By ClarenceH: A Tiny Horde

The first two units of Beja are finished for my Mahdist army!

I'm a little disappointed that I only finished two, but it took me a few evenings to build the others (another unit of spears, a unit of rifles, and camels) and I found I was out of Wraithbone primer. Being the apocalypse and all, my FLGS didn't have any so I was forced to turn to Amazon and lost out on two or three days of painting. Happily, the cans arrived this morning and I should have two more units by next weekend.

These really need some decoration on their robes scattered through at least some of the models, but I'll continue to press on for now. They still look pretty cool in a mob!

I still have enough plastic (beyond the units listed above) to build two more units of spearmen and I think I'm going to build them as Kordofani (Nile Arab) warriors, so they'll have little hats and turbans as opposed to the magnificent afros of the Beja and a different skin tone (on which I am still undecided). I'm going to mix in a few more robe colors on those as well to break up the wave of white and cream. I've seen paintings with brown, grey, and even pale blue.

Since I haven't been able to paint as much this week, I've been musing over rules. The project has been designed for The Sword and the Flame, but there are a few things I'm not overly keen on.

The first of these is the close combat system. It seems clunky and the opinion is shared by many around the web (and there are many fans of TSATF that thinks it works just fine). I'm going to withhold judgement on this until I actually get in a few games, but I would prefer to see mechanics that more closely resemble shooting. It's probably an easy fix if I decide to fiddle with it, but the game has stood the test of time so I'll try it as written to begin with.

The second thing that bugs me a little are tracking the wounded. The British need to carry theirs with them when they move and the natives become something akin to landmines in that they can attack an enemy who wanders too close. Again, this feature has opinions split. I LIKE the idea and the character this brings to the battlefield, but I'm not a fan of tipping my models over on their sides and leaving them littering the battlefield.

My initial plan is to make a casualty marker for each British unit - a wounded model with space to set a d6 to track the number of wounded. I think if the number ever goes over 6 wounded (killed models are removed and wounded may be killed as well) the unit is probably in dire trouble and in retreat. The first damn impediment to this plan is that the Perry's didn't make an Highlander casualties meaning I will have to convert them (grumble, grumble). We'll see how my sculpting skills are coming. There are no wounded Egyptians or Sudanese either, but I can probably carve up a command model to make one.

For the natives, I'll make casualty markers as well, but they will only drop half or a third as many (I'll work this out when I get to play some games) landmines as the standard rules. I may just do away with wounded natives all together.

There are tons of rule sets available for the period and I have many of them - Black Powder, The Men Who Would Be King, A Good Dusting, Up the Nile, Donnybrook... all have points to recommend and all are lacking something I want when I read through them. One of the great things of having chosen TSATF to model my armies is that ALL of these sets are playable, more or less, with the collection I'm amassing.

Ah, well - first world problems... More Mahdists soon!