Pulp at the Shed: the Scales of Anubis Campaign - The Balance of Souls

Part of Eric's amazing board.  There is also a complete village not visible.  My forces entered the board at top left.

Eric the Shed has been continuing with his epic Scales of Anubis campaign since August and there was another game last night.  Unlike the previous three games, I did manage to get along (I quite often have to do work events in the evening) and there were six others in the shed.  Eric had hinted that there was a Where Eagles Dare aspect to it but this was not a lot of help to me as I had no idea about Where Eagles Dare.  I knew it was a film but that was it!

Anyway, Eric will no doubt be providing his usual splendidly illustrated account shortly but I will just provide a brief overview of the game from my point of view.  The other games have used Pulp Alley rules as players' forces were around ten figures but this one was more in the nature of a proper military action where we had a couple of dozen figures each, so it was Bolt Action, this time.  I had four units of six British paratroops.  Incidentally, my Uncle Keith fought at Arnhem as part of the Airborne, although he was glider-borne rather than a paratrooper.  He missed D-Day as he had been trained to operate a particular new light artillery piece which wasn't ready, as it turned out, for the big day.  

Objective flugplatz

Anyway, the British had to extract the final component of the Scales of Anubis, the Balance of Souls, from deep within Nazi Germany just before the outbreak of World War 2.  The British were told (I think - I didn't have my glasses so couldn't actually read my player's briefing) that the piece was in the Castle or the village but we also had to secure the airfield as an exit point.  

Taking on the pillbox

My units came onto the board close to the heavily defended airfield which had a pillbox and a nasty looking armoured car at the gate.  I got my troops into a walled orchard and had some initial success against the unit in the pillbox.  Incredibly, given my parlous dice throwing last time, I managed to get four sixes out of six dice thrown.   I credited this to the fact that Sooty the cat had been banished from the shed.  Unfortunately, I continued to throw high when I needed low scores to unpin myself or otherwise pass morale tests. Once inside the orchard I got pinned down in every way, not wanting to risk getting into the open given the presence of the armoured car, as we had no anti-armour capability.

Blonde girls with guns!

What I hadn't counted on was the arrival of two units, in smart cars, of Nazi She-Wolves; strapping blonde women (Seven of them in each car?  They must be as friendly with each other as one might suspect - at least from a series of obviously historically accurate  films of the seventies I have seen - Frauleins in Uniform (1975) aka She-Devils of the SS springs to mind) with lots of sub-machine guns, who stood outside the walls of the orchard and poured fire inside.  These were controlled by Nazi mastermind, Mark, who has won every single game of the scales of Anubis so far to the extent that I now actually think of him as a sinister Nazi in real life (although, in reality, there were more fascists in my own family (including the Old Bat - the only person I know who has actually voted BNP - she thinks UKIP are wishy-washy pinko liberals) due to a link with Oswald Mosley in the thirties!). 

Time to re-take the orchard!

My forces were being whittled away in the orchard although, towards the end of the game, I saw a slight improvement in my fortunes due to the kind transfer of a unit from Steve.  This  enabled me to mass behind the wall, see off the She-Wolves and counter attack back into the orchard.  At Arnhem my uncle had come similarly unstuck and, making a break for it, had rounded a corner on his Airborne folding bicycle only to be confronted by a Panther tank in the road.  He calmly got off the bike, turned it 180 degrees and cycled back the way he had come, very fast.  Fortunately, he had been his schools's victor ludorum and his athleticism got him out of trouble!

Tanks appear!

We didn't quite reach resolution in the game.  The British were close to capturing the airfield but the cunning Nazis has shifted the location of the artifact.  In addition, a column of tanks had appeared in the village and was heading up towards the airfield and castle.  So, happily, we are promised another game!  Thanks to Eric, as ever, and all the other players for tolerating my total inability to remember any rules whatsoever.  Maybe I should take up model railways rather than wargaming?

A Pulp game, a Playmate and some very big yachts

A belated account of the superb game I played at Eric’s Shed is now on my Pulp blog.  Rather more conventional accounts are on Eric's and Alastair's blogs.  When I first started collecting Mark Copplestone’s Back of Beyond figures, many years ago, I could only dream of deploying them on the sort of truly spectacular Egyptian lost city board that Eric had constructed for the first in his The Scales of Anubis campaign.   It was a true wargaming wonder!

I managed to complete the two characters I needed for the game the weekend before.  They are (left) "Copper" Cooper (Foundry Darkest Africa figure) formerly of the King's African Rifles and (right) Professor Bevis Marx (Lead Adventures figure).  They flank my previously painted Lord John Roxton, this time acting as Granger Stewart, big game hunter (a somewhat politically insensitive appellation these days).

They were joined by my previously painted six inter-war British from Copplestone Castings, to make up my small unit of nine. 

I played the part of the British P.I.T.H. organisation, trying to gain three clues to reveal the location of the fulcrum, the first part of he lost scales. I successfully gathered the three required clues and set off to retrieve the artefact from the tomb. Right at the end of the game my parlous dice throwing (the worst I have ever had in a game and that is saying something) continued, mainly, I am convinced, because of the malign influence of Eric’s cat Sooty (really a reincarnation of the Goddess Bastet) who hexed my dice caused defeat to be snatched from the jaws of victory.  The Nazis (or Germans as we are now no longer allowed to call them by Angela Merkel) stole the artefact at the last moment.  Lets hope they all melt and their heads explode when they try to activate it.  

Sooty the cat seemed to take a liking to me during the game and spent a lot of time sat up next to me on the edge of the table getting in the way and casting spells on my dice.  

Mrowl!

I had dreams, sadly unrealised, that Sooty would magically transmute into Victoria Vetri from the Star Trek episode Assignment Earth where a black cat, Isis, reveals itself to be a (very) beautiful woman.

An uncredited Victoria Vetri (right) as the cat Isis in Star Trek episode Assignment Earth with Teri Garr, who would go on to play Richard Dreyfuss' wife in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Vetri is best known for starring in Hammer dinosaur epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970).  Her controversial nude scenes were cut by the American censor when the film was released in the US and later on DVD.  Fortunately for the Legatus, as a collector of cavegirl material, I managed to get an uncut DVD which was released accidentally before it was subsequently withdrawn by the distributor.

Growl!

Under her early stage name Angela Dorian (chosen by her agent based on the name of the doomed liner Andrea Doria) she was Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and pulled herself into some remarkable sculptural shapes for her pictorial.  She became Playmate of the Year for 1968.

Angela Dorian as Playmate of the Year 1968

Sadly, Vetri/Dorian was arrested for shooting her boyfriend in the back during an argument five years ago.  Things got worse for her because she initially lied and claimed it was an intruder that pulled the trigger so her attempt to have the charge deemed assault with a deadly weapon failed.  Sentenced to nine years in jail for attempted murder in 2011 the seventy year old is still in prison.

Vetri in court in 2011

A nineteen year old Dorian also appeared (right) with a hoplesessly miscast Shirley Anne Field (left) in the Yul Brynner Mayan epic Kings of the Sun (1963). I well remember the climactic battle around the pyramid in this from when I first saw it on my uncle's colour TV in the sixties.

Coincidentally, the next episode of The Scales of Anubis campaign took place on an equally amazing jungle board, complete with pyramid but I missed that as we went down to Cowes for the Royal Yacht Squadron bicentenary regatta as Guy was working as a marshal for the RYS. There were some truly spectacular yachts competing in this although, initially, racing, was curtailed by the high winds. 

The classic J class yachts, which fought for the America’s Cup back in the thirties, are not allowed to get their sails up if the wind is above 25 knots due to the fact that their 152 foot masts would be at risk and it was gusting fifty on Monday. Eventually they got some racing in and it was the first time they had had a class race series at Cowes for eighty years. More Isle of Wight news (I know you can all hardly wait) including some thoughts on Carisbooke Castle soon.

Some old things in my filing cabinet...and Pulp Alley at the Shed

Off to the Shed again yesterday and the opportunity to field some of my own figures on Eric's splendid scenery.  In order to get them there safely I decided to hunt out some magnetic paper I thought I had, to put in a file box. In one of my metal filing cabinet drawers I have a lot of old wargames rules, flags, shield transfers, cuttings and other ephemera and while looking (unsuccessfully) for the magnetic paper found some old stuff from the past.  I pulled out the hanging file right at the back (you know, the one that when you pull it out means you inevitably scrape your hand on the top of the unit) and all sorts of strange things were within.

