"Bist du mein liebhaber?"

This is the question Prince Ruprecht is reported to have uttered to Princess Valerie as she climbed into his stagecoach late one night in the winter of 1768 before they rode over the frontier separating her own Pillau-Zerbst from the prince's Electorate of Zichenau. And her answer of course was, "Ja, schatzi -- Ich bin deine liebhaber!" This, then, is the reason for the latest round of hostilities between my tiny imaginary countries on the fringe of Europe.

Welcome to the blog I have created to tell the ongoing story of my own imaginary 18th century wargame campaign! My inspiration comes from the Old School Wargaming group at Yahoo, Greg Horne (the man behind The Duchy of Alzheim blog -- I love your figures Greg!), and my own fascination with Young and Lawford's chestnut classic Charge!: Or How to Play Wargames, which goes back to 1994 when I purchased a reprint of this wargaming classic. Soooo -- I'm creating two small armies, as well as a few mercenary units, using the marvelous (in my own view) 1/72 SYW figures produced by Revell AG in Germany.

Periodically, I'll report on my painting progress and post a few photos plus a map of Stollen, Zicheneau, and the surrounding principalities sandwiched between extreme northeastern Prussia, Courland, Poland, and Russia.

Enjoy, and please feel free to send me your comments. It's great fun to hear about what other wargamers and figure collectors are up to.

Comments

Captain Nolan said…

I am going back to your first post and will be reading them all in order. What a great treat. I look forward to inspiration for my own imaginations: The Kingdom od Bakervia and The Grand Duchy of Thubidia!

10:36 PM

Paul Mahoney said…

Same here this blog has been an inspiration, I have the background, maps of my principalities etc but still keep changing the name of the offending nations.

8:04 PM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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