Dwarf kitbashes in progress

 

Painting time has been scarce (though, with the current weather, who's complaining?). But I've started to explore kitbashing possibilities with the EM4 dwarves. Along with lots of spare Oathmark heads, I've got quite a few GW bits and bobs of a dwarven nature. So, having bought a bag of EM4 dwarves on a whim some years ago, I have an opportunity to use them up. The plan is to make a few Kings of War-style multi-based units. I also have some painted Oathmark dwarves that may very well find themselves rebased for KoW, and I have lots of old Citadel dwarves to use for characters.

We do most of our rank'n'flank gaming in 1/72 scale, but with fantasy games, it all becomes a bit slippery. Because of the Warhammer-legacy basing in Kings of War, orcs have to be significantly bigger than humans to justify 25mm base sizes. Older orcs - like those from Mithril, 80s Citadel and EM4 - fill the bases nicely and look suitably imposing next to 1/72 humans. They're still sufficiently muscular and brutish-looking to justify their KoW 'Crushing Strength' in 28mm, though. So they work at both scales.

And happily, that means that 28mm dwarves like these chaps fit in fine too. Actually, we wouldn't balk at fielding them with 1/72 humans - the dwarves are still a head shorter than the humans, even if they're twice as broad!

Some more Lund and Copplestone orcs - and thoughts on Warhammer and Chainmail

 

To take advantage of the extra time afforded by home-working, my son and I have been doing a bit of mid-week wargaming. Our goal is to try out various 'square-base' rulesets and work out which we like best. So far, we've played games of Warhammer (3rd edition) and Chainmail. We've got our sights seton Ral Partha's Chaos Wars, Sword and Spell, AD&D Battlesystem and - the newest of the lot - Oathmark. And we'll also revisit Saga and 'MicroHotT' (Hordes of the Things with individually based figures). 

It was for Saga that I initially started building up a square-based orc force. Since then, I've started using 25mm squares as the default for our daily D&D campaign, simply because the bases work nicely with dungeon floorplans and look a bit less obtrusive on the table. The old Chronicle and Grenadier orcs (metals by Nick Lund; plastics by Mark Copplestone in Lund's style) that I was using for Saga have done plenty of time as the Vile Rune tribe in the Caves of Chaos, and I'm sure the PCs will meet more of that tribe should they ever return from Tekumel, where they're currently adventuring.

If they do, the orcs will have considerably more firepower, as I've recently finished a 12-strong unit of archers. Twelve is the requisite unit size for Chaos Wars, though it will give me a couple of smaller units for more flexible games.

I've also added a couple more warriors and a shaman. I don't much like the shaman miniature, but the warriors are exemplars of the Lund style: brawny, brutish and bristling with aggression:

As with their predecessors, I'm deliberately limiting the techniques I use in painting these. Everything gets a base colour and a wash in Agrax Earthshade, except for the skin, which gets washed in Reikland Flesh. Then everything but skin gets a retouching of base colour and a single layer of highlights. Skin gets a second layer of highlights. Then it's just a question of black-lining and painting in the pentacles on the shield (buff, white, black lines). 

It's a very quick process, and the simple pallet gives the miniatures a certain consistency, despite their orcish irregularity. 

And what about the games? Well, we thought Warhammer was quite fun at first, but it became a bit of a slog as the game wore on. My impression is that the finicky differences in the profiles that I learned and loved as a kid are, ultimately, a bit pointless. Too many of them even out, and it also takes an awful lot of time to cause a kill on most units. In our game, we had lizardmen, beastmen, troglodytes, orcs, hobgoblins and chaos warriors, but all of them were pretty similar on the table: tough, durable infantry. 

One thing that Warhammer lacks, I think, is sufficient differentiation between unit roles. Light infantry are just worse heavy infantry, and the movement penalties don't really balance things out. A unit with heavy armour and shield will move at 6" a turn (assuming reserve move) whereas an entirely unarmoured unit will move 8". But that difference is less striking than it seems, because once they've closed with the enemy and lose the reserve move, the distinction is just a single inch. And the 3:4 ratio is less marked than in other games; in Hordes of the Things, for instance, the ratio between 'blades' and 'warband' is significantly more pronounced at 2:3.