The first thing I came across were the oldest wargames rules I own,  Gladiatorial Combat Rules by the Paragon Wargames Group.  I think I bought these in about 1975 to use with my Greenwood and Ball Garrison gladiators (above).  While these weren't quite the first metal figures I painted they were certainly the first I gamed with, using Paragon's typewritten rules. 

Paragon Wargames Group originated in Paragon Comprehensive School and Youth Club in Southwark, South London.  They were great proselytisers of wargaming and even appeared (bottom right, above) in a feature on model soldiers in UK Penthouse in August 1976.  

Their rules were the usual typewritten and then duplicated (not photocopied!) effort typical of many rules of the day.  The Paragon school building, which dates from 1900, is now home to swanky apartments (although I am not sure that "swanky" and "Southwark" aren't contradictory terms).

Now my figures were 25mm, of course, but the rules also suggested that they could be used for 54mm figures (movement was by square not distance).  At the back of the rules they offered some helpful conversion tips which included carving helmets from Plastic Padding (none of your poncey Greenstuff or ProCreate in those days)

The subject of these conversions was one of the Britain's Herald Trojans (above).  I had a lot of these when I was small although they are not exactly historically accurate and owe more to the style of the 1956 film Helen of Troy with Stanley Baker and a 21 year old Brigitte Bardot as a handmaiden.

Next, and rather more recent, I found a set of rules for Colonial Warfare called Bundock and Bayonet by none other than Mr Robert Cordery.  I have no recollection of where or when I got these but must have a look at them! 

Also in the same folder was this album of cigarette cards which belonged to my father.  Note that the cutting edge fighter, the Mark 1 Spitfire (with two blade propellor) is so new that performance details are not "available".  Probably so the dastardly Hun can't find out the details!  I love these flying boats too and wish you could get a 1/48th model of one of them!  Perfect for Pulp!

Mujahedin.  Pen and ink (1981)

I've not got on with any of my Afghan Wars figures for a week or so but did find this drawing I did of an Afghan warrior in 1981.  I did it to illustrate an article for a magazine.  I used to like doing pen and ink drawings and did quite a few illustrations for various publications in the eighties.  I remember that I had to do this really quickly to meet the printing deadline and stayed up until about two o'clock in the morning to finish it.  My girlfriend at the time stayed up with me and made me lots of cups of tea but she did get cross when I started to do the "unnecessary" embroidered sleeve and told me to get to bed!  Who could argue with such a lovely redhead?

Anyway, off to the Shed for the second week running and a game using Pulp Alley, which was new to most of us.  Not that that mattered as it was easy to pick up (except for me, of course).  It is a game for small bands of figures (10 in the rules although we used 8) and has characters whose differing strengths are represented by the dice they use to undertake actions.  All characters have to throw more than a four to do an action but leaders, for example, have D10s so that is easier than the minions who have to get the same score but on a D6.  Injuries are reflected by dropping down a dice level. which is clever.

There are also various action cards which can be played to effect the game by targetting other players or by improving your chances to do something (giving you an extra dice roll or restoring health, etc.)   Although designed for two players we had four which seemed to work pretty well.  I'm sure Eric will put something up on his blog shortly which will make more sense to proper gamers.  They do, however, provide that real sense of pulp adventure I had been looking for in a set of rules for some time.  Highly recommended!  You can get a free pdf of the basic rules here.

Eric's splendid board had four groups converging on a town in 1930s Egypt.  Each of us starting from one corner of the board.  We had to collect two out of four clues on the board to unlock an inscription on an obelisk.  Although the location of the clues was visible they were not all as easy to capture as there were also certain perils on the board which had to be overcome.

I was able to use my own figures for my team who are obviously the successors of the Servants of Ra last seen in action in the countryside forty years in the past.  It was a first game for my Foundry Mummy (different from the North Star IHMN one) and Max Kalba (far right) a Copplestone Castings adventurer.  So we have my leader, the High Priest, his sidekick, the Mummy and Max Kalba, the keeper of the Book of the Undead.  He used to have the scrolls but a course of mercury cured him.  Five followers make up my force.  Also on the board were a team of Nazis ("I hate these guys!"), a team of British officers with Sikh troops and at the far corner a group of adventurers led by a man with a bullwhip and fedora.

