Fairs and battles

Over the past 3 weeks or so I have been to International Living history fair in Warwickshire, The Foreign Field LRP Kit Fair in Yorkshire with Julie and Dave.

At both fairs I bought very little, shirt, second hand sword, I was talked out of spending hundreds on other costume items which I think was the correct choice since as they where not what I wanted.
I did buy a cheap second hand top hat for bargain price and loved the steam punk kits the same store had for sale, but most of the content was stuff I already had.

I did buy the odd Christmas present though and enjoyed myself running into people I knew and just seeing all the interesting items for sale. I also got to encourage other people money spending.

This item was not bought by Julie she was testing the clasp



This weekend was the table top battle or should I say battles to conclude a season of many Ascendancy battles, to be bigger and better than last year we decided to run it over 3 continents which meant 3 battles
Never again will I coordinate 3 battle in one day it took 3 1/2 hours just to get started, with briefing people, placing the terrain and taking the figures out their boxes, luckily I had made the battles fairly small in scale so they could be played quickly.

Overall it was fun

Here are a few pictures

The commanders and their lieutenants.


Carnelium Battlefield


Frontier Battlefield


Stronghold battlefield


For one the battle was not that exciting.


Snow getting run down by Cavalry

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Rufus at the table top battle

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Cat Gymnastics. My cat jumping for a yellow and green ribbon off a packet of fudge that I threw in the air.

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With no photos taken this last week I thought I would play with a photo of week that never got used as I used another photo that week instead. So simply let Paint Shop Pro do it stuff here is a selection of the thousands of choices available if a simple photo is not good enough for you. Throughout the photos I've isolated Julie since applied to faces the effects don't seem to work well without lots of tweaking. (Images are best viewed full size)

This is called Topography effect



This is called Contour effect


This is called Enamel Effect



This us called Foil effect


This called Kaleidoscope effect


And this is the original image, a pretty shot looking over the town of Wirksworth

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When you haven't took any interesting photographs recently, time to resort to cat photos.

War gamers and reenactors

After all my previous weekend that were hectic, I had a really quiet one which was welcome, the only thing I did of note was go to a party in Nottingham at my friend Dave's.

He had got together lots of people I knew from the past for what ever reason not quite sure, re-enactors and war gamers, quite a few Games Workshop staff where he works in the design team and also does his own war games figures.

One of the Perry twins was there who I had just brought figures off by mail order and John Stollard who I went to Paris with to play Warhammer for the French in 1980something, he now runs his own war games company, Warlord Games.

Most people I knew even if a few names did not come straight to my mind, I suppose once in a decade its nice to see old acquaintances.

They say never far from a rat, well this one lost a argument with my car as I found it flattened on my drive, I say rat because of it size which was about 250mm excluding the tail, so I think just too big for mouse.



I think rats can be cute, but all I thought about was disease as got the shovel to carry the corpse to the bin, especially with the hundreds of flies buzzing around it.

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Fun with statistics and dice - table top games