Reveille 2019 - the AAR

Last Sunday was the 2019 edition of the Lincombe Barn Wargames Society's annual club show, Reveille II, at our usual venue, the Downend Folk House in Bristol.

There was a wide range of traders and private sellers plus a lot of very nice demonstration and participation games. I think that the general consensus from attendees that the show was a lot of fun and that they were looking forward to next year's event.

Major traders included Warlord, Magister Militum, Ironclad and Great Escape Games, but there were many other less well-known traders at the show.

The photos here show a mixture of traders and games, in no particular order. As you can see, there was a wide range of things, something for everyone!

Planning a Dux Britanniarum campaign

A few of us at the club are thinking about getting a Dux Britanniarum campaign going next year, so we are looking at our existing armies to see what would fit. 

As I already have masses of Gripping Beast Late Romans, augmented with slingers, levies etc from the "Dark Ages" boxes, I automatically assumed that I have everything I'd need and wouldn't have to do any work at all.

Unhappily, as things transpired when I started looking in depth, the one area where I was lacking was basic levy troops. It isn't that I have too few, it is more that I have based most of them up eight to a base for Sword and Spear.

So, I had to assemble and paint up six individually-based levy types using some of the many spares I have lying around, and here they are;

I wanted to make them look a bit muddy and battle-worn, so I put most of the effort into making their shields look old and battered. I think that they fit in pretty well with the existing dozen individually-based levies I have, although those guys look a bite more nicely turned out. Perhaps the new ones might represent a group of really unwilling peasants pressed into service at the last minute?

They'll also fit in with the slingers I intend to use as missile troops, although I'll only need four of those;

The rest of my Dux troops will be taken from my Late Roman armoured and unarmoured infantry.

Not played Saga in a while, until Sunday ...............

................ so here is what happened.

I got totally annihilated.

So, I'll show you the pictures of my Bad Squiddo Shieldmaidens, acting as generic Vikings and then just chat about the game a bit.

OK, so what actually happened? Well, the simple answer is that I rolled rubbish dice over and over again. My Saga dice rolls only gave me the rare S-shaped Sol (Sun) rune once in the entire game and when I really needed to roll high in combat I invariably failed to do so, thus losing my Hearthguard and Warriors to little effect. I also failed to realise until it was too late that the brown felt square in the final photo represented an area of Hard Cover, which meant that my bow Thralls had difficulty in killing off any of their opponents, but the Anglo-Danish archers killed off my Shieldmaiden Legendary unit without any difficulties at all. Perhaps charging across the table with gay abandon wasn't a good idea in the first place. They disappeared almost as quickly as my Berserkers usually do.

It didn't help that my opponents were Anglo-Danes, who seem to always defeat my Vikings, even when I use the board to boost my attacks. It seems to be one of those cases where the two boards tend to cancel one another out, leaving the dice pixies to decide who wins.

Still, it was nice to see my Shieldmaidens on the table again, I really love these figures. I think I'll love them even more when I start using them in Saga: AoM, but I need to get my mounted Shieldmaidens painted first.

Warfare 2019

Last Saturday, I headed east from Bristol to Reading for Warfare 2019. This year I had a specific list of things I wanted to buy and, amazingly I bought all but one of them.

I also had a chance to meet up with lots of nice people, including a few who I'd not met before, having only engaged with them online. It was nice to meet Andy from Gripping Beast and also to meet Rob Avery, of Vis Lardica fame, who I regularly bombard with photos of my figures as entries to the annual TooFatLardies Painting Challenge. This provides me with a regular reminder to Paint More Stuff! While I'm discussing Matters Lard, I also bumped into Lardmeister Richard Clarke and the famous Sidney Roundwood, whose blog is a source of inspiration for anyone who likes a well-painted miniature. Sidney deserves special thanks, because he spotted lots of packs of Victrix Roman Auxiliaries hanging up on a display, because we had just been discussing that I was at the show with a list, and Roman Auxiliaries were top of it. Thanks, Sidney! 

And here they are;

They will form the infantry component for my Roman Cohors Equitata for Infamy, Infamy, the Lardies' Ancient rules, which are currently being playtested.

I also stopped off at Warlord to buy some 28mm Late War Germans, for a project I will be starting early in the New Year.

