Ten Years Ago - April 2016

I really enjoyed the game Battlesworn back in the day. However it's rather clever system didn't really seem to catch on and after one supplement it's pretty much dropped out of circulation. A shame, as I think with a proper second editon it could be a great small-scale fantasy skirmish game. 

Anyway, this month's ten year time-machine post covers a Battlesworn scenario I put together that uses old Citadel horror RPG figures along with some of GW's old dungeon/horror floorplans. 

Can the heroic agents of SAVE foil the machinations of the evil Doctor Fu Manchu?

Fu Manchu's Halls Of Horror

Challengers of the Great Beyond

If you've been following this blog you'll know that I did a little bit of playtesting for the sci-fi version of Ganesha Games' 'Battlesworn' fantasy skirmish rules. This has now been published as 'Challengers of the Great Beyond'.

Victor Jarmusz, the author, has written a post on his blog which outlines the mechanisms it has in common with Battlesworn, as well as the fairly major differences. It should give you an idea if the game will be to your tastes. You can read it here:

Challengers of the Great Beyond

If you like your sci-fi hard, crunchy and 'realistic' then this is not the set for you. It's pitched firmly at the pulp sci-fi audience, so get out your Star Wars figures and brush up on your Dan Dare and Flash Gordon, because that's the mindset you'll need. It does use more figures than Battlesworn, because it now has squads as a type as well as individual characters. Since a proportion of a force must be squads you'll need to allow for that; squads have four or six figures depending on their type, and a force could have three or four squads.

Disclaimer: I not only playtested the rules, but did some of the development, so I may be slightly biased about how good they are. They're worth a look, though. Really.

Battlesworn Musings

One of the side effects of helping to test 'Challengers of the Great Beyond' has been that it's given me the inspiration to go back and look at the game it's derived from, 'BattleSworn'. CotGB does tidy up some of the grey-areas in BattleSworn's mechanisms, which has been helpful. But it's also inspired me to think about actual changes to the game, mostly where the new set offers a neater mechanism for certain class abilities than the original set does.

I have a working document of changes on the go. However I'm not sharing it just yet, as it's mostly a mess of random thoughts. But there are a few class changes and/or clarifications that I thought would be worth sharing for anyone who plays the game to try out.

Here they are. They cover classes both in the original game, and in the 'Knights and Knaves' expansion.

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Bard

Taunt: (Clarification) A Bard may also spend one Action to taunt the closest opponent in his line of sight. The taunted figure must immediately move directly towards the Bard using a Reaction if one is available, ending in melee if this is possible, even if the Bard is not the closest enemy. On subsequent turns the taunted figure must spend one of their side’s Actions or Reactions to move directly towards the Bard, and again this may become a charge and end in melee.The taunted figure may not move further away from, or move out of LOS of the Bard. The effects of Taunt end once the taunted figure is in base-to-base contact with any enemy, or if the Bard is no longer in LOS of the taunted figure. A Bard cannot Taunt again until any previous Taunt of his is ended.

Cavalry

Mobility - When making a move that does not end in combat, Cavalry may either break off from melee, or make a single pivot at any point during the move, continuing the move in the new direction.

Slot Limitation - A warband may include up to four Cavalry at the cost of one slot each.

(This is a complete rewrite of the class. Cavalry in the original game is pretty useless; it costs two slots,  and they are worse than the Flyer. In addition their ability makes them better in rough terrain, which doesn't seem intuitive. This change makes cavalry worth having, whilst giving them an edge of sorts in the open.)

Chaos Warrior

(Clarification) If two Chaos Warriors fight each other then they must both roll a D6 for their bid.

Giant

(Clarification) The melee knockback move is always straight back from the giant - measure from the centre of the giant through the knocked-back figure. The figure stops when it meets new terrain; it does not enter it.