So, while Warhammer ostensibly boasts infinitely more variety in its profiles than HotT, it actually has less striking differences between many of them; many gradations rather than the bold strokes that, in my view, make for a better game. It's not just movement: it's also things like how units react to situations and interact with each other. The rock/paper/scissors aspect that's so successful in other games is largely absent here. By the end of the game, I remembered full well why I found HotT so refreshing as a teenager after a surfeit of Warhammer. 

We both liked Chainmail quite a bit more. We played with similar forces, but we found that Chainmail, with its built-in distinctions between unit types, offered quite a bit more flavour. And it was quicker too, with much more emphasis on manoeuvre and much less on turgid, scrum-like melees. But at the same time, I can see why Warhammer was much more appealing to kids. Chainmail and HotT are both games that you have to play to absorb the flavour. The Warhammer rulebook positively drips with flavour; it's just that it's less in evidence once you get to the table. 

One reason that Chainmail played faster was that kills came much more quickly. I worked out that if two evenly matched forces of human soldiers with light armour and shield fight a round of melee in Warhammer (assuming the previous round has ended in a draw and frontages of four), they're more likely not to cause or suffer casualties than otherwise. My maths could well be faulty, but our experience of play bore it out. In Chaimail, by contrast, your hits aren't going to be nullified by unsuccessful wound rolls or cancelled out by armour saves. 

Warhammer's long statline must take much of the blame here. There are no fewer than three separate ways in which an infantryman can be 'tough' - through Toughness, Wounds or Armour Save - and you also have the prospect of fighters being skilled at hitting but not great at wounding (Weapon Skill versus Strength). All this detail creates a 'wood for the trees' effect, so that stats are cancelling each other out.

The lengthy statline must also take the blame for one of the most boring aspects of our game: the performance of the troglodytes - who are subject to Stupidity and have Intelligence 4. This meant that they were most unlikely to ever act as requested during the game, and indeed they never did anything of consequence other than wander aimlessly around their deployment zone. The problem here is that Warhammer has all those psychological stats demanding to be used. Were those to be replaced with a single Leadership stat, so that the trogs were testing on their higher Ld rather than their lowly Int, the Stupidity rule would add flavour and predictability rather than just rendering a unit useless. I think this may have happened in later editions, but I've never played those.

Where Warhammer did have an edge over Chainmail was in the clarity of its morale rules. Chainmail's calculation takes a bit of getting used to; I can see that it takes plenty of factors into account, and I can imagine that it becomes easy to do after a few games, but it's quite a slog at first. 

Warhammer's personalities worked quite well, I thought, because we avoided the most powerful types. We used no heroes or magicians higher than Level 10, and that kept everything suitably balanced.

We'll certainly give both games at least one more run, but it'll be Chaos Wars or Oathmark next. And for those, more orcs are required ... 

Enter 1:72 - and a protocol for miniature use in RPGs

Converted lizardman from Caesar; hoplites from Zvezda

Miniatures are a bit of a double-edged sword in RPGs. On the one hand, they provide focus for the players and create lots of tactical options in combat situations. On the other, they can erode the 'theatre of the mind' that's such an attractive feature of the game.

Most of the miniatures I own are the standard 28mm sort. A couple of years ago, though, I ran a Whitehack campaign using 15mm miniatures based on pennies. The smaller scale has lots of advantages: the dinner table becomes a much bigger space, and there's less of a sense of identification about the miniatures. So you hear less of "We killed that goblin last time!", because your 15mm goblin tribe probably has various duplicates on the table at the same time.

But there were disadvantages too. Painting 15mm isn't that much faster than painting 28mm, and the miniatures aren't that much cheaper - especially as you have to buy in batches, often of the same figure. And the best stuff for fantasy RPGs - Khurasan and Splintered Light - isn't readily available in the UK.

On top of that, "15mm" miniatures vary radically in compatibility with each other. I'm not a huge stickler for scale consistency, but the difference in size between "small" and "big" 15mm stuff can be enormous. That can spoil one of the main attractions of the scale: using the huge range of historical figures with fantasy ones. Alas, dwarfs and goblins from some manufacturers tower above men-at-arms and knights from others.

Also, the smaller figures don't take up much room even on a penny - so that 'crowding' is no more achievable than with 28s based on the standard 25mm round base.

And because the figures are metal, they're heavy and fragile. With reasonable success, I constructed a travel set of 15mm miniatures in a box lined with magnetic card, so that the kids and I could play skirmish games on holiday. The only problem with it was that the magnetism wasn't sufficient to keep the miniatures from rattling around in a rucksack - so that they needed a fair bit of retouching afterwards.

