Dragoons and Hussars for my 15mm SYW project

Here are the last of my cavalry for my Honours of War 15mm imagi-nation, The Grand Duchy of Überwald.

First, a brigade of Dragoons, with their brigadier;

I decided that the Dragoons, because of their roots as mounted infantry would wear the standard grey coats of Überwald infantry regiments but with orange facings. The Dragoon regiments would be distinguished by different coloured breeches and the trim on their horse blankets. Here, I have given one unit yellow breeches and the other has light blue ones.

Obviously, by the time of the SYW these dragoons would be classed as medium cavalry, rather than having a dismounted role.

My last set of cavalry are the Hussars;

I've given both regiments green dolmans and pelisses, but different coloured breeches, boots, fur trim and busby bags (which match their breeches). I decided that all Hussars in the Überwald army would have red shabraques edged in white, but I'm not really planning to paint any more regiments of Hussars, mainly because they aren't really dealt with properly in the Honours of War rules. The rules make it clear that if you want useful cavalry they have to be heavy ones, which is a shame. Hussar uniforms are always so striking.

I had a couple of spare figures left over, so I decided to rebase two of my brigadier figures to add an extra figure on each base;

I think that this looks a lot better than just having one figure and I might have to look around for a few spares to improve my remaining brigadier bases.

Anyway, I've now finished off everything I bought up front for this army. If I want to add anything different, I'll have to spend more money with Essex Miniatures.  I do quite like the idea of a Freikorps brigade, maybe a couple of battalions of line infantry and one of skirmishers, perhaps with a squadron of cavalry of some kind. I'd also like to do some allied heavy cavalry, based upon the Essex SYW British Horse Grenadiers. There is no rush, though.

Planning my Syldavia and Borduria imagi-nations campaigns

The main reason I created this blog was to write about my 18th century imagi-nations wargaming project using the TooFatLardies Sharp Practice black powder period skirmish rules.

As regular viewers of this blog already know, I have written a lot of background material for these imaginary countries, as well as painting forces and buildings. The next phase was always going to be creating a narrative for the encounters between the two rival states. My intention was originally going to be a bespoke campaign generator with some mechanism for linking battles into a coherent single entity. To be honest, I knew that this was going to take a lot of time but, happily, I don't have to do this now.

Instead, I will be using the "Dawns & Departures" campaign handbook published a month or so ago by TooFatLardies to accompany the basic Sharp Practice rules. It is a PDF offering and gives lots of scope for all manner of campaigns.

One of the real joys of this system is that it allows your leaders to develop over the duration of the campaign, so once you have used the Character Generator in the rules to create your leaders they can then grow in fame, power, influence and wealth as they buckle their swashes across the tabletop battlefields that the campaign system will create. Alternately, they may well prove to be incompetent poltroons who lead their forces to defeat and find themselves treated with contempt and derision by their troops, not to mention incurring the wrath of their superiors. Truly useless leaders may find themselves court martialled, removed from command and dismissed from the service of their monarchs. Of course, a useless but wily leader might always try and brush his ignominious demise under the carpet ("I was undermined by jealous rivals and had devious but well-placed enemies at court") and sell his questionable services to the highest bidder or even build his own Free Company of equally desperate and questionable troops.

Constructing a campaign shouldn't take too long and I will write again about this, together with some potted biographies for my leaders.