Prester John vs The Dukedom of Ceidonia

With a new army to try out it was time for a quick game this evening. The Dukedom of Ceidonia was out of its box, so I set up a colourful medievel combat - Ceidonia's red and yellow on the left (defending) and Prester John's blue and white on the right.

The Ceidonians sit tight, with a nice hill covering their right flank. Prester John sends his tribal warriors forward on his right to engage the enemy archers.

They attack, but it goes badly. In the first round the overlapped warband is destroyed and on the next turn the other one is as well.

Prester John throws his centre into the Ceidonian line.

The Ceidonian spears hold, destroying some knights and then bringing down the war-elephant.

A last, desperate charge.

The Ceidonian left now turns towards the centre.

But before they get there Prester John's army breaks.

Heavy losses. The Ceidonians lost a single element of spears.

Prester John was probably onto a lose from the start, with a solid line of enemy troops in front of him, and no obviously point where a breakthrough could be made. Possibly things would have gone better by concentrating more troops on the shooters on the Ceidonian left.

Still, a disappointing debut for the new army.

Army Showcase - Prester John

Many years ago I picked up a pile of HOTT armies on a bring and buy - and when I say 'many years' I mean 'back when I was living in the UK'. It seemed like a good purchase at the time, but when I got them home I realised that what I'd bought was a pile of badly-painted and very unexciting miniatures. They went into a box where they have remained ever since.

Until the other week, when I was looking for something else, and came across them again. Maybe I've mellowed with age, but I felt sorry for them, and decided to salvage at least some of them. A good proportion of them were medieval knights and foot-soldiers, so I decided to tidy up or redo the painting on them, and assemble a basic army out of what I had. A simple medieval European HOTT army is always worth having in one's collection, after all.

Then I started reading the army lists for David Brown's in-playtest 'Last Stand' fantasy rules. Two of them covered the mythical medieval king Prester John, and I was inspired to change the direction of my repainting project.

Prester John was a legendary Christian patriarch and king popular in European writings and legends during medieval and renaissance times. He was said to rule over a mighty Christian nation, lost amid the Muslims and pagans of the Orient or, in later writings, Africa. The legends seem to be based on accounts of isolated Christian groups beyond Europe, both in India and in Ethiopia, inflating them to mighty empires which would ride up and aid Europe against Muslim and pagan invasions.

I decided to switch my army to Africa, but go down the medieval route of assuming that they'd still mostly look like medieval Europeans in terms of weapons and armour. Essentially I did a core medieval European army, but gave all of the troops dark skin, and added in some native troops and elements for local colour.

Here's the whole army:

1 x Cleric General (Prester John)

2 x Knights (Knights. Of course)

2 x Blades (Armoured foot-soldiers)

1 x Behemoth (War Elephant)

1 x Shooter (Armoured Bowmen)

1 x Shooter (Native Subjects with Bow)

2 x Warband (Native Subject Warriors)

1 x Lurker (Crocodiles)

Here's Prester John himself, and his noble knights. The original figures had this blue and while colour scheme, but with some additional jarring purple as well I de-purpled them, and tidied up the rest.

The blades. They are made up of those terrible figures that have a bent sword cast across the face that's almost impossible to cleanly cut away without hacking the figure about.

The elephant. Because who doesn't want an elephant in their army? It's from HAT's 20mm Carthaginian range; oversized for 15mm, but suitably heroic for an elephant in the army of a legendary figure like Prester John. The crew are more of those wonderful medieval figures, though.

Archers. The 'regulars' are a mix of spearmen and bowmen, but count as shooters for HOTT. There was only one element of archers in the  collection, so I mixed them with an element of spearmen to stretch them out a bit. Then I only used on of them in the finished army. There's still room for expansion. The irregular archers are some 15mm Tupi I had going spare. Not African, I know, but the average medieval chronicler wouldn't care, and neither do I.

Native ally warbands. More Tupi. I seriously don't care.

Crocodiles. Nothing says Africa like crocodile lurkers. And, again, they were going spare.

The whole army again.

Now let's see how they fight.

24AP HOTT

Last night we played some games of vanilla, straight out of the book, 24AP HOTT. This is something of a rarity in these days of 36AP or big-battle games, and made a welcome change.

I'd like to say that I took lots of pictures, but I didn't.

I played a couple of games, in both cases using armies I haven't had out of the box in a while. In my first game I used the Army of Rama, and faced Gary with a force of Dwarves.

Demon-ally chariots and minions of the monkey-king Hanuman held the one flank

I advanced bears and the two hero elements on the other.

The bears attacked ...

... and the Dwarves counter-attacked.

I couldn't marshal enough PIPs to make the bold attack I wanted to on that flank, and Gary was able to bring troops over to reinforce it. It became the main battle. The bears fell, as did Hanuman.

On the other flank, Hanuman's monkeys surrounded and killed the Dwarves' hero. But it was too little, too late. I was left trying to take down the Dwarves' giant ally using knights and warband, and we all know how that ends.

I face Dwarves again in the second game, a different army run by Geoff. I used my Peter Pig Garden Gnomes, which have some claim to being my first ever HOTT army.

A big fight developed over a hill in the centre.

Meanwhile dwarven cavalry tried to turn my left flank. The Garden Gnomes are a small army, in more ways than one, and were stretched to cover the width of the board. A single behemoth and a magician did what they could to cover this move.

