Sean's Bretonnians

Hi All,

 Before I tell you about my army let me bore tell you about my gaming history.

I first saw the D&D boxed set, I forget red or blue, back in 1978. My friend's older sister had it and we had no idea what to do with it. By 1980 I had played one game of D&D with some kids in a club at school. That was pretty much a disaster.

An older kid in my apartment building started introducing some of us to AD&D, he used a mixture of Judges Guild stuff in our games and we tended to use Airfix army men and wooden blocks to map out the dungeons and play it like a table top skirmish. He also introduced me to wargames like Blitzkrieg, Squad Leader and Caesar at Alesia. We would go down to the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street to buy Airfix, AD&D books and the various games Avalon Hill and SPI, to name a few.



We drifted apart and I joined a new group of friends in High School where we played AD&D, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Top Secret and some other role playing games. We would occasionally try to play Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or some other big multiplayer wargame, but it never really worked out.

Now, you may be asking yourself at this point, "WTF does this have to do with Oldhammer?" Well let me tell you. Up to this point I'd say the majority of my gaming had been fantasy. I was steeped in the Lord of The Rings, Hobbit and World of Greyhawk. I loved Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and decidedly disliked the Rankin Bass Hobbit and Return of the King. I quit school, dicked around, went to recording school and somehow landed a job at Sound One in midtown Manhattan in the Brill building. I think it was in late 1989 or early 1990 that I stumbled upon the Midtown Compleat Strategist. I think it was on 54th St, but I don't really recall now. Anyway they had tons of this game called Warhammer.

So I bought the rule book, Warhammer Armies, and started an Orc and Goblin Army. I tried to get my coworkers, one of whom I went to Avalon Con with in 1991 to play in an Advanced Squad Leader Tournament, to play. But everybody quickly lost interest with the hobby side of it and the expense of collecting armies. So I started slowly purchasing things like Mighty Empires, Man O'War, the Mighty Fortress and a few random other figures to flesh out future opponents. I still remember buying a big chunk of my Orc army with a $100 tip that Gary Goetzman, the executive producer of Silence of the Lambs, gave me since our work on that was going so well.

So I mostly just painted, read White Dwarf and played in maybe one actual game of Warhammer and another of Blood Bowl. "It'll never catch on" I thought. By 1992 I was fed up with film post production and went to school to learn Food Science, but really to learn Brewing Science. My high school friend Charlie and I set up our Mighty Empires campaign and played it by actual mail for a little while, but as he got busy and I tried not to fail my classes, the hobby went away and I eventually put everything in storage.

Years went by and I carted all my crap, again, from California to Texas to Arizona. I don't know what started it, but in 2011 I decided to get back to gaming and started a blog. At that time I vowed to never buy or play 28mm again. I had sticker shock at how much the miniatures cost these days. By 2013 I had heard of this thing called Oldhammer and posted articles about my only ever "completed" units. You can read about them here and here if you wish.

Although I pretended for a time that I was going to play Warhammer 3rd Edition with 1/72 plastic figures, I eventually started buying and painting 28mm again. In 2015 I decided to finally get off my ass and go to the 2nd Oldhammer in the New World event in Allentown, PA. It was legendary and I haven't looked back since.

On to the Army

If you're still reading this, thanks for sticking around.

I like using Army Builder because it allows me to try things out without having to remember all the rules or erasing a lot. I will say that the minimums and maximums for certain things are stupid and I think don't scale well for under 2-3000 points.

The question is, how to break this up into 200-ish points per month.

Chevalier d'Honneur 215 points.

Brigands 198 points.

Noblesse d'Epee 166 points + Feudal Levy 60 points = 226 points

Foot Knights 123 points + L'Ordonnance 60 points = 183 points

Retainer Spearmen 114 points + Retainer Crossbowmen 80 points = 194 points

Hopefully that sounds reasonable to everybody.

I'm still working out color and heraldry schemes and have been at it with name generators to get some reasonable French sounding names. Rather than place them specifically in the Old World, I may have them be from the Mighty Empires setting that my friend Charlie and I created 25 years ago. Monfel.