Borderwilds AAR and The Dungeon First Foray

When we last left our heroes, they had successfully ambushed a small rat-thing outpost.  The group split up, half to return a badly wounded hench-halfling to his home, half to clear the rat-thing warren.  So five brave heroes (sans artillery – if first level wizards can be classified as such) spent an hour and a half exploring the caves of the rat-things only to find the leader had absconded with all the loot. 

They were able to track said leader deeper into the mountains to the entrance of The Dungeon.  During the game and on a whim, I google image searched “Skull Mountain” and found this image.  This is now the official entrance to The Dungeon, which the players have christened Skull Dungeon.

Turns out this is from the Smurfs of all places.  Taking inspiration
from any and all media - a time honored OSR tradition.

Though it meant their quarry living to fight and scheme another day, the players returned to town to rest up for a week.  They returned, loaded for owlbear, and promptly triggered a shrieker.  Said shrieker alerted the goblins on level 1, who arrived en masse, and graciously offered to escort the characters to the second level of the dungeon (the Cult of Chaos) for the nominal fee of 5 gold per head.  (The goblins are playing both sides against the middle, having granted succor to the rat-things for the same price.)

Locked into the Temple of Chaos, the characters flubbed their first encounter with the leader of the cult and fought a vicious battle on the lower steps, won the day and blundered into a second ambush moments later.  They survived that ambush and had just enough time to loot the Black Library before cultish reinforcements arrived and chased them off into the safety (sic) of the goblin escort.

At the end of the day, the characters learned quite a bit about Skull Dungeon and absconded with several heavy tomes, one of which is cursed, one of which is magic, and one of which is both.  They’re going to need some help dealing with all three of those, but are looking forward making another attempt on the Temple.  As of right now, they figure 5 gold is a cheap price to pay for not fighting the goblins.  We’ll see how they feel about that when the goblins do what goblins always do.

Skirmish - What's Out

So now that you’ve seen what’s in the game, what about what’s out? 

As usual, we’re gonna go right back to the start before we answer that question.  First we need to talk about what exactly we’re going here.  Every miniature war game rule set abstracts a whole host of factors in every rule it makes. Everything that happens on the table is an abstraction.  No battlefield is a plain as flat as a tabletop – we abstract the rills and gullies and rocks away.  Fighting effectiveness and morale is a function of an infinite number of factors (how cold it is, the reputation of the enemy unit across the ridge, whether Gunny Highway had a good bowel movement that morning, if PFC Johnson got shot yesterday on patrol) and we’re gonna abstract it all away into one mechanic.

So we’re gonna keep in mind a commitment to abstracting as much as possible while still maintaining the fundamentals of a miniature wargame.  Just remember that speed and fun are the key as we cheerfully toss certain conventions right out the window.

Command and Control

These dudes are your dudes to push around as you see fit.  You’re here to fight the enemy and not the rules.  You’ve only got a handful of them, so you decide how they act.  The good guys have satellites and comm-links while the aliens have telepathy or hive-minds or whatever other justification will help you sleep at night.

Morale

Your figures don’t have morale.  They can’t get scared.  They are bits of metal.  You can worry about them, and you might want to have them run away to stay safe, but they won’t run away.  They might get hurt bad enough in a fight to play dead or run off; either way, they are dead to you, so just write them off and move on with things.

Record Keeping

Look, if the figure is on the table then it’s doing some good.  If it’s not doing anyone any good, get it off the table.  Once a figure can no longer contribute, he needs to at least be knocked over so everyone knows that figure is effectively out as a fighting force.  Unless the specific scenario calls for it, there isn’t enough time to pull him out or patch him up.

Markers, Chits, and Other Distractions

A lot of games use on-table chits, markers, or dice to designate a figure’s status.  Those things (aside from exceptionally clever highly detailed markers) always clutter up the table with visually unappealing additions.  Suddenly, the neat diorama is marred by a big purple cube next to the guy who is broken or fleeing.  Visual appeal is half the hobby, we’re not gonna sully this table with any of that nonsense.

Small Scale Skirmish Rules - What's In

As promised, the rules for my next big mini-project. Tentatively titled 6-4-6-Skirmish, these are the rules I've worked up for quick and easy battles between aliens, colonists, and the marines who protect them.  These are for battles that are small scale in every sense of the word: the scale of the figures is small and the size of the engagements is small.  They should work for forces of less than 20 figures to a side.

We're all adults here, we've played enough of these games - I'm not gonna bore you with all the introductory minutiae of wargaming.  This is a basic set of rules suitable for convention style participating games.  It's not the sort of game to get bogged down with the difference between running figures and prone figures and unit cohesion.  It's just another bug hunt focussed on moving some dudes and rolling some dice.  Let's not make a big thing out of it, mkay?

These rules should be printed up on cardstock 6-inches tall by 4-inches across, and all you need is a single d6. Hence the name of the game.



Print on 4-inch by 6-inch cardstock.  Or on standard letter sized
paper if you like those ranges better for whatever sick and twisted
reason (like you use 28mm figures on a full sized table.)

Let's break this down to its rudiments, shall we?  For every figure you really only need to answer three questions: how does it move, how does it shoot, and how does it fight.  You can add a bit of complexity by asking how hard it is to kill as well.  That gives you four main stats, some of which don't apply to every figure.

As you can see, my basic unit of measurement is the card.  Slow things move 4" and fast things move 6"; Things that can shoot a little ways can shoot 4", things that have medium range can shoot 6", and if we ever need it, long range stuff like snipers and artillery can shoot across the table.  Those numbers, not coincidentally, match the lengths of the rule card.  Yeah the ranges are short - we're abstracting things here, so consider them effective ranges.  Your little mans can spray ammo all over the table, but beyond the range listed, they're just wasting it.

