An Odd Assortment

 An assortment of sundry items rolling off my paint desk this week... (or arriving in the mail!) 

This is some of the stuff I've been painting that I've finished up this week. 

(There is a bunch of other stuff... but I'll deal with that in another post!) 

This group can be broken down into roughly three groups... 

The first is nine British Soldiers from the Second World War. While I was snooping through drawers of WW2 stuff - looking for things I might use in a future FiveCore skirmish campaign, if found these in one of the Canadian drawers... and they were the only unpainted miniatures in the drawer and, honestly, I do NOT need MORE Canadians, so I thought I'd quickly knock them out as regular Tommies for use as extras in any smaller skirmish or role-playing game... 

When we started the Fourteen Men in the Solomons campaign, we generated the force using Five Men in Normandy - which includes tables for people your squad knows in the area... and one of those rolled for the squad was members of another military unit... and we'd wondered about maybe some Australians or New Zealanders with indigenous troops that might get along better with the African Americans of the 93rd Division troops... 

I had imagined that Australian and New Zealand forces might be like Canadian forces in the second world war and just incorporated them in the regular army units... instead they were more like the US - where they were allowed to serve it seems it was generally in separate units. There was a whole battalion of Maoris that served... but they apparently served in Europe!? 

I did read somewhere that many served in the Coast Watchers... so I imagined these two as Coast Watchers stationed on New Galloway. 

Also, while listening to an audiobook about the Marine Raiders they mentioned marines having to go on missions to rescue Coast Watchers that the Japanese had figured out the location of and were moving in to capture or kill! 

After my first game of FiveCore Pulp Adventure, I decided I might spend the little cach gained to hire two more followers. I'd initially rolled "Guards" but wasn't sure what a "guard" should look like... then I rolled a "Ex-Military" and "Hired Gun"... and then I figures all three of those could pretty much look the same!? so I went looking in the bins of THINGS TO PAINT and found a few spare military types that weren't needed for any units and painted them up... but painted some of the clothes a little different. The idea being they're civilians now, so can wear whatever they want, but maybe are comfortable and familiar with the equipment they used in the military - which is why they're wearing the webbing they'd have used and carrying the same rifles they'd used?

Not something that rolled off my workbench... but something that just landed on it!

Because I was planning to pick up the Aeldari Codex and have been thinking about playing more Age of Sigmar (using the Ravaged Coast campaign) and both of those suggest using a 60"x44" playing area, and was concerned about the potential upcoming trade war (as most of those available in North America are sourced from the United States) I got looking around for one of those and on place I'd been considering buying from had a BUNCH of deeply discounted Bolt Action miniatures (like, less than half the current suggested retail!?)... so, even though I ended up ordering the mats from a completely different seller... I bought a few packs of the discounted Bolt Action miniatures!? There were MORE that I was considering getting, but I had to draw the line somewhere!?

I got these Marine Raiders because A) I just finished listening to an audiobook about the Marines Raiders (which I'd gotten months ago and only picked up because there was a two for one sale and there was one book in the sale that I was going to buy anyway... and they only other book that looked remotely interesting was the Marine Raider book... I wasn't sure if I'd ever get around to listening to it, but it was free so...), B) We started playing a game set in the Pacific Theatre of Operations and maybe some marine raiders could show up as allied supporting troops... or C) I have a small force of Marine Raiders already, and I thought I could add these to the force and start my own SOLO campaign that could be also be fighting elsewhere on our fictional island of New Galloway, and occasionally bump into/team up with the troops in the other campaign...?

I also bought some Italians... but I'll deal with them in the next post which is ALL ITALIANS!?