Category: Impetus

My club Spieltrieb Frankfurt presented a medieval Impetus game during the Hamburgian Tactica 2012. We showed a local setting where the citicens of Frankfurt fought in a feud against nearby operating robber-knights of Kronberg.

Since the Perry twins did not have images of the miniatures in their story, I did not knew, that these models were that outstanding until I saw Antipater´s incredible beautiful Handgunners . He inspired my very much to quickly buy these models and add them to my city force of Frankfurt.

The initial plan was to have another crossbow unit prepared for the event. However sometimes good ideas are born, when something is not at hand. Although I bought three times at Perry Minitures I forgot to buy enough crossbow men. Therefore I suggested our project leader Lemming to use hand gunners instead. He decided to base them as skirmishers, which is more useful for different existing and upcoming lists for the period. But even more important was to me, that he suggested to achieve the look for two elements by using wounded and dead gunners, who sadly experienced the danger of new invented weaponry. So this idea was great and I designed an exploded handgun by using a cutter with a polystyrol rod.

I tried to position the miniatures in a way which makes it possible to put them right in front of each other. This is not very important for the game since skirmishers are used to screen the more important troops, but for display it´s not bad.

The leader of the unit is one a patrician from Frankfurt. Actually I do not know the name of the family, I just saw the crest on a church during a walk through my home town and painted it. The patricians were not noble, so I think that the leader is interested in new weaponry and maybe he understood how important the weapon will be for the future.

In our club we started recently to play Impetus, which has the very nice effect, that you can design diorama bases with your miniatures. I really love to collect that kind of army, interesting to know is, that there are guys out there, who play DBA with that kind of bases as well.

However I do like the Impetus gameplay so far, since I do enjoy games, if they are surprising at some point. If I am a little bit more experienced in Impetus, I will talk more on that. I always wanted to have a medieval army, and I urgently needed to have an excuse to paint the Perry´s Agincourt to Orleans Range.

The conflict we want to depict is the “Kronberger Fehde” a local conflict between the City of Frankfurt and the knights of Kronberg, which had quite an impact to the decline of might of the free german cities. If you follow that article you will find a painting of the battle which took place in spring 1389.

The miniatures I used wear gambesons, chainmail and partly plate armour, since the germans still used a lot chainmail during that time. Lemming told me, that the german chainmail was of such a quality that it was still used in contrast to the french and english armies of that time.

I definetly was inspired by Antipaters excellent Impetus Bases, which also are shown in the Extra Impetus book, he made me look at that system. He supported me with detailed information on the armour and clothing of that time and his literature list was an excellent starting point. Thanks again for that, Antipater!

I modified some of the miniatures, since the Perrys depicted some of them as suffering from dysentery and therefore leaving their trousers down the heel, always prepared to shit. That was not exactly my expectation for the force of Frankfurt, although they failed in the battle due to loss of morale, as far as I know. El Comandante therefore will show some of them with their trowsers down.

The rock was made by Rusus, it´s made from Ceramofix and is an phantastic material, since it looks like real stone, but is absolutely flat on the bottom. I used a very similar painting technic as told by Elladan using airbrush paints to ink down a white rock.

The banner was inspired by the medieval painting depicting the battle of Kronberg. It shows the Eagle of the Holy Roman Empire on red. I used an illustration from Wikipedia to create the banner. The printed paper was glued and afterwards I painted and highlighted the red. Since I want to use a lot of banners, I prefered to use the printed banner technic. For sure I will paint some Knights banners by hand, but that motive is very detailed.