Those who have an open shot in range roll a d6 to see if they hit. The only thing that influences this is cover, which effectively adds 1 to the difficulty.  Big guns fire two shots per turn, that abstracts out flames, high rates of fire, and burst effects. Nice and easy. 

When you get stuck in each side basically rolls a d6 and the winner kills the loser.  Weak fighters subtract one from the roll, strong fighters roll two dice and pick the one they want, while experienced fighters can re-roll the die if they aren't happy with the first one.  If you can gang up on a figure then you get to add one for each extra goon in the fight up to two helpers, but just roll once for each side.

The wound-slash-morale system is easy - there aren't any.  Really tough or armored things get a saving throw to negate the hit.  Otherwise, if you're hit, you're out.

Oh, there is a bit of a morale system.  If you are stuck in hand to hand combat and win, instead of killing your foe(s), you can run off.  Everybody who does this should roll to see how far they make it; on a 1, 2, or 3 they move S and on a 4, 5, or 6 they move L.  Doesn't matter what their 'real' move is - this is pure panicky flight from a fight, so they'll take what they can get.

That's it.  Fight until one side is dead or meets the victory conditions.  Ahhh, victory conditions - that's where these wargames really shine after all.  More on that later.

Story Time!

Dungeons and Dragons was my gateway drug, not to Satanism and real magic, but to miniature wargaming.  We collected a box full of Ral Partha figures for our characters and the monsters they fought, painted them to a low standard, and then never bothered with a protective coating.  Today my brother still has those weathered figures somewhere in his attic.

Unlike the rest of the group, I tinkered around with massing the figures up and fighting big battles among them.  We didn’t really have enough for massed battles, so BattleSystem, Warhammer, and rule sets of that ilk didn’t work for me.  Combine that with a first real miniature wargame experience of watching friends play in an elaborate participation style TSATF game of French Legionnaires against Taureg tribesmen at the local convention, and you’ve got a kid that puts wargaming aside as a hobby akin to speedboat racing; it looks like fun, and I’ll do it whenever the rich people put it together, but forget building all that up myself.

The terrain was simply one of these kits - but
one more Mexican/Texan than medieval.

My one trip to GenCon (1991) was a life-changing experience in a lot of ways.  It introduced me to some fantastic games that I still play to these days, Silent Death and Car Wars among them.  These are the smaller scale games that even broke college students can afford.  But it was also my first introduction to fun and simple wargame rules that fit on the back of a card.  I dropped in on a 15mm Alamo battle where everyone played Mexicans trying to kill more Texans than his rivals.  I didn’t win, but clever use of captured cannons meant that I played king-maker for the eventual winner. Aside from the beauty of the game, I was struck by how easy the rules were, and this was a game with siege ladders and cannons, too.  I still remember half of them more than 20 years later.

Flash forward through 20 years of experience with 240 page rulebooks, games that take 4 hours to play, and games that require a lot of money to play.  Since starting this blog, I’ve tinkered with fast-play rule sets like DBA, Car Wars 5e and AK-47-Republic, and a host of free sets available on the web.  I still have not been able to recapture the fun and speed of that Alamo table; the closest experience to date has been Full Thrust, with its intuitive and simple base mechanics.

After beating my head against the wall trying to find the perfect little rule set, I realized that it was staring me in the face.  If I want a game that feels like that Alamo rule set, why not use that Alamo rule set?  The half I remember was great, and the half I don’t is easily extrapolated.  So that’s what I did.

I’ll show you the rules and talk about design considerations tomorrow.

Kid Stuff Sixdux

The boy traded off some terrain I built for him in exchange for more figures.  Well done him.  He figures he doesn't need terrain because, in his words, "The store has terrain we can use."  No son of mine is gonna be stuck using in-store terrain.  I'm raising him better than that.

Besides, terrain building is as much fun as playing the darn games anyway.  To start bringing him up to speed, I taught him the basic techniques of found items and 'sand and glue modelling paste'.  Together we built a few craters where his Imperial Guardsmens can hunker down.

Then we grabbed a couple of empty almond cans and slapped on accoutrements until they looked like right proper bunkers.  The flanges on the side are foamcore, and the smokestack on the right is from an empty dishsoap bottle.  Those have great texture for smokestacks.  You're going to be seeing more of those soon.

All these need is some paint and flocking and he is off to a great start.

The Lizard King

These lizard guys look pretty meh in the lead.  Painted up, though, they really take on a lot of personality.  This is my first ever conversion at this scale.  This lizard was born a banner carrier.  One of my skeletons sacrificed his head for the cause and now it's a shaman.  Although in my D&D campaign, he's going to be the Lizard King.  (The hero is a normal sized human.)

This minotaur shaman (or wokan if you're going by the Rules Cyclopedia) was painted by my daughter.  It occurred to me that there's no sense of scale in the previous post showing these guys, so I included her other figure to show how much these guys tower over the competition.

Kids Stuff Fivedux Redux

I swear this isn't turning into a Games Workshop blog.  I'm just light on lead of my own to paint, and let's face it - friends don't let friends play with unpainted miniatures.  So I painted up my son's heavy flamers for him, too.  He traded for a pair of Catachan heavies, but he's running Cadians, so a quick conversion with headswaps and adding a shoulder plate turns them into the right kind of troops.

The guy on the left's head broke off while spraying on the protective dull coat.  I glued it back on, but it settled funny, so he's got a lot more attitude now.  These guys equipment doesn't completely jive with the rest of the Cadians, but hey - these are different kinds of troopers.  They run into battle with a ten gallon jug of high explosive gel strapped to their backs.  They aren't quite right in the head.  Their equipment just reflects that.