Mustering for the Silver Bayonet

Currently the queue of miniatures on my painting tile is a hodgepodge of projects, that I’m picking off here and there as they take my fancy - I figure that it’s better to paint what I’m inspired to on any given evening rather than trying to do something based on a prioritised list and burn myself out.

So the next thing to make it’s way from half-painted to finished is this pair, the start of my Silver Bayonet unit:

They’re Perry miniatures that my wife bought me for Christmas I believe, and will be my Officer and a rifleman. Especial thanks to Tim in Saskatoon for sending me pictures of his painted officer so that I could work out which bits of uniform were supposed to be which!

I’m not really sure why I haven’t ever gotten into historical gaming - I grew up watching Sharpe, and remember being really excited when some reenactors came to the village I lived in when I was 8 or 9 and planned to run away with them. Playtimes were spent going through the motions of reloading an imaginary rifle, the steps to which we’d learned from Sharpe (which was why you’d see children in the 90’s standing in fields and graveyards miming biting the end off of a paper cartridge, where I grew up at least). I guess it’s that my route into wargaming was via Warhammer, and so I pretty much stuck to fantasy and sci-fi for the next two and a half decades.

Brief aside, ‘how I got into wargaming’: I was in primary school, and the friend of my friend’s older brother had done something so naughty that he had been removed from his class and sent to sit in the back of ours. And he had a copy of White Dwarf, with a glorious picture of painted miniatures on the back (probably around the 170s or 180s). I asked what it was, and that was that.

Jumping back to the present, then came the Silver Bayonet, which I got a copy of when it was first released and re-watched some Sharpe, and was thankful that it was just as good as I remembered. It’s a great bridge between historical and fantasy Wargames (the Silver Batonet, I mean, not Sharpe), letting you dip a toe in cool Napoleonic stuff without being worried about exact uniforms, or there not being enough werewolves.

The premise for my unit isn’t the same as almost everyone else’s (essentially Sharpe in all but name), but it’s not a million miles away: my Officer and Rifleman are the only survivors of the massacre of their unit by unknown forces. Upon their return to Blighty, they are inducted into the Silver Bayonet, and told that there is a much bigger war going on than that they were previously aware of, and that their unit was the victim of a vampire attack. Their contact, one Van Helsing (an ancestor of the more famous one - we’re going more movie than literary Van Helsing, where he’s a vampire hunter rather than just a likely chap who knows about odd ailments) then introduces them to their new charge: a Dhampir armed with a pair of pistols and a fierce desire to destroy the undead. They are warned that although he is a powerful tool in their fight, they are as much his minders as his comrades, and that if it comes to it, they may find themselves in a position where they have to destroy him.

So, Sharpe meets Hellsing, essentially! Ideas started percolating in my head when I read the Dhampir entry in the rulebook, and I figured I could use the mini I use for my D&D character.

It’s not just up that the Tally goes though, as Northstar has been having weekend long special offers on specific ranges, and there came one that I couldn’t resist (as it included some of my favourite words, including ‘discount’, ‘free’, and ‘ninja’) so I treated myself to something off my birthday list and got the Ronin Bandit buntai:

My plan is to use bandits in place of gnolls when I run through Ronin of Shadow Deep, but more on that in a future blog post.

Tally:

25 vs 53 = -28

One last thing: em4 put out a call asking if anyone had pictures of their painted miniatures for them to spruce up their website, and three of the pictures I submitted are now being used on their website!

Part of me thinks it’s a shame that only the simple paint jobs from 2011 are the ones that got used, but the other part of me is just excited, as that still counts!