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 ... 

A batch of bugbears

Our lockdown D&D game must now be hovering at over or around 30 session (we've been playing every day). On Friday, the party made their way north from the city of Kalbarad,* where they had been involved in much factional skullduggery, to return to the Keep on the Borderlands, now partially demolished by an ancient giant they unwittingly awakened.

I thought that they might raid the bugbear caves this time around, so got these fellows painted up on Saturday morning. As it happened, they confined themselves to massacring orcs. But the bugbears may well feature today. 

These miniatures are vinyl pieces from some D&D boardgame or other. The big one is actually an ogre, but he'll be a bugbear chief or shaman for me. I cut them off their thick integral bases and stuck them to the same square plastic bases as the rest of my dugeon-crawling stuff. I also converted two to carry different weapons, and added a few greenstuffed details here and there; I want each to be distinct for hit-point-tracking purposes. 

I like these figures for a few reasons. They were very cheap, which always helps, and they're very quick to paint up. And their relative crudeness should help them 'read' well over Zoom (only two of the seven-strong party are in the room with me). Also, the blocky way in which they occupy space means that they look suitably imposing on the table but still fit on a 25mm base (their original bases are about 22mm). So they fit in dungeon corridors, rank up for wargames and work well for the likes of MicroHotT and Book of War.

*A name I invented on the fly before it featured in the game, but which turns out to be a village in India.

Another ugly orc

Here's a C16 orc archer. He's one of a few early Citadel orcs that I began to paint a few years back and have started to repurpose for the square-base project.

As with his immediate predecessor, he's in Gygaxian colours as set out in the Monster Manual. He even had a bit of bluishness about him to begin with, as I'd originally painted him with a blue-green wash as with these chaps, but with pinkish mouthparts, nose and hands. He was supposed to look like an intermediate sort between two orcish schemes.

He's got the same face as one of the armoured orcs in this photo, with a huge, bulging left eye. The inventive reworking of the same elements is one of the joys of early Citadel miniatures (for my money, Aly Morrison was the leading light in this, in that some of his half-orcs and hobgoblins reuse the same bodies but in such inventive ways that the recycling can go unnoticed for years).

The next task is to get this orc's other long-neglected and half-painted brethren finished off. There are  three more half-painted ones, plus a few more that are merely undercoated. And I have a shaman from a more modern source underway too.

A very ugly orc

This is an old Citadel Fantasy Tribes orc from the early 80s. I've painted loads of these fellows before, chiefly in a 'fish-white' scheme in a nod to Alan Garner's svart-alfar. 

But, as we're playing a lot of D&D at the moment (in the house and over Zoom), I thought I might try some with square bases (for Book of War and MicroHotT) and a more Gygaxian colour scheme ("brown or brownish-green" with "pinkish snout and ears" - I didn't bother with the "bluish sheen" prescribed by the Monster Manual as well). 

This guy's a test. I'm quite happy with him, though I can't seem to get a terribly good photo.

The Fantasy Tribe orcs predate Warhammer and were, presumably, designed with D&D in mind. They're certainly not Tolkienesque, like some of the slottabased C15 orcs, which had long arms, bow legs and short stature. Those were produced around the time that Citadel obtained a licence for official Lord of the Rings miniatures; some may have been trial runs for that range. But the Fantasy Tribe lot were taller, ganglier and armed, inter alia, with crossbows and polearms - the quintessential weapons of the D&D orc. 

The range was huge, thanks to the practice of swapping a dozen or more heads between a dozen or more bodies. I used a similar - though bluer - scheme on some other orcs a few years back, and also on a Fimir; I was planning to use the lot of them together as a Fomorian warband for Of Gods and Mortals. I may yet do so.

Here's the new fellow with his predecessor:

For the shields, I was aiming for something that looked primitive enough for an orc to draw itself. The older shield works a bit better, but I like the idea of having some in black and some in white. I based the design on the figurehead of a Viking longship. The two bluish orcs on the right of the photo with the Fimir might end up being rebased to work with this lot. Then again, I have plenty more ...

Practising my art upon the gnolls ...

Here are a few quick gnolls - demonstrating none of the artistry of Mr Nuth, but some quick 'n' dirty speed painting instead. using the same basecoat/drybrush/wash method of the last batch I did.

These work out as four shooter elements and a brute for MicroHotT or four gnoll longbowmen and a chief for Book of War.