Of course, I had to visit Bad Squiddo and have a nice chat with Annie and Bruce. I also met another of Annie's friends, the lovely and very funny Anjuli, who I'd not met before. I also had a chat with Guy Bowers of Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy magazine at the same time, because he had also dropped in to see Annie. Of course, I couldn't visit the Lair of the Squid without buying something. I came away with three Amazons who were still being packaged up as well as another group of Japanese warrior women. (note to self - get on and start painting the ones you've already got!)

I also finally got round to buying some heavy cavalry for Syldavia and Borduria, my 18th century Imagi-nations, from Essex Miniatures. These will give me enough figures to field two groups of eight Heavies for both armies, plus a couple of leaders apiece.

I met lots of other people too, too many to mention, but I must single out Colin Farrant from Charlie Foxtrot, who has the most amazing new French church model, which you can see on the CF blog. To be honest, the word "amazing" doesn't really do the thing justice. It is pretty a lovely thing to see in real life. 

Painting - a few odds 'n' ends

The weather has been particularly horrible this week, so I have been painting a few figures, basically clearing space for getting some Napoleonic Portuguese infantry started.

Anyway, I've finished off four more figures from that GW Blackstone Fortress box set I mentioned previously.

According to the blurb on the box, the two blue guys are "Ur Ghuls" and the robot thingies are "Spindle Drones". According to me, the blue guys are Mutants and the robot thingies are potentially Sensor Droids, or maybe some other sort of droid, depending on the kind of game I am playing. Lazily, I have stuck pretty much to the box art regarding their painting schemes, because I rather like how they look. I am thinking that the blue guys will also make suitable Null Men figures for Frostgrave.

I've also been painting Monks. Surely, we all need a few monks? I am thinking that monks could crop up in all manner of games in many periods, right?

Specifically, I bought these because of a conversation I had at the club about taking part of the Magic rules from Sword and Spear Fantasy, specifically how magic can be used to boost the fighting ability of units and also to rally hits off of units. Our reasoning was that these aspects of Magic could be seen as being akin to religious figures boosting the fervour or morale of the troops, something that was a common feature of mediaeval warfare, as well as in earlier and later periods. Holy Men even have a role in Sharp Practice. As I have both FIW French and Napoleonic Anglo-Portuguese forces for SP in 28mm, a monk or two might come in handy.

Of course, monks can also feature in other settings, too. Saga immediately springs to mind, as well as Dux Britanniarum. Monks in a fantasy setting might also be possible. Who knows?

These four are rather nice figures, Foundry, I think, and I wasn't too concerned about which particular Order they might belong to,  so I painted three up as fairly generic monks. The fourth one I wanted to make a bit more colourful, as I am planning to add him to my Late Roman army, so I felt that a bit of an "imperial" habit might be appropriate.

Finally, I painted this chap;

He's a bit wizardy-looking and a bit like a Ranger for LOTR, but also a bit hermit-like. I really like him, and I can easily see him as a Christian Hermit supporting my Late Romans too.

Sci Fi skirmish play-test 2

So, after the first playtest of my sci fi skirmish rules, which are called Raiders Of The Outer Rim (ROTOR), I made several amendments, particularly to the shooting, close combat and initial game turn rules.

Yesterday at the club, I had an opportunity to play-test again, with Matt from last time plus two new players, Wayne and John. John is John Curry, who runs the History Of Wargaming Project, so I was happy to get him involved as I hoped that he might offer up some real insights.

I didn't take any photos this week, because I wanted to concentrate on the game, so this will be a text-only (BORING!) post.

I wrote up a simple scenario, that would concentrate on working through the combat mechanisms;

The teams have been hired by a large Agribusiness Corporation to carry out a seek-and-destroy mission inside a damaged and abandoned orbital agricultural habitat, which the corporation wishes to bring back into production. Unfortunately, a gang of Feral Alien intruders, led by an Alien Psyker have occupied one sector of the habitat and are trying to penetrate the AI core. These feral aliens only have H2H weapons, but move quickly. The habitat is still active and is patrolled by small combat drones, which are controlled by the habitat’s damaged AI systems. Before the repair teams can move in, the alien intruders must be eliminated. Unfortunately, because the AI is damaged, it cannot distinguish between lifeforms and the drones will attack anything that moves.