Ranger

Change ‘Like The Back Of My Hand’. After setup a Ranger selects one area of terrain on the table. They can ignore this piece of terrain for movement purposes. As a miscellaneous action the Ranger can change their piece of terrain,

Sniper

Does not have to shoot at the nearest target. Gets +1 dice when shooting if its side has the initiative, Cannot bid 1 when shooting. Cannot bid 6 in melee.

(The basic Sniper isn't that exciting. And generally there's no reason not to have one if you have one or more Shooters, since you rarely bid 1 anyway. This change makes them a little bit different from the basic Shooter.)

Sorcerer

Ignore the rule that has a Sorcerer taking an extra hit from any damage. Instead a figure targetting a Sorcerer ignores rolls of ‘1’ when rolling damage. Rolls of ‘2’ from cover or the Rogue ability (if the Sorcerer is multi-classed) still count.

(This change still makes Sorcerers easier to damage. But the original rule felt clumsy, and wasn't clear either - does a Sorcerer take the extra hit if no hits were scored, for example. This is a simple change which has the same effect.)

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Finally, here's a possible new class, based on a mechanism we were looking at putting into CotGB, but didn't, but which seemed too good to waste.

Swashbuckler

Thrust And Parry - If you are the low bidder in a melee, your opponent reduces the number of dice they roll for their attack by the number of hits you scored in yours. Hits absorbed by a Tank still count for this purpose.

eg You bid 3 and your opponent bids 4. You roll three dice for the attack and score two hits. When your opponent rolls their attack they only roll two dice.

Quick - A Swashbuckler may not multi-class with anything that is not normally allowed to bid a '1' in melee.

Slot Limitation - A warband may include up to six Swashbucklers at the cost of one slot each.

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Bards and Berserkers.

A couple of weeks ago I painted a few more characters for my BattleSworn Elf and Dwarf warbands.

For the Elves I did a sorcerer and a bard. I'm not sure of the origin of the sorcerer figure; I got him in a big box of assorted GW figures, so I'm guessing that's what he is, but he's a one-piece plastic figure and looks like he came from a boardgame. The bard is a Reaper Bones figure. She's actually a human, but since my BattleSworn warbands are pitched at GW Middle Earth figures in terms of size, she's very tall in comparison to most of them, so I made her an elf instead.

The Dwarves have also acquired a bard, as well as a berserker. The former is a Reaper Bones gnome, whilst the latter is another GW plastic figure.

I took these pictures before I did their bases.

We've also acquired yet another cat. To be fair we've lost one too - our daughter finally moved into a place that allowed animals, so took Gypsy Danger away. That left us reduced to three cats, so we got a new one. And here he is. He's about two to three months old and he's called Mr Wednesday.

The name was the winner in a neck-and-neck poll run on Twitter and Facebook. We name all of our animals after characters from film, TV and comics, with the rule that each 'franchise' can only be used once*. Mr Wednesday (American Gods) won out over Raymond (Brooklyn Nine-Nine).

* My wife cheated with our two most recent goldfish, by naming them Elfo and Luci.

Kobolds Ate Milady

I gave the Kobolds another run yesterday evening, against the SAVE Envoys.

This time the Kobolds fielded: 4 x Fighters (including the Leader), 4 x Rabble, 2 x Chaos Warriors, 1 x Rogue/Shooter and 1 x Rogue/Assassin

SAVE had 4 x Fighters, 2 x Shooters, 1 x Arquebusier/Tank (Ranjit Singh), 1 x Rogue/Sniper (Josephine Carfax) and 1 x Brute/Chaos Warrior (The Baron)

The scenario was The Burden, with SAVE being given an extra non-combatant figure to protect - Lady Faversham. She counts as three figures, so makes the force harder to break, but a big loss if she is killed.

This was the deployment.

Lady Faversham was tucked away on the baseline, covered by a hired gun and Josephine Carfax.

The majority of both sides faced off in the gap between a hill and some rocky ground. The Kobolds rushed forward, hoping to slip through SAVE's line and make a run for Lady Faversham.

