1. Our annual PW flea marker took place at the last meeting. As usual, sellers outnumbered the buyers by a huge ratio. I asked the Park Service for a helicoptor flyby to get an attendance count, and the aerial photos indicated 329 sellers and one buyer. Definitely not the Million Man Flea Market. PW came out with a huge profit margin of $44, which was a wee bit short of the $100 goal I had hoped to achieve. Ah, well, I guess "some" money is better than "no" money... 2. Issue No 77 (Sept/Oct 1995) of Hal Thinglum's Midwest Wargamer's Association Newsletter (MWAN) arrived, with a $6 cost indicated on its cover, and a $5 cost indicated inside. Very confusing. The entire issue was professionally done; instead of one article being run off on a dot-matrix printer, another article typed using a different font, etc., the entire issue was uniformly printed. And the booklet itself was also well done... the volume was professionaly bound (no staples), complete with slick, glossy cover... in short, MWAN seems to have risen above amateur ranking status (although I notice the contributors still display a distinct tendency to confuse the usage of "its" and "it's"). The magazine contains 144 pages; of these, a full 55 pages are devoted to advertisements from just about every dealer and manufacturer in the miniatures hobby. Add to this another 10 or so pages composed of figure reviews plus a section devoted to the goodies that Hal finds in his mailbox, and the hobby's products are completely covered. The remaining 79 pages are filled with letters to the editor, articles, etc. In thumbing through MWAN"s pages, I still wonder why, with every outlet in the hobby seemingly inserting full-page ads in the MWAN, the price for the subscription for the 6-issues-a-year magazine is so high. I guess I'm used to the el-cheapo PW REVIEW xerox publication method. Perhaps I'm too old to understand this new high-tech world. 3. Tom Elsworth forwarded the latest WRG/Barker effort... DE BELLIS RENATIONIS (DBR), the renaissance version of DBM, together with the appropriate army listings. The booklets cover the period 1494 to 1700. In the introduction, the author states: While its principles and mechanisms are similar, DBR is not DBM with extras. Har! Har! Har! We all know this guy's kidding us... we've seen the finished, published versions of DBA and DBM and HORDES OF THE THINGS... we,ve seen soon-to-be-published Napoleonic and British colonial era versions... the same game, over and over and over again, wrapped up in several different formats. Why can't the author openly state that: (a) in DBA, I developed an extremely useful, yet simple, method of representing the command and control problems that crop up on the battlefield, (b) I'm expanding the system to include the various eras in military history, and (c) each era has to be fine-tuned to account for its different weaponry and procedures. In another vein, I never know what to make of the WRG/DBM army lists, other than to note that one helluva lot of man-hours went into their production. An example: in the Ottoman Turkish army listings, covering the period 1494 to 1700, one is allowed to incorporate Qapukulu cavalry, anywhere from 1 to 5 stands. These cavalry are classed as sipahis, which the text defines as "all mailed asiatic or east european cavalry who both skirmished with bow, javelin... and also charged." As "cavalry," they get to add a +3 to their combat die rolls against both horse and foot opponents. In addition, the Qapukulu are classified as "S"... meaning that they are "Superior," which, in turn, means that if their combat total (6 sided die roll + 3) is less than that of their opponent's, they get yet another augmentation, i.e., they get to add yet another +1 to their total, giving them a wee bit more survivability. The list now says that after 1595, the Qapukulu can be downgraded from "S" to "0"... they are now lacking horse armor; the "0" says they are "ordinary," everyday cavalry, their plusses taken away, ehe point cost per-stand slightly less than it was before. But wait... one notes that after 1625, the Qapuluku can be adjusted again, this time to "F," meaning "fast." They are still unarmored and if the enemy attacks them, and their combat total is less than their opponent's, they get a decrease, a -1, making them more vulnerable. If they attack the enemy, however, there is no -1. hence they fight the "ordinary" way. What the above means is that when my opponent fields his Ottoman army, I'm certainly going to closely scrutinize his Qapukulus. The question arises as to exactly how arbitrary all this pseudo-preciseness is. Consider the listings for the Safavid Persian armies, covering the period 1499 to 1639, wherein there's an entry for "Zamburak camel guns, accompanied by a note cautioning: Camel artillery is not mentioned by the sparse sources, but was later to be a favorite Persian arm and had already been used by the Mamluks. All of which says... why include the camel drivers?? Another item of note is that the army lists cover everyone and his brother up to 1700 AD. This includes not only the Asian and European fronts, but also the Americas. Of interest is the Mayan army of 1449 AD to 1697 AD. The author has obviously read all the original Mayan manuscripts in his local library, and so he lists, not only archers and warriors, but "road weasels" and "hornet nest throwers," two extremely valuable adjuncts of the Mayan army. "Road weasels" turn out to be scouts. And about the "hornet nest" contingent, the author states Hornet nest throwers are one of the more colourful... varieties, projecting an early multiple homing sub-missile warhead! Do I detect a somewhat subtle sense of humor...? The immediate issue that surfaces concerns just how many hornet nests is each hornet nest thrower allowed in battle. My own researches indicate that a seasoned, well trained thrower could carry... quite carefully, of course... about 6 nests. A super- skilled warrior could juggle 7, but any more than 7 and he became a liability to his own side. Seems to me that the hornet nest throwers fall into the same category as that of the "flaming pigs." And, as a final comment, I must note that in DBR, there was not a "psiloi" to be seen in the listings. Their place was taken by "skirmishers," whose ranks include the hornet nest throwers discussed above. Skirmishers, says DBR, employed "fire lances"... but sad to say, I lost interest, and never fully looked up "fire lances" in the index. Back to PW Review November 1995 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1995 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com