The Pledge

Over on TMP folks are discussing if they have met their pledge in 2019 , or not.  Personally I never really understood the concept behind The Pledge or exactly what was being pledged for that matter.   Some people take it to mean not buying any more figures until the ones they have are all painted others that you simply have to paint more than you buy so by the year's end the lead/plastic mountain is slightly smaller.

Neither of those really describe my approach, if I had applied the first definition I wouldn't have bought any figures since about 1980!  If it’s the second then although I actually have more painted and based figures than I started 2019 with and slightly less unpainted figures I haven't necessarily cleared out the oldest unpainted castings. 

The oldest unpainted figures are probably the ones shown below.  These are from the old Citadel Range C100 'Spacefarers' I used them for the Traveller RPG.  Although most of them are painted there are a handful who never made it to the painting table. These are from one of the Perry twins and are lovely figures for the time and cost the princely sum of 40p each according to a catalogue I found online.   I also still have some of their gangsters range from the same period which are still bare metal! 

1980's Citadel spacefarers - I will paint them, eventually!

Looking back over the old Citadel Catalogues online I was surprised to find that I still have a fair few of their figures in the collection.  The Elenderil figure I posted about last year is one of their early fantasy figures and I have samples of a number of their dark age figures I must have bought either for for use in RPGs or to try out alongside my Hinchcliffe 25mm Late Imperial Romans.  For some reason I never actually bought a full army of them though, probably due to a new and expensive hobby that entered my life around that time called parenthood!

Some projects just stalled and I lost enthusiasm for them and never picked it up again or other enthusiasms took over and pushed that project down the priorities list, though the reality is that I'm not so well organised to actually have a list!  Others are things I will probably never return to partly because I don't have local players interested enough to want to play the period, the rules or the scale and some I just couldn't get to grips with.  Western Gunfight games are one of the ones that I really used to enjoy playing but a lack of anyone else wanting to play the genre pretty much killed the project.  Same goes for spaceship to spaceship combat games, although that at least is easier to play solo should the urge take me.

Last year my plan was:

"paint the rest of the Sassanid Persians, finish the Dark Age Britain project and the WW1 dogfight project (rules and models).  Then get the Great Civil War in Lancashire campaign into gear.  Plus whatever else takes my attention (WoTR in 6mm anyone?)."

I managed to resist the temptation to dive into 6mm WOTR but then again I managed to resist the temptation to actually fully complete any of my ambitions for 2019.  I actually did paint up most of the Dark Ages in Britain figures I had to hand apart from a few Welsh and some cavalry who I haven't yet decided on nationalities for, so I'm counting that as a win.  The WW1 dogfight rules are about there too and just need me to be disciplined enough to actually sit down and write them up. The rest, well yeah not quite so positive.  I abandoned the civil war in Lancashire project for lack of a mechanism for map movement that could reflect the differences in times for moving between locations (AKA too lazy to think about it).

For the coming year I still have some (for some read quite a few) 6mm figures to finish.  The painting queue has Early Sassanids as the main item needing finishing followed by early World War 2 British and Germans (who have been sat awaiting attention for about 4 or 5 years now). Also on my to do list for new projects I have an ambition to try Blucher with 3mm figures and need the 6mm figures to complete my Dacians, Picts and Scots Irish.  I also want to replace my Irregular Miniatures Late Imperial Roman and Maurikian Byzantines with Baccus figures.  The latter will need proxies from other ranges though, Baccus doesn’t do a Byzantine range of any period but I think there are some strong contenders in the Sassanid and late Roman ranges.  Ideally I would like to get my 2mm ECW rules finalised and make a start on some fast play WW2 rules for company level.  I have never really found any rules that I like for WW2 or at least any that I have enjoyed as much as the old Charles grant set 'Battle'.

I suppose that at some time I shall have to accept that I will struggle to paint all the stuff I have before I get past it and stop buying new figures!  But this is not that day.

So that’s my colours nailed to the mast for 2020.  Overall it looks like my Pledge for this year involves a buying spree at Vapnartak next month.