I'll probably rebase the lizardmen on twopence pieces

The allure of an intermediate scale
Enter 1/72. I've dabbled in this scale before, but only in monsters that are somewhat scale-agnostic, such as the Caesar lizardmen, which I've used in both 28s and 15s. But I've started to see the attractions of RPG gaming in 1/72 scale entirely.

First, 1/72 figures tend to be a lot more compatible with each other than 15mm. Yes, there are scale discrepancies between manufacturers. But they're slight. One viking or hoplite won't be twice as tall as another. That opens up a huge range of historical soldiers and civilians (1/72 ranges offer a nice array of ancient and medieval civilians). Populating a crowded marketplace or court is far more achievable.

The second attraction is cost. For between six quid and a tenner, you can get 40 or more miniatures. Yes, there'll be some repetition, but there's also a lot of variety within boxes. I bought some Italieri crusaders yesterday; the box included nine mounted knights along with multiples of eight different foot-soldiers.

And those multiples offer a further attraction: anonymous 'extras' for town guards, the local baron's men-at-arms or whatever. Compared with the characterfulness of 28mm miniatures, the unassuming nature of 1/72 figures takes some of the emphasis off the miniatures on the gaming table and back into the players' minds.

At the same time, the compatibility of the figure and their anatomically correct scaling (as opposed to the 28mm emphasis on faces and hands) adds an extra dimension of realism. And the miniatures occupy a penny base just about perfectly - allowing for a reasonable amount of crowding while still providing stability and weight. And they'll travel unscathed in my magnetised box.

Swords, sorcery and soft plastic
But the biggest attraction, for me, is 1/72's suitability for sword and sorcery. I don't much like Robert E Howard's Conan stories, which I find poorly written and heavy on the sublimated wish-fulfilment. But I do like the Hyborian blueprint of a world including lots of thinly veiled proxies for historical cultures, all thrown together with anachronistic glee. Fritz Leiber does it rather better, and so too does Howard's contemporary and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith.

The best way of representing that sort of mish-mash - ripe for games involving travelling adventurers - is to have different cultures visually represented. And 1/72 opens up a whole wealth of intriguing possibilities. Imagine these as town guards in one northern city. Or these as invaders threatening a coastal civilisation far to the south. If you want a human-centric game - or one that's set in or nodding to Glorantha or Tekumel - this is the scale to do it.

Fantasy creatures, of course, are less well represented. But Dark Alliance/Red Box and Caesar do quite a few fantasy sets: orcs and goblins of various stripes, lizardmen, ratmen, trolls, hyena-riders, fantastical barbarians and undead. And, of course, 28mm monsters will generally work fine in 1/72: they'll just be bigger (and nastier).

It's also worth noting that some of the official D&D miniatures from Wizkids are a nice fit with 1/72 stuff, because they are similarly (i..e more naturally) proportioned. This snakeman is much bigger in 1/72, but the proportions of his human elements make him a better fit in 1/72 than in 28mm.

Also, some 15mm goblins work pretty well at this scale. I reckon the little chap below is perfect for a small Middle Earth orc or a D&D goblin:

The same's true of these (rather large) 15mm frog-men:

And I'll be stripping down these Ral Partha dwarfs (painted by a friend when we were teenagers) and repainting them. They're tiny by 28mm standards, but just right for short but strong mine-dwellers in 1/72:

These old Chronicle kobolds and orcs work too (as larger and fiercer monsters at this scale - gnolls and ogres, perhaps):

I can also see lots of potential for using these in Dragon Rampant. The reduction in unit 'footprint' makes a 3'-wide dinner table a better battlefield - and assembling and painting up cavalry is much quicker. And then there's Hordes of the Things. A box of 48 miniatures (like the Dark Alliance fantasy sets, with four identical sprues of 12 figures) could be used for a couple of different factions of individually based models for RPG and skirmish games and a few elements of multi-based troops for massed-battle wargames like HotT. 

Then there's painting. I found the Caesar lizardmen exceptionally easy and quick to paint. The softness of detail is actually an advantage when it comes to painting 1/72 for RPGs, as you can blast through them without worrying too much about precision.