More things of chaos

Two more beastmen to go with the mantis-man. The bony fellow will be a 'beast' element in MicroHotT; the other two are 'hordes'.

Mantis-man

Here's another chaos creature for MicroHotT (and The Book of War, on which more shortly). This guy has a GW beastman head, a Frostgrave gnoll body and right arm, and a tyranid claw.

Another batch of beastmen - and handling bigger beasties in MicroHotT

Here's another batch of beastmen for my MicroHotT project. These will all be 'horde' elements in MicroHotT.

The ability to churn out horde elements quickly is a big part of the appeal of MicroHotT. Some of these kitbashes were originally destined for regular HotT horde elements that I started work on a couple of years back. I got five done - but I've knocked out ten MicroHotT elements in a fraction of the time. The reason's obvious: a MicroHotT element is a single figure, whereas most of my HotT horde elements contain at least five.

We played another game of MicroHotT at the weekend. The joy of this version of the game is being able to use very large numbers of elements without overwhelming the table. We played with about 64 AP each, but found that a single PIP roll (1-6 PIPs) worked fine.

Because you can split groups at will, as in any version of HOtT, you get a constant stream of command-and-control decisions. Those are a often a bit more crucial than in HotT, because you're having to assess the relative threats of various blocks: "Will six warband elements be a match for the fourteen hordes over there, or should I keep the group of ten together to make sure?"\

The only downside that I've noticed so far is that it looks a little odd when you have a single spear or warband element backed up by another. The aesthetics are better in standard HotT, because you get a square group rather than a tiny column. But in practice, it happens rarely and not for long: if you have two warbands fighting one, it makes more sense for one of the two to overlap or flank than to provide rear support (there's a greater chance of a kill with +3 vs +2 than with +4 vs +3, as the chances of doubling are higher). And, of course, you're normally fighting with much larger groups of elements than this.

An idea I tried out in our latest game was using "double-based" elements to represent very large monsters - or, rather, monsters that don't fit comfortably on a 25mm frontage. I happen to have a couple of beasties based in that way from an abortive Mayhem project a few years back (we ended up just playing it with doubled-up HotT elements). And I also have a giant painted to match my Nick Lund orcs that fits nicely onto a temporary 50 x 50mm base. 

Using these beasts (two behemoths and a dragon) required a slight adjustment to the rules. Here's what I came up with:

1. Double elements cost twice the points of a normal element minus one (for 1-2AP elements) or minus two (for 4-6AP elements). So a double warband costs 3 (like the unofficial brute and phalanx rules) and a double dragon costs 6. The lower cost represents the fact that a double element is less manoeuvrable and thus less flexible than two single elements. For example, two ordinary dragons can range the battlefield mopping up hordes and other vulnerable foes, while a single "double dragon" will take a lot longer to do so. A double element can't "close the door" as two single elements could. Also, double behemoths, dragons and gods, etc., can flee, flee off the battlefield or dematerialise at a stroke, whereas two dragons, etc., would be likely to last longer.

2. Double elements can attack twice per bound if they are in front-edge-to-front-edge contact with two enemy elements. If they are in such contact with a single element, they automatically overlap it. So a double dragon fighting a single warband element is on +6 vs +2.

3. Double elements only suffer the negative consequences of close-combat outcomes if they receive only negative or neutral outcomes in a given bound. So, a double dragon that is beaten by one element but destroys or pushes back another does not flee from the table. A double element that is doubled by one opponent and merely beaten by the other is destroyed. A doubling and a draw result in a kill, and a beating and a draw result in a recoil (or fleeing the table for a dragon). Positive outcomes work as normal (a double element won't pursue if it's still in contact with a foe).

4. When double elements fight each other, they fight as normal elements of their kind. So a double dragon vs a double behemoth is +6 on +5 with normal outcomes.

All of this sounds a bit fiddly, but it worked just fine. The doubled elements were a lot harder to defeat in close combat, but they could still be flanked and destroyed by determined foes. The points costing felt about right.

The doubled troop types allow me to use monsters that are a bit two big for Warhammer-sized cavalry monsters but slightly underwhelming on an conventional HotT 60mm frontage. And using appropriately sized bases keeps the miniatures more suitable for other games - notably RPGs - which is one of the main goals of MicroHotT. The swelling horde below is just screaming for a dungeon to populate ...

More beastmen for MicroHotT

The chaos pack is growing ...

