"Army lists for Charasiab, 1879" Topic

Just put a post up on my blog re: Anglo-Indian and Afghan forces at the Second Afghan War battle of Charasiab. As some of you may know, I've been building terrain for this battle for a long… LONG time, so it was kind of nice to shift gears from cutting and gluing and focus on turning my recent research into orders-of-battle!

If interested, please click below to visit…

link

P.S. I usually put at least one pic up with every thread I start, and even though this thread is much more about research and army-listing, I also just finished up a mini-project for Charasiab that I've been working on for some time -- a 28mm scale version of the Sang-i-Nawishta ("Carved in Stone") monument which stood at the Southern entrance to the Sang-i-Nawishta Gorge, a terrain piece which figured prominently in the battle:

EDIT: WHOOPS -- just realized I should have also cross-posted this to THE SWORD AND THE FLAME board, since my army-lists and units are all organized for TSATF! Oh, well, no way to EDIT cross posting. (Maybe in TMP 4.0?)

What an amazing blog! Thank you for sharing, it's rare that I say this but it's an inspiration! I am just getting back into war gaming and my favourite period is the latter half of the nineteenth century – fantastic, please keep sharing!

Did you seriously glue an antique Mughal coin to a piece of bark to make that carved-in-stone monument?

Don't get me wrong, it looks perfect for the task, but I really hope you just made a cast of the coins and glued the casts to the 'stone'…

Excellent work! Extremely useful and no doubt the result of much painstaking research. Now to paint those Gurkhas…

@Rhysius: thanks very much for your comments. It always feels good when a fellow wargamer finds something on my blog useful, but to have it called inspirational is simply awesome! Have no fear, I will keep sharing, at least as long as I have anything new to share.

@Eclaireur: great to hear you got something out of the painstakingly-researched Army Lists! You can never have too many Gurkhas -- unless you're their enemy, in which case I think you always have too many -- so get cracking on those paintjobs!

@Lion in the Stars: oh, man… I am hesitant to reply to your query, sir… truth is I did consider making an impression mold and casting up the coin-faces, so I could have multiples to hand out to friends and relatives and South Asian history enthusiasts (well, okay, to hand out to a handful of fellow Second Afghan War gamers)… but though I'm pretty handy, one thing I've never done in my decades of building and painting figures, models and terrain is cast my own figures -- or my own anything else. If I absolutely had to I could probably manage it, but the cost of the Mughal coin was probably less than you think and the Iranian coin was under $5 USD, and I am not really a mass-production guy, so… yes, I admit it -- I used the coins of the 17th Century Indian and Mid-20th Century Iranian realms. I'm not proud of it, and if I had it to do again I'd probably at least give the mold-making and casting process a try… but what's done is done.

I appreciate you saying it works well for the task, and if you're a coin collector I submit my humble apology.

Ethan, What a great post. I thoroughly enjoyed the reference works, very cool, awesome reads, very exciting and informative. Thanks for the links. I'm impressed with the research and how you broke down the battle into game terms, especially in units for my favorite rules set TSATF. Oh how I wish I could be there for the play test of yet another Mad Guru epic game!!!! I can't wait to read the AAR's and see pics of the play tests.

Sterling work sir!

Cheers,
Sgt. Guinness

Thanks very much for your comment, Sarge! Really glad to hear you enjoyed the Order of Battle! But I do have a question: did you read all the way through the books or just the chapters dealing with Charasiab…? Those books are pretty thick from cover to cover! I totally agree they are awesome reads -- at least for those of us with a special interest in the period!

Here's another link to a great online Second Afghan War reference tome -- the official British history: The Second Afghan War 1878-1880, Abridged Official Account, Produced in the Intelligence Branch Army Head-Quarters, India.

link

Heard from a gaming friend in the UK that the link above was not working for him. Just checked and it worked for me here in the USA. In case it remains a problem, here's a link to another online version of the same book, this one at Archive.org run by GoogleBooks. It unfortunately it contains some computer typos in the transcription from the original printed version but is still relatively easy to read:

link

Oooh, thank you for the links, Mad Guru!

One of these days I will have to make a trip down by your place to shoot at some Afghans and/or Pathans…

Mad Guru,

I had only read brief excerpts from the books, but am rally looking forward to reading them cover to cover!

Thanks again for the links, and the INSPIRATION!

Cheers,
JB