A protocol for miniature use in RPGs

These considerations of scale and "anonymity" have got me thinking about how miniatures are best used in RPGs. Nicely painted 28s and precise floorplans are great for dungeon crawls and one-shots, but take a lot of time to prepare. And there's the problem I brought up at the start: the way in which the tabletop props can detract from the imagined scene. That doesn't much matter in the typical dungeon crawl, but it causes problems in more sophisticated games - not least because if everything's set out in detail and represented with miniatures, everything looks like a fight.

So here's how I'm planning a forthcoming session with some old friends. I'll almost certainly use The Fantasy Trip for the game, because of its simplicity and speed of character generation and its tremendous tactical combat. That entails a hex grid, so I'll get one of the Chessex dry-erase maps. The smaller scale of the 1/72 miniatures will compensate for a grid size that's smaller than the TFT standard. 

Now, what I want from an RPG session is plenty of roleplaying. But if there's to be fighting, I want that to be intense and tactical - essentially a mini-wargame for players and GM alike, with both sides aiming to win. Of course, I'll allow and encourage any convincing stratagem that interrupts the normal flow of combat. 

To balance that with role-playing and 'theatre of the mind', I won't use the dry-erase markers until swords are drawn. The players will know they're in a large audience chamber or a cramped tomb or whatever, but until they have a fight on their hands, I won't sketch it on the grid or place miniatures to represent NPCs. 

That should have two important effects. First, the players will process the monsters and NPCs as they're described before they see how they're represented on the table - if they see that at all. And second, rather than every encounter looking like a fight, as it does in a floor-plan-assisted dungeon crawl, every encounter will appear a role-playing opportunity. Only if that leads to fighting will I quickly sketch in the scene, place a few props and - finally - plonk the baddies down on the table.

The Fantasy Trip

Last year, I found my curiosity piqued by The Fantasy Trip and looked into a couple of the retroclones. I resolved to get hold of it when it was republished - in part, because I couldn't remember if I'd ever played the minigames on which it's based: Melee and Wizards. Steven Jackson Games were popular as lunchtime diversions when I was at primary school; we played Car Wars and OGRE quite a bit, but I'm not sure about Melee.

Having bought the Legacy Edition of The Fantasy Trip, I'm still not sure. The rules seem familiar, as do some of the counters. But it was a long time ago - and if we did play it back then, we played Car Wars and OGRE much more. I never owned any of them, and I do remember designing some grid-based combat games shortly after I moved schools - possibly to recapture the counter-and-grid thrills of those lunchtime sessions.

Anyway, the kids and I played four games of Melee over the weekend. It's terrific. I'm planning to use it for most RPG sessions with the kids and their friends from now on, simply because it'll make combat encounters so much more compelling than the various D&D clones we've tried. Whitehack will doubtless remain a go-to for small, focused groups, and I'm playing Tunnels & Trolls with some old friends next weekend, but for dungeon-crawling with the kids, The Fantasy Trip/Melee appears perfect.

So why is that? Well, the sheer amount of decisions to be made - formalised in the game as options - gives a tremendous range of outcomes. I can't think of any one-figure-per-player skirmish game that offers quite so many options in combat situations.

And yet the game is very simple. For Melee (the TFT combat system as a freestanding game), characters have three stats: strength (ST), dexterity (DX) and movement allowance (MA). You design your character(s) by deciding the balance of their ST and DX and then choose whatever weapons and armour you like.

And that's where the real genius of the game comes in. It combines a reasonable amount of realism with a tremendous amount of game balance. Strong characters can take and hand out more punishment: ST acts as your hit points, and allows you to use nastier weapons) But DX decides who attacks first - and the higher your DX, the higher your chance of landing a roll. Armour absorbs damage - but also reduces DX and MA.

So sufficient ST to wield a grisly weapon like a two-handed axe will impair your DX when you initially assign points between them - and heavy armour will impair it still further. But you will be appropriately tank-like and able to deal terrible damage on those rare occasions when you hit.

Alternatively, you could choose high DX to allow you to hit quickly and often. But against heavily armoured foes, you'll be relying on lucky shots to get through the armour.

You can see how this is perfect for gladiatorial combat: secutor v retiarius, or whatever.

