The Red Sabre Beyond the Empire

Before going to Uzbekistan I already had a few characters and adventures as well as a unit of Bolsheviks painted. Having returned completely inspired by such an amazing country I am starting with building forces for the “Beyond the Empire” rules ( available from Cavalier Books).

I will aim to build four small forces. Each force will consist of one of two cavalry units of 6 men each, and up to four infantry units 10-12 men each, along with supporting characters/special units (leaders, heroes mg teams, armoured cars, planes etc) , these characters will also be chosen to represent archetypes for “Red Sabre” my ongoing adaptation of “Silver Bayonet” for this setting. I will be focusing on these characters with rules ideas and asking for help ( stars /rules for lmg’s and hmg’s???) in future posts.

The forces will be:

Bolsheviks

As I already have half a force either painted or just requiring a couple of more painting sessions this is the obvious first place to start. The force will consist of three infantry units and one cavalry plus characters/special units.

I will be using Copplestone Castings (CC) for all of these figures.

Veteren infantry – Siberian Rifles

Elite Infantry

Raw infantry – standard Bolsheviks troopers

Lewis gunners, HMG team, FT17 tank (Empress Miniatures =EM), Garfield Putilov armoured car (EM) and a Nieuport 17 biplane.

Leader.

Uzbekistan Defenders

Having been inspired again by my holiday this has to be the next force. There are no specific models that I know off so this is going to be very Pulpy. Many of the,Characters are going to be from the Artisan Designs (AD) North West Frontier Afghan models as well as using their Afghan Herati troops as the Elite Infantry Emits Guard,  the other infantry and cavalry will be AM Afghan tribesmen (I will re-sculpt a lot of the turbans into Astrocan sheep will hats) along with with a unit of Mongol tribal cavalry (CC).

This force also has a unit of mercenaries, I will be using the Copplestone Mercenaries pack and Great War Miniatures Late WW1 German infantry. There were a lot of German imprisoned just outside Tashkent so these kind of make sense to me.

I will also give them a,Crossley armoured car (EM) and a Roland C..OK biplane.

The two future forces will be an Expeditionary/Archaeological force consisting of lots of characters (CC &EM) one unit of infantry (EM Jazz Age British Infantry) and an EM Model T-Ford with HMG ( I love this,model and had to find an excuse to use it).

The final force for now will be that of the Mad Baron, purely because it can be,so eclectic. Mongols, Tibetans, Ragged White Russians, Chinese Spearmen all from CC and Japanese Infantry and artillery from Tsubo.

I will probably find excuses to give both these forces a plane even though not necessarily historically accurate.

I may then expand these four forces further, or add in Warlord Chinese, Turkish and British probably a bit of both😄

I plan to scratch build a Mosque and a couple farm houses/yards.

I will also intermittently be adding various horrors and Cthulhu creatures to support the “Red Sabre” side of the project.

Sorry for the poor photographs, I have created this project on my fire tablet and the camera,is,not great, but is far easier to create project. I will work on replacing the photographs