Elizabethan Gothique

As regular readers may have gleaned, a long term project of mine is an elizabethan project. Obviously 'Elizabethan' is an a very Anglo-centric name for a period of history and the particular conflict that always interested me was the Dutch revolt against Spain. I bought loads of figures and have started to paint them all but something that has always stymied the project  is rules and the scale I wanted to play. By scale I don't mean the size of the figures (28mm is gods scale why try anything else) but the size of the battles. Although there were some set piece battles during the revolt (also known as the 80 years war) a lot of the interesting combat were actually of a much smaller size. A lot of the war in the Low countries revolved around sieges of the fortified towns so actual combat tended to be smaller 'actions', ambushes, skirmishes, pursuits all involving a couple of companies of troops. When I started to read about the 'Donnybrook' rules I decided they fitted exactly what I wanted. They even fitted the size of the 'companies' I was organising and painting. But, as you all know, painting figures takes time and I wasn't going to have anything to play with for some time as the was essentially a second rank project, for me and done when I had time.
Then I saw a couple of things and it made me think.....
What if I pitted some adventuring Dutch/English types....


Against some dastardly Spanish.....

Then threw them against some rennaisance zombies.....

Summoned but Mistress Giselle with her unwordly powers...

And used the forthcoming 7th Voyage supplement.

This allows me to use some of my dutch revolt figures as well as the Zombies that I bought on whim cos I thought they were cool. I bought the 7th Voyage rules today so they should arrive at some point so I might be able to tick off another of the games I wanted to play.

Think about it.....

Sir Thomas Cocksure and his company have been fighting in the Low countries for 6 months and apart from wading through knee high water and sparring with the dastardly Spaniards they have nothing to look forward to.
However, Sir Thomas has heard a rumour about a small town not too far away that may hold a hoard of Spanish gold stolen from a shipwrecked vessel.
Along with the story of the Gold there were other stories of strange goings on and of the wife of the local Burgermeister and a deal with the devil when the local church was burned down and the icons destroyed.
Sir Thomas only heard the bit about the gold.........


Don Fernando Diego Gonzalez Hidalgo was annoyed. His troops were revolting. And they were refusing to fight too! Their pay had been stolen when the ship had been sunk on the coast. He knew where it was though. The local Sea Beggars had taken it to the town of Mortenburg and it was bein held by a local Mistress. Don Fernando was going to get it back! All he needed to do was to convince some of his men to get it for him.....

 

In addition to playing some witch hunting silliness I'm hoping to get some more spaniards painted soon. This will be a company of Arquebsuiers to go along with the Musketeers that I've already finished. That's all i'll need for playing Donnybrook but I will need to make a couple more companies of Dutch/English.

Comments

  1. I love these foundry figures, and long ago planned a game using them and a modified version of the Lord of the Rings Skirmish system from GW to play Spanish vs. Aztecs...

    as for your adventures in the low country, I think it sounds like great fun.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, this looks fun as hell! :) Really nice paintjob so far, looking forward to see where this leads...

    ReplyDelete
  3. These little 80YW mercenary warbands are really nice. Good point about the anglocentricsim as well, it's hard not to see things through the lens of the rather insular take on history. Looking forward to seeing the zombies done up and terrorising the Dutch, English and Spaniards!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment