Maurice Part Deux

Gary and Caesar finally played their Maurice campaign game last night, completing the first round of our campaign. Gary defended with the Ottomans against Caesar's massed French columns.

Gary seemed to get off to a good start. His laid a dense terrain, which gave his massed artillery plenty of protection, but which also allowed his irregular cavalry to do a sweeping flank attack on the French infantry as it advanced. Caesar managed to stabilise that situation, and eliminate the Ottoman horse, but had suffered plenty of casualties. Eventually, though, his infantry met that of the Ottomans and a firefight ensued in which the Ottoman line slowly crumbled. Gary's artillery did fearful execution on the French cavalry, but it was too late; the Ottoman morale collapsed, giving the victory to the French.

Gary was part of the same alliance as Peter and myself, so his loss means that the war continues into another round, with many of us fighting with armies made up of hastily-raised conscript replacements. So the next set of battles look like they might be interesting, but short.

John and I played a few bouts of Munera Sine Missione, with a lot of the rules being in my head owing the the major rewrite they are currently undergoing. We ran a campaign setup, but only played out the first Games. We each had a school of six gladiators; two lights, two mediums and two heavies, putting two challengers forward each and matching them with something suitable from our school for a total of four bouts in the 'day'.

My fancy arena really only allows one bout at a time, so that's what we did.

Bout 1: I used Hero against the spear-using Alumnus. Alumnus couldn't get past Hero's armour, whilst the heavier gladiator slowly wore his opponent down and eventually forced him to his knees to seek mercy from the crowd. They spared him, but that meant there was a negative modifier on the next gladiator to appeal that day.

In the second fight, I used Bremusa against the dimachaerus Spiculus. Bremusa is armed as a thraex, but since Spiculus doesn't have a shield her sica simply counted as a sword (In MSM a sica is specialised for circumventing the opponent's shield).

This was probably the best fight of the evening, with both gladiators ending up wounded. It went for ten rounds before Bremusa finally backed Spiculus into the arena wall and ran him through, mortally wounding him.

The third fight was between the heavily armoured contra-retiarius Telamonius and my school's retiarius, Titan. Titan got in an early net attack, but couldn't exploit it before Telamonius cut his way free. However his agility mostly kept him out of trouble, and eventually he managed to fell Telamonius with a mighty blow from his trident. I'm hazy on what happened at that point (our notes are incomplete), but I think poor Telamonius fell victim to the crowd's desire for blood.

Finally John used the lasso-using Gracchus against my other heavy gladiator who, at some point, has lost his name label, so was called Anonymous for the evening. John had appalling AP rolls in this fight, to the point where Gracchus simply gave up trying to use his lasso, dropped it and fought with his trident in both hands, just so he stood a chance of getting in some attacks.

Anonymous had better luck with Action Points, and took down Gracchus fairly quickly. Like Alumnus, he was backed against the wall, and killed instantly.

We called a halt at that point, since John had lost all four bouts and decided that his school would close in shame.

The various changes we were trying out seemed to work OK, but Victor and I have plenty of work to do tying everything together, agreeing on terminology and (in at least one case) agreeing on mechanisms.

There were actually two other games on offer last night; Peter and Geoff played a big DBA game, whilst Ralph ran some Team Yankee at the back of the room. I didn't get photos of either of those games, so you'll just have to take my word for it.