Which they did; you can just see a lone kobold at the top left of the picture.

Lady Faversham moved to the cover of some ruins, whilst a gunman moved out to protect her.

The two sides slogged it out in the middle, although the kobolds warily kept clear of engaging The Baron.

The lone kobold sneaked into the ruins, evading the gunman.

A second shot winged him as he ran through the buildings, but he reached Lady Faversham.

And killed her.

Both sides were taking casualties in the centre.

A kobold warrior attempted to rush The Baron, but Miss Carfax shot him down.

Other warriors now engaged The Baron, including the sneaky assassin. I really left it too late to use him though; his ability to poison people relies on using reactions in subsequent turns, so is best used early on.

As it was it wasn't poison that did for The Baron anyway, but a good, old-fashioned, spear in the back.

The kobold Kaptain engaged Ranjit Singh, who simply shrugged off most attacks.

The kobolds were fighting hard now. They were taking casualties, but most of them were rabble. And SAVE were close to breaking. The kobold archer and a gunman exchanged fire from cover, and the gunman was seriously wounded.

Into the last turn, and another of SAVE's hired muscle fell. But it wasn't enough; they were on exactly half losses, and the kobolds needed losses to exceed living figures for a win.

Technically the fight was a draw, but SAVE had suffered more losses, so the kobolds got the winning side of it.

In both this game and the previous one I tried a rule change Victor and I have been discussing where the number of dice rolled by the losing bidder in a melee is reduced by the number of hits they receive from the winning (lowest) bidder. This gives more incentive for an early low-value strike, and worked in that respect. But it does extend the length of melees and, I felt, made the Tank class a little to good, since a powerful attack against one was easily countered by the Tank bidding low. I think we might ditch the idea.

Kobold Debut

What better way to celebrate the eighth anniversary of this blog than by debuting my newly painted BattleSworn kobolds?

That's exactly what I did this morning.

I pitted them agains my Moria Goblins, who fielded 4 x Fighters (including the Leader), 3 x Rogues, 2 x Shooters, 1 x Cavalry (a wolf) and 1 x Brute/Giant.

The Kobolds were 4 x Fighters (inluding the Leader), 2 x Chaos Warriors, 4 x Rabble and 2 x Rogue/Shooters

I'm trying out scenarios from 'Challengers of the Great Beyond', and used one of the versions of the McGuffin scenario we're testing. Each side has three counters in terrain areas on their side of the board. If a figure moves over a counter it is removed, but no character can start on or touching a counter. When the fourth counter is removed, roll a D6 - on a 5+ the counter is an artifact and all other counters are removed. The fifth counter is the artifact on a 3+ and the sixth counter is always the artifact. The artifact must be carried off the side's board-edge to win.

This was the setup. Both sides defended the counters on their own side of the board, but had plans to grab ones on the opponent's side as well - the plan was reveal one or two on their side then use moves to reveal the last few on their own side, hoping to get the artifact. The game is a tense balance between choosing to remove counters, and getting your opponent to do it so you can try to ensure that the artifact is one of the counters on your side of the board, plus trying to bid such that you get to move the artifact off the board with reactions at the end, as these are harder moves to block.

I ran the kobolds (naturally, and used the solo mechanisms for the goblins).

The goblins sent their wolf round the flank to threaten a counter in the kobold's rear. I use a different version of Cavalry to that in the rules. Firstly it only costs one slot, secondly you can have up to four and thirdly they move differently. Instead of ignoring the first terrain change (which has the curious effect of making cavalry good in rough terrain), they can make a single direction change during their move, so long as they don't enter combat. Normal BattleSworn movement is always in a straight line.

The kobolds responded by attacking the wolf.

And first blood to the kobolds!

In the centre the two kobold Chaos Warriors (representing their 'elite' warriors) rushed into some rocky ground and used reaction moves to grab the counter their from under the goblins' flat noses.

The goblin Rogues also went after a counter, but ended up caught in a duel with the kobold's archers.

Things looked desperate when the cave troll charged in as well.

But the kobold's kaptain performed an intercept charge and distracted the troll.

By this point two counters had been revealed. The goblins used their turn to reveal a third, and then roll for a fourth, which turned out to be the artifact. All they had to do was get it off the board.

Anticipating the find I had run a couple of kobolds over to the goblins' edge, ready to intercept any attempt to move the artifact off the board.

A couple more joined them.

But let's not forget the actual fighting - the troll knocked the Kaptain away, but the two archers finished off their opponents, losing one themselves.

Two kobolds were now in a position to stop the goblins escaping. In regular BattleSworn this would be a a good position to be in. And in terms of actual figure positioning it was.

But 'CotGB' also uses card-based initiative bidding, so you only get a limited number of each bid value. And I'd used up my high, reaction, bids earlier in the game. Now I was stuck bidding '1' which allowed me an action, but gave the goblins plenty of reactions. My first attempt to attack the archer with the artifact was intercepted.

As was my second. And the goblins could move the archer with reaction moves both times, so he escaped.

The goblins won. They had taken more casualties, but got the artifact and had escaped thanks to my poor hand-management.

Despite the loss this was a fun game, and the kobolds looked great. The scenario seemed to work OK as well, offering some tricky decisions about timing of moves and whether to take the initiative or not.

Kobolds!

It was a source of some surprise to me that despite my infamous online monniker, my wargames figure collection didn't include a single kobold, Kaptain or otherwise.

Last week I set about rectifying this egregious oversight and, seduced by a Facebook post advertsing new figures in the range, put in an order for some 28mm kobolds, which I spent a couple of evenings this week painting.

And here they are - enough kobolds for a varied BattleSworn warband:

These beautiful figures are made by Mike Broadbent for Goblin Factory, but are sold exclusively through Slave 2 Gaming. Drew, who runs Slave 2 Gaming, lives just around the corner from me, so I was able to message him my requirements on the Friday afternoon and pop round to pick them up on Saturday afternoon. I bought one of each available pack - four command figures, five sword-armed, five spear-armed, five axe-armed and five archers; a total of 24 figures. The warband uses 16 of them; the others will be used to fill in gaps in the roster as I discover its flaws in actual play.*

So what does the warband consist of?

Well, obviously the are led by a Kaptain Kobold. In BattleSworn he will simply be a Fighter with the Leader trait (I have been trying a change where every warband gets a Leader for free, rather than it taking up a slot). I wanted the kobolds to be numerous but puny, so making even their leader just a fighter seemed only fair.

He is supported by his axe-wieding bodyguard - three more Fighters.

There are missile troops; two archers and two kobolds with javelins. In BattleSworn these could be Shooters, although Shooter/Rogues would be OK as well. The javelin-throwers could just be Rogues.

The group needs some shock-troops, and I assigned the role to thse two with axe and shield. In a boring warband they would be the obligatory Brutes, but I feel that the unpredictable Chaos Warrior trait fits them better, making them more unpredictable than the Fighters without any real increase in fighting strength or defensive capability.

And the bulk of the warband? Six Rabble, armed with swords or spear. Cheap expendable filler.

So that's an easy 13 slots even without any multi-classing, which I'd almost certainly do for the missile troops.

As I say, there are a number of other figures waiting to be painted once I decide what to do with them. Some of them may undergo conversions before I finish with them. There's a nice drummer, though, which I think I may run as an inspiring Bard.

I find painting a real chore these days, and don't do a lot of it, but these figures were a pleasure to paint, with just enough detail to look good, but not so much that it got fiddly and boring.

And how big are these kobolds? Well, here they are closing in on a GW Middle Earth elf.

Small and puny. But numerous.

I'm hoping to get a chance to debut them this weekend ...

*And I'm assured that there will be more figures added to the range - flying and armoured kobolds even - later on.