I nearly ended very badly. The Gnomes lost the magician, and also lost their other behemoth. But a flanking move by their stone-throwing shooters on the other flank helped even the game up a little. The final result was very close indeed, but a Gnome behemoth rolled over some Dwarf cavalry to clinch the final victory.

Dave, Geoff and Gary played some games between them that I didn't get pictures of, using my medieval Ceidonians and heroic Malians.

Gary and I also talked about possibly running a simple, mapless Hott campaign one Sunday, using this system, which could be fun.

The Disappearing Clone

Back in February I posted THIS in which I pondered on the existence of a clone of this blog.

At the time I wasn't sure why the clone even existed, but further research showed that such sites are set up in order to gather hits and a solid Google presence, before being converted to other purposes or used for advertising. However I stifled my clone by reporting hundreds of possible links on the site for breach of copyright. And that's what it took; merely reporting the top level domain to Google wasn't enough; I had to pretty much report each post, each tag search and each date range individually. But as I did so the site's presence in Google (and it only seemed to be in Google) grew less and less until basically it disappeared from searches. It still existed, because I'd check every so often, but unless you went looking for it specifically you'd never find it.

Now I see that the link just goes to a domain name registration page; the content has disappeared. I have some slight reservations about claiming the death of my clone; it does say that the domain has been recently registered, so it could be that the individual responsible is going to have another try. But I hope that my fears are unfounded and that a search for my content on Google will return a link to this blog, and not an evil copy.

If you have a blog it's worth googling for your own content from time to time, especially via an image search, just to see if you have acquired a parasite.

Last Stand - First Time

Last night we gave Last Stand a playtest. Last Stand is a set of fantasy mass-battle rules which are being developed by one of our club members. They are designed to give an element-based DBM-sized battle, and whilst they owe their roots to the DBA/M system, they are different in many, many ways.

One person had played them before, whilst the other three of us hadn't even read them. Dave adjudicated, mostly from memory.

The game was a massive nostalgia-fest. Dave had set up a Middle Earth battle, and the figures were a wonderful mix of 25mm wonders from days gone by. Some of them were reckoned to be more than forty years old.

Pig-faced orcs!

And look at these minimalist ents.

Anyway, have fun looking through the pictures if you are into vintage miniatures.

As for the game, both sides spent the early stages wondering just what we were supposed to be doing. Last Stand is very detailed. It is, on the surface at least, quite complicated. It uses a whole range of mechanisms - different coloured dice drawn from a bag, a combat chart which looks like snakes and ladders designed by a sadist, a PIP system for movement, combat and rallying, multiple hits on elements and random events. There's no denying that this is a comprehensive game, but it's not an easy one to learn and, on a first play, ot an obvious one to get your head around just what you are supposed to do.

So here we were, set up and ready to go.

Unsure of how to initiate anything more complicated, Geoff and I (playing the Forces of Evil) just attacked. In the centre this went badly, with our Orc hordes hitting disciplined High Elf soldiers, and being repulsed along the line. It went pretty much as it would have done in HOTT.

We couldn't win there, even with dog-faced kobolds in our army.

It all looked spectacular.

Slowly we started to get an idea of how you managed attacks and supports, and from time to time all players were putting together moves which actually resembled the plan behind them.

After the first hour I stopped taking pictures, because it was hard enough trying to work out what we were doing, without trying to document it as well. The gist of the game was this. We attacked with our Forces of Evil in the centre, and it didn't go well. So the survivors just hung on grimly, and we attacked on the flanks instead. On our left, Saruman's Hillmen charged the Lakemen and in a spectacular round of combats and pursuits drove them back almost to their baseline before being halted by some dwarves. The Uruk Hai followed up to attempt to finish the job.

On the other flank, more orcs attack some wood elves and their Ent allies. We had some big monsters on that flank, and they smashed through the enemy line, with the breakthrough being supported by their Black Rider commander. The wood elves broke.

The Forces of God weren't idle. Both of our attacks had left our flank forces broken up, and they were quick to swing in reserves to exploit this. A disciplined line of Elven spears wheeled into the flank of the Uruk Hai, led by Gandalf himself. I managed to pull the half-orcs into a proper line in response, but it wasn't looking good.

So I threw Saruman into combat.

He defeated the spear-line opposing him, and broke through it. He attacked Gandalf.

He killed Gandalf.

A series of cascading morale tests on that flank saw the entire Good command rout and flee off the table.

This broke the army.

Evil triumphed.

It's very hard to judge a game on the first play. Last Stand is a fantastic labour of love, and when it's released into the wild for testing you'll see that it has one of the most outstanding sets of fantasy army lists I've ever seen, drawing from sources that I was not even aware of. But all of us felt that it could probaby do with streamlining in a few places. Difficult to see where, though, without radically changing some of the interlinked mechanisms.

One to keep your eye on.

And would we play it again? Dave admitted that what we played was a pretty large game, and was quite ambitious for novice players. I'd possibly be interested in a smaller battle with fewer troop-types, so that we could get a better feel for the interactions.

I want to play a big-battle HOTT game with those figures though.

I was so busy that I didn't get any pictures of the Team Yankee game, or even Gary and Peter's amazing Might and Reason battle. Peter took a couple though: