tatobem.  The Pequot say that they don't recognize the difference between the Dutch and the English.  And so, a series of back and forth revenge attacks starts.  The Pequot War.

To kick off my Pequot War project, I ordered a set of Warlord Games Pike & Shotte Infantry, designed for the Thirty Years War.  I also ordered a command sprue of four fancier figures, one figure on horseback, and some casualty figures.  These should give me everything I need for the campaign, though I'll probably have to do some customization.

The first figure I built is the hero/villian of Scenario 1, "Death of Stone."  John Stone's game stats show him to be carrying a matchlock musket, a pistol, and a sword.  Almost everything I needed was on the command sprue.

John Stone, in the Raw

In the upper left corner of the sprue was a suitable body in a dynamic pose, with a pistol arm, open arm, and sword.  The sprue also contained a number of floppy hats.  I'd have to do a bit of customization to have Stone carrying a musket and a pistol.

Parts removed from sprue. Body, left and right
arms, hat, and sword.  Base and musket arm from
my spare parts bin.

Step 1: Remove any mold lines or sprue bits

Steps 2 thru 4: Cut of molded base, glue to round
base, glue on sword.

 

Oops!  I grabbed the wrong arm!
There's a left, and a right.  Now I have a spare.

Steps 5 & 6 - Glue on hat and left arm.
All the standard bits are now in place.

With all the standard pieces from the command sprue in place, it was time to do a little customization.  As molded, the figures are set up to carry a single weapon.  Due to his stats, my version of John Stone needed to be carrying both a pistol and a matchlock.  With no suitable arms on the sprue, I went through my bits box and found an arm from a militia figure from the American Revolutionary War.  It's molded to be used on a figure with their musket propped against the shoulder of their left arm, but I could fix that.  Some people don't like plastic figures, preferring the heft of metal, but I really like plastic, exactly because it's easier to do things like this.

Steps 7 thru 9 - Customization.

First, the arm was cut from the musket.  The piece was a bit brittle, so it broke at the wrist of the musket, but that is what glue is for.  Next, the hand was carved away, leaving just the weapon.  Finally, the musket was glued into the open right hand of my John Stone figure.

John Stone, fully assembled

Now, time to work on the rest of his crew.

Drums and Tomahawks

 Officially, the Little Wars TV Fall APC began September 1st, with the announcement of the theme, "Forgotten Wars."  After reading the initial post, I starting thinking about the Indian wars that occurred in New England prior to the French & Indian War.  At first, I had contemplated painting up figures for King Phillip's War, but I wasn't sure exactly what was available for that time period.  A short discussion on the LWTV Patreon Discord server pointed me Brigade Games KPW line of miniatures.  Scrolling through the site, I saw that they sell a skirmish ruleset for the time period, Song of Muskets and Tomahawks by Ganesha Games.  The price was right, so I purchased the PDF book.

At some point, while reading through the rules, and looking into the time period, more, I decided to change focus to the Pequot War.  As I mentioned in my last post, two of my ancestors were involved in the conflict, so I had read a bit about it before.  Looking through the Ganesha Games website, I found, surprisingly, that they had a scenario book specifically for playing the Pequot War using the SoDaT rules.

The scenario books outlines a 12 game campaign, with each game representing a specific battle of the war.  It starts with the ambush of John Stone and his crew in 1634, but, really, the animosity of the various factions started before that.  I'll cover that in an upcoming post.