A Renaissance In Renaissance Wargaming

In 1984, I first really got an interest in wargaming the Renaissance. Some older friends in the 5 clubs I gamed with every week, were ECW re-enactors, By The Sword Divided had been on TV for a while, and I had fallen under the Mephistophelean, the Machiavellian, grasp of Lloyd Powell, whom I looked up to as one of several role models, who collectively shaped me into the misanthropic and opinionated ne'er-do-well I am today.

But more importantly, Lloyd really got me interested in the Italian Wars and Wars Of Religion, and even today, over 4 decades later, when I need to check something about that wide period, I will still pick up the phone and call him at his repose in the Tower Of Doom overlooking the Rivelin Valley, from where he plans the reintroduction of the Feudal system and the arming of certain government agents with the longbow and shoot to kill instructions.

But, I digress, as always...

I love the colour and pageantry of the period and I have developed a acute aesthetic sensibility to miniatures and colour schemes. True, a ladnsknecht should be bright, but when you see flourescent colours are used, mine eyes are justly offended. Likewise, when people use fantasy models inspired by the period, as renaissance troops, despite being wrong, I 'have issues'.

But, all things considered, I would recommend the Renaissance era to anyone coming new to the hobby or 'manning up' from the world of Games Workshop and the obviously dissolute life they have be living to that point.

Apart from the opportunity for lots of colour and some fantastic flags, many of the units and troop types may be used in assorted and varied armies, more so, if you don't mind the odd discrepancy in the realm of vexillology.

This makes it a very cost effective period to get into, and if I am perfectly honest and ignore even my own gadfly nature, you can get a lifetime, a literal lifetime of gaming out of a renaissance collection. The tactics evolve as the period progresses, and so you can have fun trying different tactics - here I wait for the flaming - with troops not normally known for them, if you thing you may be getting bored. They will be 'period' tactics broadly speaking, but used in a different context.

Of course, if you want an army which is experimental in nature, then the Army of Henry VIII is the one for you... Want longbows? Want lots of artillery? Want to get stuck in with the pike? Want to add some wild Irish or dour Landsknechts?

You'll be wanting the Henrician Tudor, sir!

Of course, if you are a habitual lover of the man with a big chopper or suspiscious-looking fellow clutching javelins, then you have the Irish army, which is one of the least typical looking armies of the period, but which if used properly, can be a great army to field, using tactics totally unlike other western armies.

And the Irish can be used in other periods too, with a tweak here and a tweak there. Indeed, they also make great fantasy troops.

I've been chatting with old wargaming colleagues in the last few weeks, those who I 'came up' with in the hobby, and whilst we have all been great exponents of the 28mm figure, and, have very respectably sized tables at our disposal, we have reflected that some of the best games we played were 15mm renauissance games on the standard club sized 6x4 tables when we were but smooth chinned, bright eyed, naive, and somewhat callow youths, not the wargaming monsters we are today.

What has come from this, is the realisation that we were also fed a diet of renaissance artwork, with sweeping vistas depicting massive clashes.

OK, we have the troops in 28mm and we have large tables, but the ratio of scales does not look quite right. So, 15mm came back into the conversation. 

We are all (I say this in genuine modesty, but it is a fact) accomplished painters, being in our turn amongst the first wave of commission painters able to turn a hand to anything and do it well. I, and I know others, were able by 1984 to earn £50 a week (more than my first job paid) painting after school, thereby funding the aforementioned carrier bags full of GW figures and massive collections of 25mm as well as literally 5 foot high stacks of roleplaying books (I don't often talk about RPGS, do I? I'll correct that sometime).

But more than that, we could and still can I suppose turn out a decent 15mm figure. I paint more slowly now, but that's mainly because as I paint for a living - being a dissolute vagabond with no ambition - I have to work meticulously for my clients, being unable as a result to shut that mode off at the weekend.

15mm allows us to actually rediscover if not reinhabit the past and how we gamed, albeit with refinements which come with long, bitter years of experience on the bleeding edge of gaming.

As some of you you may recall, I have a stupidly large number of very nicely painted (by the Memsahib - and don't rail up against the term, look it up if you don't understand the context or prefer to shout 'cultural misappropriation') Grand Manner buildings , but I and indeed others have a very dirty little secret - we worship at the feet of Dennis Coleman and adore his Hovels buildings line as the Magi adored the Christ-child in his manger.

Hovels in both 15 and 25mm are a joy to behold. Keep ye, thine MDF and shun the the 3D-printed excrescence, Hovels are lively to look at and a pleasure (even for this flinty hearted and fickle old bastard) to paint. What's more, as those 'in the know' will tell you, there's a subtle use of reduced footprint which is not at first apparent, allowing you to get a lot of buildings into a ground scale-friendly area.

This in turn means that when used with 15mm figures on even a moderately sized table, you can really get a sense of scale and space relative to those 96 figure pike blocks (tip for new gamers - build your pike blocks up slowly if you prefer using 16-figure 'buildinbg blocks' to achieve the aforementioned 96 figure blocks beloved of the long-beards and grey-hairs of the Generation Grognard. It also allows a modular approach to unit building) and the table begins to look an awful lot more like those renaissance paintings, riotous in colour and variety.

So, we are working towards a renaissance in renaissance gaming as it were, and planning and collecting forces pretty much at whim, given the scale of our ambitions.

For my part, I am initially looking at the following:

800 'generic' Landsknecht types as a 'car pool' of martial force.

1000 Ottoman Turks

1000 80YW/30YW types

1000 Italian Wars/Wars Of Religion types

I'll add 'blocks of 100' models to that as I go, but will probably not bother with the ECW, at least initially.

At some stage, I will add in Knights Of St. John and the obligatory Polish Commonwealth  to round it out.

I am currently waiting for the postie to deliver over 30 Hovels buildings  and a load of bits like walls and bridges, which cost (including shipping) £214.45 split equally between Western and Mediterranean architectural types. Compare this to the £200 price tag (more, I think) of just my Grand Manner church.

Before I go, I'll mentiuon the visual pleasure that is the 15mm baggage and artillery train. There, that's it - it's a visual delight to see a long line of baggage wagons or a propper fixed position battery, on table where they actually look 'right'. Indeed, you can deploy baggage lines behind your army and indulge in that time honoured  activity of looting, pillaging and casual rapine (here, we wait for the sensitive darlings to start flaming me, without looking up the meaning) which could seriously affect a battle's outcome when troops or supplies went missing. Consider if you will, this tendency in the Royalist cavalry...

Well, time passes as always, and I must away to my tower and do my daily duty, to earn that essential crust...

TTFN