Quick! It feels a bit boggy!

My passage towards the village took me through a narrow defile where one of my opponents tried to place a quicksand peril, which given the dismal standard of my dice throwing at the beginning of the game could have seen me knocked out in the first move.  Fortunately, Eric, knowing the dismal standard of my dice throwing and my inability to understand new rules, took pity on me and moved the peril elsewhere (although I did, in fact, subsequently encounter it and defeated it.  Thanks, Mummy).

I came in from the top left and headed for the encampment.

The nearest clue was located in a Bedouin encampment, so my leader headed straight to it but was struck down by poisonous snakes.  Action in the camp was intense and while holding off marauding Sikhs (like Southall in the eighties) the High Priest tried several times to wrest the clue from the mysterious Arabs.  Max Kalba tried to help but expired in the attempt (in fact in these rules you don't really die but can come back in the next thrilling episode). His health drained, the  high Priest eventually had to give up on this clue.

Meanwhile the main part of my group began an ongoing skirmish against the dastardly Nazis, who were first to collect a clue through the brutal figure of Herr Kutz.  This man had an unfortunate hair style, a toothbrush mustache (not a good look to inspire a loyal following, you might think) and was very tough indeed.  He and the Mummy entered into a bruising set of brawls while his minions riddled the Mummy with lead, to no effect.  He is already dead, you see.

Switching tactics we decided to capture the two clues the Nazis now held and sent the Mummy and our five minions after the Germans, who were now trying to decypher the inscriptions on the obelisk.  The British were also attacking the Nazis but then my Mummy came under fire from seemingly all the adventurers who really should have known better than to help Nazis.  Americans! They must have been TMP Lounge members.

My forces close in on the Germans who, without the Book of the Undead to decypher the obelisk's hieroglyphs, are looking in the wrong place!

Fortunately, the elephant gun of Doddery Ken and some Sikhs on the British side and all my minions and my high priest on the other side soon removed the knot of Germans clustered around the foot of the obelisk.  I tried to unlock the secrets and, for once, my dice rolling came though.  The secret was mine and I had won (completely to my surprise).  I had only lost one figures as well.

Victory!

So, another truly fantastic game at the Shed thanks to Eric.  I am currently part way through a 1920's/30s force for use in this part of the world so I will have to push along with them now.  Meanwhile the world will hear again from The High Priest and his servants.

Next stop, Salute!

Pulp Villainess - Rania Al-Ghais and belly-dancing

Although I am doing some work on my Carolingians I got distracted by this splendid belly-dancer by Brother Vinni.  She brings my completed figures for February to a massive five! 

She may do duty in my nineteenth century In Her Majesty's Name world as Zairah, in her private entertainment capacity to Sir Lawrence Swann.  Really, however, she will be part of my new 1920's Egypt pulp world as Sir Laurence Swann's illegitimate daughter Rania: Dancer, courtesan, assassin, mystic and spy.  More about her back story here.

While painting her I listened, naturally, to belly dancing music, of which I have rather a lot in my iTunes collection.  This is partly because I listen to it when in Turkey (as I am likely to be again in April) and partly because my German friend, B, used to do belly dancing classes (probably still does as she is working in Istanbul at present (conveniently)).  My favourite disc is this one by Ensemble Hüseyin Türkmenler, with bellydancer Nasrah Nefer on the cover.

Gyrating in the Grand Hyatt

I have always enjoyed the belly dancing shows in the Awtar lebanese restaurant, in the Grand Hyatt hotel, Dubai, which is where I grabbed this shot of undulating loveliness.  I have also seen good displays in Istanbul, particularly at the Ciragan Palace hotel.  That said,  less exotically, they used to have a regular belly dancer at the Greek restaurant down the road in Esher!

Dance of the Almeh (1863) by Gérôme

This sort of dancing had been reported upon in the west by nineteenth century travellers and was illustrated in orientalist paintings by artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme (who painted the famous gladiator painting Pollice Verso), Nils Forsberg and  Vincenzo Marinelli.