And then you've got the hand-to-hand option - grappling, essentially, in which no weapon larger than a dagger is useful, but a dagger is very useful indeed. That creates a whole extra dimension. If you're determined to grapple with a foe, you'll probably want to drop your main weapons and draw a dagger - but there's a chance that they'll be able to do the same when you close, or even just clobber you with their main weapon and step back.

It's a fantastically elegant combat system. There are certainly lapses in realism; I suspect armour wasn't quite so constricting/slowing, at least initially, and of course many strong people are very dextrous too. YOu don't need to be terribly strong to use a two-handed sword or battleaxe; a two-handed sword isn't usually twice the weight of a regular sword. And the weapons list has some oddities (a pike axe?). But for a balanced game, it's just right.

Incidentally, while the RPG rules (In the Labyrinth) give a whole list of real-world weapons that might fit into the various categories, these make very little sense. The glaive and the naginata - essentially the same thing - are in different slots, for example. None of this matters, though - it's very easy to look at a miniature and decide that its big fantasy polearm is the very quintessence of pike axe.

After an initial one-on-one run through the rules, we played three lizardmen against three orcs, then a couple of games with two burly, armoured hobgoblins and a smallish giant against five orcs: two heavily armoured types and three skirmishers (two with javelins and one with a light crossbow). Both times, the orcs won, because they were able to surround the unsupported giant and pierce it with many weapons. There was something of the mammoth hunt about it, which seemed quite appropriate.

We're eager to play more, and to try the wizard rules. There are printable hex papers of appropriate size available online, so drawing out some floorplans on those will be no more onerous than drawing them out on traditional grid paper.

The labyrinth beckons ...

Mutants and Death Ray Guns!

A selection of mutants

So far this year, the game I've played most is Mutants and Death Ray Guns, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi skirmish ruleset from Ganesha Games. Work, travel, holidays and the Six Nations have conspired to deny me time for preparing RPG adventures, so I've been running MDRG games for my son and his friends (and one of their fathers) most weeks.

I've had the rules for three or four years, and we've played them fairly often over that time, but usually simply as a sci-fi take on Song of Blades and Heroes, the marvellous fantasy skirmish game that provides the 'engine'. So, we typically just stat up some characters, keep the page with modifiers for high-tech weapons open and then play SBH. 

The field of battle

In our recent sessions, though, we've been paying much more attention to the differences between MDRG and SBH. And the game was much the better for it. That shouldn't be a surprise, of course, but I think many of us are guilty of carrying assumptions from one ruleset into similar but subtly different games.

So what have we been doing differently? Well, for starters, we've been using the profiles for each species in the book: Q3, C2 for humans (the default in SBH tends to be Q3, C3) and Q4, C3 for mutants. We then gave each side the appropriate leader and champion updates. That meant that Captain Zero, a human leader, is Q2, C2 - very easy to activate, but not especially formidable in combat, even when decked out in power armour (+2 C) and equipped with a jetpack (the Flying trait) and a sub-machine gun (+2 C).

Captain Zero

We've also paid much more attention to the differences between weapons. It was only fairly recently that I noticed that the titular death-ray guns don't just add 2 to combat rolls, but are also Lethal (killing on a 'win' rather than a 'doubling': something that should have been obvious!). So we've been making sure that was observed. And we've also been using multiple-shot rule for most high-tech weapons - a big departure from SBH - and the slower rate of fire for primitive weapons like bows and crossbows (which need an action to be reloaded in MDRG).

All of our SBH and MDRG games involve wandering monsters, which add a bit of extra spice. Before the game, I line up six beasties in order of power, with stats assigned to each. At the end of each turn, someone rolls a d6; a six means that a wandering monster (d6 roll for which) appears at a random table edge. This adds a lot of unpredictability to the game: players have to watch their backs.

Our most recent game put a twist on this. The game centred around cargo from a downed aircraft that had broken up over an alien hive. The players' squads had to retrieve some of this while avoiding or fighting off angry, bug-like aliens that emerged from several 'spawning points'. A d6 was rolled for each of these at the end of a turn; only a 1 failed to produce aliens, with other numbers spawning various types of bug.

Bugs

This lead to a set-up in which the table was often swarming with agitated aliens, meaning that the player goals often had to be subordinated to sheer survival. That forced temporary cooperation among the players, who were otherwise opposed to each other.

