WSS: Cheap & Cheerful - "Limbered" Markers

 It became obvious during my recent playtest session for my WSS rules that something needed to be done about artillery limbers - there aren't any in the game, and my batteries (unusually for me) each consist of only a single gun. I had thought in general terms that I could merely place the gun back to front and that meant it was limbered up. Certainly I have no appetite at all for building proper limber teams, but the back-to-front convention proves to be untrustworthy, and it looks daft anyway.

So I've come up with a cheap, easy solution; there are now markers which can be placed next to the gun when it is limbered up - the gun has to be reversed, so that the trail is towards the horses, but it is now obvious what is going on, and in which direction the contraption is travelling. 

At first I thought, "Oh gosh, I'm going to have to get proper limbers, in 20mm scale, and that means they will have to be painted correctly for each nation - oooh - etc etc". Further, since cannon in the early 1700s each weighed about as much as your average Gothic cathedral, a proper limber team would need enormous numbers of horses, and I really was beginning to hate the whole idea. Amongst the spare figures I have from the Eric Knowles Hoard, there are a decent number of suitable draught horses, so my wizard wheeze was that a simple pair of horses, on a separate base, could be stood next to a gun, and that would suffice. 

Next I went through a tense couple of hours while I decided whether I could be bothered making up some drivers to look after these teams. There is a very useful Hinton Hunt ECW gun crew member who isn't actually doing anything, and I have some of these, so I decided I could hack a few heads off, replace with Irregular tricorn heads, and so on. Again, the job was getting fiddly. So I went back into the Spares Boxes and found enough odd artillery figures to fill the bill. I chose figures armed with sticks or poles of some sort - to encourage the cuddies. Already painted (thank you, Eric), all they and the horses needed was a bath, some gloss varnish and a nice new base - the aim, by now, was to have generic counters which would do for anyone. The driver, of course, may be dressed in any old uniform, but I don't care. The reasoning is:

(1) the artillery train and drivers were mostly civilians, so the driver may be wearing some unknown livery used by the contractor, or may be a soldier helping out, or may be wearing captured clothing, or anything, really. It's only a bloody game, for goodness sake.

(2) the limber is there somewhere, you just can't see it. 

(3) if you hang around for a while, when the gun comes into action the counter will be removed and is unlikely to be seen again - this would be a sad fate for an 8-horse limber team painted to museum standard.

Anyway, the whole project took me about 3 hours and was entirely supplied by existing spare parts - I even used my standard 50x45 MDF bases, of which I have bags (literally). Job done. Scrooge McFoy Productions triumph again.

Here you go - a supply of generic "limbered" markers. Available to all-comers

And here's one in use, contracted to the Imperial Army - yes, that's correct, the unit is obviously travelling to the left; the gun crew like to watch to see where they've been