Creatures of the Chaos Pack

These are the start of a MicroHotT army of chaos creatures. Each infantry-thing will count as a horde element (no matter how fierce it might look), and they'll be accompanied by behemoths, flyers and beasts. I'll probably throw in the odd sorcerer or champion too.

Of course, as individually based models, they'll be handy for RPGs and skirmishes too. I can see a mini-campaign arising from this army, with each wretched beastman having a personality and traits of its own. 

The marsh creeper (below) will also make a decent 1/72 troll of the Poul Anderson/D&D variety:

I might do something a bit more elaborate with the bases - perhaps initially picking out a few rocks and bits of debris, and slopping on various washes here and there.

MicroHotT - Hordes of the Things with individually based miniatures

Hordes of the Things is the best mass-battle fantasy ruleset around, I reckon. It's quick to set up, quick to play and brimming with tactical depth. And it copes with any vaguely fantastical period - hence my current 40K HotT project (designed both to use up spare miniatures and to introduce 40K-attuned friends to the glories of HotT).

Standard HotT games use 24AP armies and strict victory conditions. But we often play much bigger games: 36 or more AP a side. We also tend to play to the death or surrender rather than achieving 'technical' victories (as when a general is destroyed as the first casualty of the game). Those are fine for tournaments, but the game's mechanic for the loss of a general (troops become twice as hard to manoeuvre) is a perfectly good penalty if you just play on.

So the game's certainly good for a bit of stretching beyond its usual rigid parameters. Last week, my son and I decided to stretch it a bit more by playing it with individually based miniatures rather than the usual 'elements' of three or four figures.

We used 28mm infantry figures based on 25mm squares and cavalry based on 25mm x 50mm. So all frontages were 25mm, as opposed to the usual HotT practice of 40mm for 10 or 15mm and 60mm for 25mm or 28mm. Each individual miniature counted as a full element, and we used a 3' x 3' table (the 28mm standard) with 15mm movement rates. We also started with 54AP armies - huge by HotT standards - but kept the PIPs (activation points) roll at a single d6.

Orc warbands and spears await goblin riders and reptilian behemoths. The smaller cold one on its own was classed as a knight element.

So how did it go? Well, it was great. My son said that he preferred it to normal HotT (and he's an enthusiast). The larger table, relative to both bases and movement ranges, opened up a lot of space for manoeuvre. And the standardised base depths caused no problems. They theoretically entail very slight advantages for pursuing troops, as those would end up aligned again after pushing back or destroying elements that would usually have different base depths. But that's a trivial consideration. And all HotT base depths are "suggested minima" in any case, so this is still "rules as written".

The only other disadvantage I could see was that square, single-figure elements can look a little odd when one element is providing rear support to another (as with spears and warbands). Having figures standing in columns of two men isn't as convincing as having two rectangular elements backing each other up. It's a very minor point, though.

Other than that, I thought this version of the game offered several advantages:

1. It's a rank-and-flank game for individual figures that's much quicker to play than most of the alternatives (Warhammer, for example).

2. Huge battles are possible. 100 AP a side looks eminently doable. But 24AP games will work just fine too.

3. The single-figure basing keeps everything in scale. One of the few drawbacks of HotT is that certain elements can look oddly over- or underpowered on the table. This tends to apply particularly to behemoths. One player's behemoth might be a solitary, underfed-looking troll while another's might be some huge monster that takes up almost all of the available base space. In this game, we used GW cold-one riders as behemoths, and they looked just right: bigger and meaner than a knight, and dangerous to be near, but not oversized for their fighting ability. Similarly, dragons that fit on 25 x 50mm bases will tend to be appropriately sized, and the same goes for gods and heroes. Airboats might be a challenge, I admit - but then, they always are. Huge plastic vehicles could be supported on perspex rod and heavily weighted 25 x 50 bases, though.

4. Creating elements through painting up a single figure is an attractive option. Need a sneaker? That goblin looks suitably crafty. A flyer? Let's give the magician general an imp familiar. And so on. We found it remarkable easy to parse a batch of orcs into various battlefield roles: spears, warbands, shooters, blades, hordes, heroes, etc.

5. Using the same miniatures for different purposes. I have lots of square-based orcs because the EM4  ones come with square bases that are a paint to remove, and so I based matching Nick Lund metal figures similarly. I've used them for Saga in the past and intend to use them in Of Gods and Mortals, in which square bases are useful. This version of HotT gets still more use out of them.

All in all, I'd say that it's a good way to get a bit more out of both a common basing type and the excellent HotT rules.

Warbands drive through wolfriders