Belly-dancer by Forsberg

Most of these were exotic fantasies set in the harem and so they depicted dancers wearing rather less than their actual dancing contemporaries would have been seen in.  Forsberg's painting more accurately depicts the dress and the fact that the dances were performed to all female audiences, until the nineteen twenties.

Dance of the Bee in the Harem (detail) (1862) by Marinelli

Vincenzo Marinelli's harem fantasy has his dancers undressed more in the fashion of the Brother Vinni figure.  I am sure, however, that if you had your own harem, as in the Topkapi in Constaninople, you would have had your dancers undress for you so as to appreciate their terpsichorean talents all the more.

Little Egypt - the sensation of the World's Fair in 1893

Actual belly dancing was first seen outside the Middle East and North Africa at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and its shocking gyrations spawned many imitators (and some arrests!).  The performance by 'Little Egypt' (Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos -a Syrian married to a Chicago-based Greek restaurant owner) at the show The Algerian Dancers of Morocco was rumoured to be so sensational it actually contributed to the financial success of the Fair, due to the crowds she drew.  It is said that Mark Twain, who had a keen interest in technology, made a film of her there and that later he suffered a near-fatal heart attack watching her  perform (he had a keen interest in belly-dancing too).  She was later arrested for performing her dance naked at the stag party of the grandson of PT Barnum. In a strange cultural twist Hollywood started to put belly-dancing in films and Egyptian dancers copied what they saw in Hollywood's version of the dance and incorporated them into their own routines in Egypt.

A very,very fictionalised account of the World's Fair shows was presented in the 1951 film, Little Egypt, starring Rhonda Fleming.  Other than the fact that it is about a notorious belly-dancer (or Hootchy-Kootchy dancer as the Americans called them) at the 1893 World's Fair it bears no resemblance to actual events whatsoever.

Badia Massabni

What we know as belly-dancing today (a translation of the French, danse de ventre - the name given it by Napoleon's troops in Egypt) is a mixture of different folk dances from Turkey, Algeria, Egypt and Syria, melded with western forms. Its development went the opposite route of that other scandalous dance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Can-can. The Can-can began as a solo dance and evolved into a group dance while belly-dancing began as a group dance and gradually became a solo dance in the nineteen twenties. In the Middle East itself, its heyday began in the nineteen twenties, with the lifting of religious restrictions in Turkey in 1923 and the work of pioneers like Badia Massabni, a Lebanese, who introduced it to the clubs of Cairo in the late nineteen twenties.  It was Massabni who introduced formal choreography and incorporated western ballet and Latin American dance elements.  She also introduced, appropriately for this figure, the concept of the dancer lifting her arms above her head, something not seen in the original folk dances. It's flowering in Cairo stopped in the 1950s when restrictions were introduced to prevent too-revealing costumes and ban floor work (which remained popular in Turkey), which was considered overly lascivious.

Samia Gamal in 1952

From just before this period we have an actual Egyptian belly-dancer, Samia Gamal (born Zeinab Ali Khalil Ibrahim Mahfouz) who was a protege of Massabni and was considered the Egyptian Ginger Rogers.  She visited the US in 1950 and became well known as a result, even marrying an American (briefly).

Rania Bossonis

Dancers like this were never acceptable in Egyptian or Turkish society, even at the time.  Many of the Turkish dancers were actually Roma people. The dancers in Egypt were likely to be Lebanese or Syrian.  Today, the dancers you see in places like Dubai may come from Argentina or India.  Noted modern dancer, Rania Bossonis, is Greek.  I have borrowed her first name for my character but I also knew a fiery Egyptian lady called Rania, who I met at a reception in the British Ambassador's residence in Cairo a few years ago.  We later met up in more relaxed circumstances in Geneva where she did not have to coneern herself so much with Egyptian norms of behaviour for a lady (which she very much was, however).

Dancer with zils

The Turkish and Egyptian styles of belly dance have some stylistic differences (the use of the finger cymbals, zils (also used in Ottoman military bands), is a Turkish practice, for example) but these days it tends to be a mish-mash of various styles and influences.   Rania Al-Ghais, having been schooled in the Egyptian style. would not, therefore, sport zils.

I think I have another two Brother Vinni dancers to work on so may dig another out soon!