After first reading one of Alan Saunders's Weird WWII battle reports a few years back I immediately became both intrigued and hooked to do some HotT gaming in that genre. However, life and a major down sizing move in our lives seemed to have other ideas than my pursuing this interest.
However, even though painting was put on hold I did manage to start collecting some figures and working up some army lists after seeing the movie "Captain America: The First Avenger". I also had some email conversations with Alan about his approach, suggestions and ideas. As always his input was both helpful and constructive.
The main thing I learned in those chats with Alan was that you needed to have a theme to base a Weird World War army on and it was then that I realized what he had said in his narrative about building his Weird World WWII German and Russian armies. The former was based on the occult fascination of Hitler and other high ranking officials of the Third Reich, while the Russians was driven by the propaganda of the working class, and specifically the many propaganda posters Russia did at the time. One element in his Russian army is just spectacular to me the soldier raising the Soviet flag above the Reichstag. This is so perfect!
So now I had a good grasp of how to proceed and went back to review the army lists I had originally created since they lacked focus, and using Alan's philosophy on this endeavor. Mine was more an effort to mush realistic WWII into HotT rather than create a true HotT army with a WWII flavor. So I went back to the army list drawing boards and separated out the various armies that sounded like fun earlier, and determined a unified theme for each one.
I had also asked on TMP about recommended books on the subject of Weird World War, since TMP has a devoted subsection under WWII Land and was kindly assisted with numerous suggestions. That lead to a major reading frenzy which had already started when I had stumbled upon Harry Turtledove's excellent World War series where aliens invade during the middle of WWII and Earth unites to fight them.
All of this quickly lead to me creating around a half a dozen matched armies for the genre and I couldn't wait to start painting armies again. This was a real shot in the arm for me as I'd not really picked up a paint brush in close to a year. I decided to finish my army based on Captain America, but it had now switched from the single movie to an army based on WWII Hollywood Movies of which there are more than enough to pick from. I picked four favorites "Saving Private Ryan", "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Sahara" and "Sands of Iwo Jima". So I now have an army with none other than Tom Hanks, Chris Evans, The "Duke" himself John Wayne and my favorite of all actors, Humphrey Bogart, plus others. The army is finished and I am now working on the basing, which will have them ready to do battle, and friend Paul Potter has dared to send his purple and mauve Cthulhu against them.
I had also become quite caught up in Harry Turtledove's World War series and the following Colonization series, having read all six books back to back (about 3,000 pages). Therefore, the other army that I recently finished was a Russo-German-Polish army for the Tosevites based on the first three books in the series. As I read the books I took numerous notes (about 20 handwritten pages) about the characters, and weapons and such to create as accurate an army as possible from the story. This army too is finished and in the process of being based.
There are still plenty of armies I am so anxious to work on and get fielded, but probably the next one up will be Red Skull and his band of deplorables. I must admit that I am taking a lot of Alan's ideas for this one, but with my own twist thrown in. The theme for it is science and bio-chemistry. The latter being taken from the several great zombie type movies such as the "Outpost" series or "War of the Dead" being my favorites. So you'll see Alan's Werewolf troops and Death's Head troops showing up along with a Terror Bird, a pterodactyl with a German rider taken from a Weird World War comic, and one that I can't wait to model – a Panther Lehr Behemoth. Yep a Panther tank with a leopard melded into the turret and upper body instead of the 75 MM gun. There will also be some cyborg robots as Warband and of course some zombies!
I was going with Lord Ninja raptors for "The Race" to oppose my Tosevites but when I did a size comparison they were just a bit too large since The Race is only supposed to be about the size of a ten or eleven year old. So I have placed an order with Leon at Pendraken for some of his 110 MM laser rifle armed lizards. He advised they are really 11 MM tall so they should be perfect and even though the poses are limited they will supply all I will need with a few conversions.
Down the road I have the two armies from the Movie "The Desert rats", the two armies from the trilogy "Fiends of the eastern Front", two armies from the movie "Things to Come" and then two armies inspired by the dumb movie "Iron Sky", only mine will be a post apocalyptic theme where WWII turned mega-scientific and created an earth of foul air that humans cannot breath, so everyone either has a gas mask or a helmet a la a space figures. I am also looking at an American army for Turtledove's World War series and also an American army based on comic books, Sgt Rock and Easy company and of course the Jigsaw Tank!
To help this pursuit I have discovered there are numerous books on the theme and also quite a few movies. Additionally there are rule books for it and although HotT is not the primary rule set, it does seem very popular as skirmish or role playing games.
I have been wanting to share these thoughts for some time, but only now have had time to sit and type them out. I have to give a lot of credit to Alan Saunders for planting the seed, and for his help in getting it going. Maybe others will find it of interest as well.
Terry
bases more of his German artillery tractors.