The teams were all fairly similar, with combat droids, who are powerful entities in ROTOR, plus a variety of basic grunts and specialists (in this case heavy weapons, psykers, scouts and techno ninjas) led by Leaders and Sidekicks.

The role of the aliens was given to the Snakemen warriors from my Saga: Age of Magic Otherworld warband, with the Hamata taking the role of the Leader Psyker and with a Feral Alien Paladin as the Sidekick. The Defence Drones were from one of my HOTT armies.

Anyway, the game played out a lot more smoothly than last week, but it did throw up some new talking points and questions. The most important issue was how the Turn Sequence should work, and I have made some changes to this for ROTOR V1.3, which will form the basis for the next play-test. I have also changed the way that Droids and Scouts are activated, to speed up the Turn Sequence and give each player a bit more thought about what they can and cannot do.

I have also made a few tweaks to how Psykers operate, because there was a real risk that they might be too powerful as things were in V1.2. There are now risks attached to using psychic powers, and repeated use becomes harder.

Finally, my Techno Ninja was shown up to be too weak, something that my initial solo testing had highlighted, so I have made the stats a bit stronger for this specialist type.

I think that the game we played out was OK as a test, but lacked the variety of the first game in terms of the kind of actions the payers had available. Still, the is a work in progress, even though I think that I am getting closer to a finished article.

Sci Fi skirmish play-test 1

On Sunday, I finally had the chance to do a full play-test of Version 1 of my science fiction skirmish rules, which are called Reivers Of The Outer Rim, or ROTOR for short, because I like games rules which are an acronym.

I'll post a few pictures first, mainly because of Clive's excellent post apocalyptic scenery, but also because blog posts always look better with pictures, and then talk about the challenges of writing and testing rules.

We played a basic sort of scenario, with five different teams. My main aim was just testing the movement, combat and shooting mechanisms, but I also wanted to make sure that people enjoyed their game. Thanks to Andy, Matt, Nick and Clive, I think that we managed to achieve both objectives. Andy played with a Scavenger team, while the rest of us had variants of the other basic team structure.

This face-off between my Combat Droid on the left and Clive's larger equivalent lasted almost the entire game, until my droid was knocked out, which prompted a discussion on what happens to scrap droids. I've subsequently written a rule on this, which may well be subject to further revision. 

The purple thing with four arms is a non-player character, in this case, a Mutant. I have clarified certain rules covering NPCs, because of a few inconsistencies. These are included in V1.1 of the rules.

OK, so my thoughts.

1) My Firing rules were too complex, and asked questions that, once I thought about them made no sense. I have subsequently simplified them, removing some really unnecessary Hit modifiers that I have forgotten why I wrote them in the first place.

2) Hand-to-hand combat worked OK, but I have still tweaked it a bit, because I think it needed clarifications regarding combat outcomes.

3) I had pretty much forgotten to explain how the initial game turn would work to bring players onto the table. Luckily, I was able to deal with this and have now written a section for the first game turn, which is slightly different to what we did on the day, but still within the spirit of the solution we used.

4) There was a lot of tightening up of rules required, which was always going to happen. Games systems, like battle plans seldom survive contact with the enemy unscathed. If they did, play-testing wouldn't be necessary. In my former working life, I spent a lot of time writing manuals, technical guides and operational procedures for IT systems. I quickly learnt that once a first draft was written, it had to be read through by someone who didn't know the system, but was technically experienced in general terms. Just because something makes sense to the author, that doesn't mean that it will to other people.

5) Spell-checking and proof reading is essential. I really should have done this before making ROTOR V1 available.

6) I was conscious that I might have written rules that had created one or two almost immortal characters that would be impossible to kill. There was a risk of that, but we made some changes on the fly to reduce the risk. It is almost inevitable that there will be more to come in later iterations.

Anyway, I have now written V1.1, proof-read it and made corrections which are included in V1.2. My next task, to avoid leafing through the rules for everything is to write a Quick Reference Sheet. This won't be very fancy at first, because it will undoubtedly need amending and updating after first use.

I have also added in a final section suggesting some basic team types that players might want to use, which might give games a different feel each time.

I have to say that there is something really satisfying about seeing a set of rules come together and actually get used in a game, warts and all. Hopefully, the next play-test will be a bit easier and the game will feel a bit more streamlined and quicker to play.