Bugs and their spawning points

I also recently played back-to-back games of GW's Kill Team and MDRG. I enjoyed KT (a game with an old friend is always fun), but I was struck by how slow the game is compared with the Ganesha rules. We used a small section of the table for KT and the whole table for MDRG, with two warbands a side for the latter game. But MDRG played out much more quickly. It also offers much more elegance in the combat system: shooting delivers five possible results from one opposed dice roll, whereas in KT, it's three possible results from four or five dice rolls. In close combat, MDRG gives a spread of nine possible results from the single opposed roll; in KT, it's three results from four rolls - and the process is repeated if the defender survives.

That got me thinking about how MDRG and SBH combat is generally much more enjoyable and dynamic than most RPG systems. And that in turn prompted me to dig out the Tales of Blades and Heroes RPG rules from Ganesha. I'm planning a hybrid skirmish/RPG run-out with those this weekend.

A couple more thoughts on The Dolorous Stroke: mortal wounds and asymmetry

After our brief try-out of The Dolorous Stroke the other night, a couple of other thoughts occurred to me. The first was the phrase "mortal wound".

This was an absolute staple of my childhood reading in epics and myths. But I haven't heard it used for years - and not once, I think, since I got back into gaming. Why? I suspect it's because most wargames and RPGs don't really cater for the idea of a mortally wounded warrior who staggers around the battlefield taking out a few more foes before succumbing to his injuries.

And that's a real shame. It's such a huge part of the stories that inspired fantasy gaming in the first place. There are lots of epic and mythological examples. Take Cuchulain, for example:

Then Lugaid threw the spear, and it went through and through Cuchulain's body, and he knew he had got his deadly wound; and his bowels came out on the cushions of the chariot, and his only horse went away from him, the Black Sainglain, with half the harness hanging from his neck, and left his master, the king of the heroes of Ireland, to die upon the plain of Muirthemne. Then Cuchulain said: "There is great desire on me to go to that lake beyond, and to get a drink from it."

"We will give you leave to do that," they said, "if you will come back to us after."
"I will bid you come for me if I am not able to come back myself," said Cuchulain.
Then he gathered up his bowels into his body, and he went down to the lake. He drank a drink and he washed himself, and he returned back again to his death, and he called to his enemies to come and meet him. 

There was a pillar-stone west of the lake, and his eye lit on it, and he went to the pillar-stone, and he tied himself to it with his breast-belt, the way he would not meet his death lying down, but would meet it standing up. Then his enemies came round about him, but they were in dread of going close to him, for they were not sure but he might be still alive.

And then there's Boromir (whose death has a distinct echo of Cuchulain's):

Then Boromir had come leaping through the trees. He had made them fight. He slew many of them and the rest fled. But they had not gone far on the way back when they were attacked again, by a hundred Orcs at least, some of them very large, and they shot a rain of arrows: always at Boromir. Boromir had blown his great horn till the woods rang, and at first the Orcs had been dismayed and had drawn back; but when no answer but the echoes came, they had attacked more fierce than ever. Pippin did not remember much more. His last memory was of Boromir leaning against a tree, plucking out an arrow; then darkness fell suddenly.

When Aragorn finds Boromir, he "was pierced by many black-feathered arrows" and had killed four of the very large goblins of Isengard, so he clearly fought on after receiving his mortal wounds (he killed some of the big Orcs who shot him dead, as other of their kind later boast).

Anyway, The Dolorous Stroke is the first game I can recall playing that has mortal wounds worked in as an integral part - disembowellments, bleeding out and other grisly and prolonged exits. I'm sure there are others - actually, RuneQuest may well have some rules for this, though I think the character is generally incapacitated at that point - but they've never come up in any game I've played in.

So, if you think that fantasy wargames should attempt to emulate epic, myth and the better sort of fantasy literature, that's a huge point in The Dolorous Stroke's favour.

The second point that occurred to me was how welcome the lack of points values is. All the best skirmish games I've played have involved asymmetrical forces. Our family-favourite scenario for Song of Blades and Heroes is a last-stand scenario that pits five elven archers (around 500 points) against at least 1,500 points of monsters. It's worked brilliantly every time we've played it. So any game that encourages asymmetrical games is to be applauded.

Wargames vs RPGs: RuneQuest, The Fantasy Trip and The Dolorous Stroke

I got into RuneQuest when I was at primary school. A friend's older brother had it, his younger brother inherited his books, and I asked for the rules for my next birthday. And that led to many glorious encounters, though very little in the way of campaigns; characters were very short-lived, and fights often ended badly.

In retrospect and despite all the glories of its setting, RuneQuest probably functioned for us as much as a brilliant skirmish wargame as an RPG. The roleplaying happened before the fighting - and then the fighting typically ended things. 

A year or two ago, a Lead Adventurer Forum regular, LeadAsbestos, noted that he'd often used RuneQuest simply as a low-figure skirmish game. My son and I tried out RQ2 in that way a while back and had a pretty good session pitting one crested dragonewt against a few trollkin. 

In the past, the big problem with RuneQuest was generating NPCs and monsters, as this took almost as long as creating PCs from scratch. So we tended to use stat blocks from scenarios (those Rainbow Mounds trollkin from Apple Lane must have been slaughtered again and again and again ...) and from FANGS, a supplement consisting of nothing but pre-generated monsters, many of whom were much more powerful than starting PCs. 

These days, though, there are automatic generators for NPCs (or at least for Mythras, the non-Chaosium incarnation of the RQ system). So statting up a few broo or dragonewts for a quick skirmish has never been easier. That's something I intend to do shortly, once I've properly digested the Mythras rules. 

The Fantasy Trip is another example of the way RPGs and skirmish games can intersect, with game being derived from the Melee microgame (I seem to dimly remember playing it; certainly, those plastic-boxed board games were in vogue at lunchtime when I was at primary school: Car Wars and Ogre in particular).

Then there's Song of Blades and Heroes and its mechanically similar RPG version, Tales of Blades and Heroes, which is great for one-off, miniature-based games and certainly enlivens combat. I've never played Savage Worlds, but I gather it performs the skirmish and RPG roles well.

It's probably true, though, that most RPG combat systems don't make for great skirmish games, because the fights are too long - too much hit-point attrition - or insufficiently tactical without GM input. Or because they're too complex. Song of Blades certainly handles 12 broo vs 5 adventurers much more smoothly than RuneQuest. And D&D-type systems can get a bit boring in symmetrical fights (two groups of three third-level fighters facing off, for example).

Conversely, most good skirmish systems aren't that great for RPGs, because they're too realistic - death can come too suddenly - or insufficiently flexible to allow for the creative ploys a group of D&D players might come up with (spilling oil on the floor, shouting "look behind you!", feigning death or whatever).

Anyway, I've been thinking about this today because I bought The Dolorous Stroke last night. It's a new skirmish game with RPGish elements from Emmy Allen, whose blog is trove of delights (add-on duelling systems for D&D, tables of hideous wounds, discussion of Machen's The White People ...). The kids and I have just given it a run-through, on which I shall report shortly.

Rogue Planet, Mayhem and Havoc

Rotters!

I painted up these portly gents for a spot of Rogue Planet this week. A friend and I managed a couple of games on Tuesday night, first pitting his space marines and inquisitor against my motley alien pirates and then deploying my freshly painted rotters and some demons and beasts against the marines.

Not having played the game for at least a year, I was a little rusty on the Rogue Planet rules. We missed out a few things, including the option to take default action points and the penalties from multiple opponents in melee. And we were probably both a little hesitant in using counter-actions in the acting player's turn: interceptions, opportunity fire and so on. We did master the counter-charge, though, which resulted in plenty of collisions between monsters and machines.

Anyway, the evening whetted my appetite for more Rogue Planet. There's a great deal about the game that's fresh and liberating: unmeasured movement (as in Ganesha's terrific Battlesworn, another ruleset to which we periodically return); the freedom to build whatever units you wish to deploy; and the innovative use of miniatures, whether as "pawns" that represent a hero's abilities and endurance, or "groups" that allow the same stat line to be presented in radically different ways.

I can't think of any ruleset that matches Rogue Planet's ability to make you look at a collection of miniatures and dream up imaginative ways of deploying them on the table. The simplest way to do this is by designating them as pawns - hit points for a leader that also provide special abilities while they remain on the table. So, that huge alien beast could be an intimidator (reducing the opponent's command-and-control ability), that ferocious-looking mercenary could be a brute (enhancing the leader's combat ability) and that odd, striped vaguely dog-like thing could be a pet (allowing the leader to make instantaneous attacks on enemy forces anywhere on the table).

The game's also fast. This week's Rogue Planet session was a re-match after my first game of 40K since at least the early 90s. But we managed to get a couple of games in in far less time than the 40K game took, despite our lack of familiarity with the rules.

My son remembers the rules fondly - as a frenzy of charging lizardmen and dinosaurs, chiefly - so we'll aim to get in a game or two this weekend, if the good weather allows.

Other Bombshell games
Rogue Planet is one of several excellent wargames written by Brent Spivey of Bombshell games. The other two that we have are Mayhem (fantasy massed battles) and Havoc (fantasy skirmishes).

Mayhem is the one we've played the most. I have a couple of 10mm armies in progress for it, but we've generally played it with 28mm Hordes of the Things units doubled up. Mayhem units are squares, so two 60 x 30 HotT bases do the trick nicely. Like Rogue Planet, the game is innovative and quick to play.

The Achilles heel of both rulesets, however, is the build-your-own-unit aspect. I'm all for this in principle, as I dislike prescriptive rulesets that allow you to field only highly specific troop types (usually tied to a certain range of miniatures). My rule of thumb for any fantasy game is that it should allow you to field a goblin mounted on a giant lizard (or a dwarf on a giant bird, or a beastman on a giant beetle, or whatever ...). If not, then it's probably not for me. Both Mayhem and Rogue Planet certainly cater for goblin lizard riders.

The problem, though, is that it requires a little bit of work to stat up such units - and that there's little in the way of baselines to work with. That doesn't make the game itself any less satisfying - but it does require an hour or two's work to draw up two sets of rival forces.

This is a minor complaint, of course. And there are plenty of statted-up forces floating around on the net, as well as an app with Warmaster/Warhammer troop types rendered in Mayhem terms. But the absence of a sample lists does mean that we tend to play both Mayhem and Rogue Planet less often than they merit.

Here, I'd make a comparison with another excellent wargame, Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes. This is the skirmish game that got me back into all this malarkey when I bought it for my son's sixth birthday almost four years ago. We haven't looked back, and the RPG fires were swiftly rekindled. Song of Blades also allows you to stat up any model as you see fit, which is great. So goblins on lizards are no problem at all. But it does contain a handy list of non-prescriptive profiles. So you can look at the orc profile of Quality 4, Combat 3 and then make your particularly vicious and cunning-looking orc Quality 3 (lower is better) and Combat 4 (higher is better). And then you can layer on special rules as you see fit: Savage, Heavy Armour, etc. There's a handy warband generator on the Ganesha site, so you can have a printable roster sheet ready in a couple of minutes.

This "time to table" aspect is crucial in how often we play a given game. So I'm going to make an effort to preserve our Rogue Planet profiles so that they can be reused quickly - perhaps going to far as to print cards for each model or unit that we use. With the "time to table" problem solved, I think the game will get the playing time it deserves.

Havoc is the earliest Bombshell ruleset, I think, and the one we've played least. This isn't because it's a bad game; the one or two times we played it, we thought it very good. But the rulebook is thick and impenetrable. It could also do with a good proofread and edit. This isn't a problem with Mayhem or Rogue Planet; judging by the acknowledgements, Mrs Spivey deserves the credit here.

But Havoc does get round the "time to table" problem by having a list of preset profiles. You can still field a lizard with a goblin rider, but you'll use the profile for "rider" or whatever. And an orc with spear and shield will be identical, rules-wise, to a dwarf thus armed.

I don't mind that at all. It's a system that works very well in massed-battle games like Hordes of the Things, where a "warband" element might be large goblins or burly barbarians or excitable elves; the flavour of the army comes from the combination of the unit types rather than their individual powers. From memory, Havoc caters better slightly better to ancient and Renaissance-type profiles rather than high medieval; I don't think you can easily fit in a poleaxe-armed, plate-armoured man-at-arms of the Wars of the Roses sort, for example, as users of two-handed weapons are deemed to be lightly armoured like landsknechts or Dacian falx-wielders.

In essence, Havoc has what Mayhem and Rogue Planet need in its standard profiles. Mayhem and Rogue Planet have what Havoc needs, both in their brevity and clarity and (to a lesser extent) their ability to cater for any sort of profile.

Anyway, my experiences of playing both Mayhem and Rogue Planet have been sufficiently good to make the effort of force creation well worth it. If Bombshell were to produce a cleaned-up and stripped-down Havoc, I'd pounce on it like a half-starved polecat.