The League of Augsburg

Clarence Harrison - Happy New Year! Starting off 2016 with progress to report for this summer's trip to Historicon. Here is the plan for our table...



The board will be 4x8', constructed in two halves. The details will evolve as I get stuck in, but my initial step is to rough in the main forms. I've written lots of tutorialson the subject of building terrain, so I'm not going to detail every step,...

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stairwells just to be weathered. Basic shape of removable Armoury roof

Building this project has taken quite a lot of time. One of the advantages of such a protracted construction has been the frequent ideas which have come to me as the whole thing took shape. Experiments and triumphs have begat ideas. Leaving things not quite complete has allowed me to revisit and extend or...

Raw internal view - a front face will conceal the lower floor

One of my big dilemmas building this project was deciding whether to have removable roofs on the buildings. As many of the scenarios in the book are Donnybrook scale skirmishes and involve missions which have to be completed by various factions I thought that have internals in at least some of the buildings was a necessity.

mock up with...

Although not finished this piece is getting close with natural weathering taking place

At the approximate mid point of this project and having listened to the comments and feedback from Blog members and friends I thought it would be good to include a few shots of the walls of Derry provided by Peter. I used as my inspiration the drawings of Philip Armstrong (Painting the Past), old prints, modern...

roof tiles from cheap cardboard found at the back of notepads

The early stages of this project saw big progress. Walls appeared, stairways,a breach and a  gateway filled six feet of boards. Gouging and plastering and sanding and painting created a real sense that things were cracking on apace.

this middle board has taken over 40 hours alone so far.

When I started assembling the buildings around the...

Now, I know a few of you will be reading this and saying - 'what breach?' but actually there were various points around the walls which had taken a bit of a pounding. There was a serious Jacobite assault during which they attempted to destroy a damaged bastion near Butcher's Gate facing out on to the bog side (west).

This is what I originally planned using the Kallistra pieces.

I intend to use these...

Gateway placed on in front of wet ditch under construction

Having fallen at the first hurdle with the 10mm medieval  piece from Kallistra I bit the bullet and decided to make a gate house for myself from scratch.

buildings on the inner wall under construction around the gateway

The original gates of Derry are long gone and have been replaced by semi ornamental arches and bridges. The available...

The original idea - jacked up Kallistra 10mm walls x 4 feet

You have got to be careful with titles like 'Derry's Walls'. It might attract the wrong kind of traffic. Needless to say, it was hard to keep certain ear worms from taking over during my construction project. I managed to suppress that particular demon by running the entire boxed set of MORSE in my workshop as I indulged in my most...

By now I was really in to it. The ideas were coming thick and fast. Some good, some not so good. I decided that when the basic construction was ready I would undercoat it in my favourite chocolate emulsion paint. This got rid of the distracting patterns on the mats and made the model begin to look like something which was going to be of real value.


I was beginning to fret over the level of detail...

There was some degree of hit or miss with the making of this piece. I am too impatient to measure everything like a craftsman and tend to size things up by sight and judge it. As a result one or two distances are marginally off. I satisfied my OCD by making up the excuse that the Russians constructed the platform in haste and so did not themselves seek perfection, rather functionality.
The idea of...

Sometimes when you get an idea you just have to run with it. I wanted to get back to the kind of creativity which go the League of Augsburg a good reputation in the first place and I have not been able to find the time to indulge that for quite some time.

The scratch-built Mortar Platform

Now if there is a phrase I particularly dislike it is 'thought shower'. It ranks with 24-7, tipping point, embedded and paradigm shift all of which are equally cringe making.
Ironic then that I actually have many of my most creative wargaming ideas in the shower. As my recent summer holiday came to regrettable end I was having a shower and mulling over the fact that...