Hot Blood & Cold Steel

Author: james

  • Re-enactors' Market

    A trip to the re-enactors market and a meeting of Fox’s officers.

  • Improper Ganda!

    http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/improper-propaganda-posters.php?page=1 A fantastic collection of propaganda posters that have been photoshopped to change the message. Very funny, especially the re-enactment one, and the Cthulhu poster. Worth a few minutes of browsing past in my opinion.

  • The library of Triamore: Mundane tractatus

    http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/thelemur/ars/triamore/Covenant/mundane_tractatus.html Last night I joined in with Simon Cornelius’s Ars Magica campaign. My character is a female Mage (aka Maga) called Lumen, she’s a younger daughter of a French baron in the early thirteenth century. Blond, blue-eyed and slightly elfin like, the picture I have in my head of what she looks like is of…

  • Master of Europe 3

    The megagame of the 1813 campaign in Europe was played at Anerley Town Hall on Saturday 7th November 2009. My role was as General Blucher, the senior Prussian Military Commander and also the Commander of the joint Prussian-Russian Army of Silesia. We started off during the ceasefire period of August 1813, with my army in…

  • Preparing For War – Onside Report

    Onside report of a design session/roleplay game run at the CLWG November 2009 session where I tried out some ideas for a game of the administration and training of a WW2 infantry company.

  • CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports

    A collection of reports from the CLWG Design Conference held on 9-11 October 2009. sessions included: – WW2 Operational research discussion; – Come One Come Eorl tryout/discussion; – Second Life demonstration; – Agincourt Logistics; – Minions of Evil discussion.

  • St.Valery: The Impossible Odds by Bill Innes

    This is a collection of first hand accounts, mainly posthumously published from three men who were ordinary soldiers in the 51st Highland Division in 1940. None of them were officers (although one was commissioned after his escape and return home). The main part of the book is a personal account originally published in Gaelic and…

  • The Battle for France didn't end at Dunkirk

    The title of Saul David‘s “Churchill’s Sacrifice of the Highland Division” is possibly erroneous, the book doesn’t come out for what happened to the 51st Highland Division in June 1940 as being a political gesture of allied solidarity on the part of Churchill. It is certainly the fullest account of the 1940 campaign of the…

  • Blue Fires, Gary Hyland

    “Gary Hyland owns a successful company that produces original sculptures. He has a long-held fascination for the Nazis’ development of new technologies during the Second World War.” Do I need to add any more? Synopsis This is one series of speculations about how the nazis might have invented (and built prototype) flying discs at the…

  • Battle of the Hills, 21 January 1943

    This is a short article about the advance of the 51st Highland Division in Tunisia in the follow up from El Alamein. I wrote this to be played as a tabletop wargame.

  • Making A Killing, James Ashcroft

    Review of “Making A Killing” by James Ashcroft who was a mercenary in Iraq in 2003 & 2004. Well worth reading.

  • Book Review – Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab

    Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read the hardback version very shortly after it came out. I collect first hand accounts of the WW2 and unit histories of the 51st Highland Division in particular, so this one was a must buy. That said…