Category Archives: Fantasy

Posts on fantasy gaming using the Fantasy Rules 2nd Ed. and Hordes of the Things rules.

And Then the Golem Threw Another Stone…

Always interested in a new gaming system and being pen and paper roleplayers, Brian and I have been playing a little bit of Songs of Blades and Heroes recently. Like many of our gaming experiences, this one has been long delayed in coming but it was well worth the wait.

Our first game was a wonderful and thoroughly-illegally built three-way match involving two groups of Orcs and my Reaper Mouselings, his Dwarves and my Mouselings have had it out. The game is interesting and fun and very fast (we played three games on an hour and a half ferry ride) but has a few weak points.

Our current warbands are both tricked out minimum figures, maximum damage warbands. Neither has more than 7 figures, each worth at least two dozen points apiece. Hordes of zombies these are not. My mouselings have half their 300 point standard warband allotment between my mounted-on-an-owl, magic-using leprechaun leader, Shamus O’Reilly, and his familiar, Mossy, a captive stone golem with shooter(medium) and combat 5. Brian’s dwarves are just as nasty, with the two flanking dogs and a leader with Quality 2 and Combat 5.

A note about the game: In order to get units moving and fighting, you need to score successes by rolling at or above the quality on a d6. Combat is a simple oppposed d6 + Combat Value + modifiers. Lower Quality scores are better, higher Combat scores are better.

The game itself plays well, with some bad break points. Specifically, magic-users are useless as ranged combat figures, but deadly when they transfix. Combined with Mossy’s powerful combat and throwing ability, this gave my team a one-two killing “punch” that was hard to beat. Add in the dwarves (and mouselings) short-move and you can see where it will go wrong quickly. Where the dwarves beat me was when they were able to get their dogs around into my magic user (only combat 2) and made him move did things go badly.

And then there was the rout. Or maybe I should say “The Rout.” Brian apparently cannot roll combat rolls. I cannot roll quality checks to get people moving. These two phenomenmom manifested in one game where I never made it more than one or two short moves away from the table edge (basically less than 4″). When Brian got my leader to book it off the table, this triggered a morale roll every other warband member. Which I failed. And so my entire warband ran off the table. In a single turn.

In sum, we do enjoy playing the game, but I am not certain if its simplicities truly make me happy. We need to try some different warbands, including zombies, skeletons and cheap soldiers and see how that works.

And where are the pictures? I haven’t taken any and Brian didn’t either, so no pictures for all of you. Besides, we were playing with basically no scenery on a cafeteria table for most of our games, so they wouldn’t have been great photos anyway…

An LPL3 Archive

As discussed in my last post on entering LAF‘s LPL5, here’s all ten of the images from my 2009 LPL3 entries. I finished somewhere in the bottom third of the pack, but certainly didn’t enter with any expectation of doing much better — I entered to give me incentive to work on my painting and photography, which worked out just fine!

LPL3’s bonus rounds were “Germans” for Round One, which I botched; the German WW1 stormtroopers I did for Round 7 were supposed to be my Round 1 bonus entry, but I ordered them too late. Round 5 was “Cavalry”, which I managed with my first 15mm fantasy unit painted in years. Round 10 was “Lost Worlds”, bonus points for an exploration team, a “native” team and “monster” or similar — pegged max bonus points there, and a photo I’m still proud of!

The entirety of LPL3 is still archived over on LAF.

Terrain: 15mm Cardboard Fantasy Buildings

I put the first of these buildings – the Short Tower – up on the site sometime around 2000, and for ten years they’ve been consistently popular. I think I’ve gotten more feedback on these (and some of the other cardboard/paper stuff I have available) than on anything the website’s ever hosted.
Continue reading Terrain: 15mm Cardboard Fantasy Buildings

Photos from a Fantasy Rules! Battle

More old photos resurrected – this time a few from a Fantasy Rules! 2nd Edition game we played years ago. Human medieval knights & footmen vs orcs and goblins with necromancer help. I’m pretty sure this was the first outing of Tony’s undead; years later he’s finally got enough to field an all-undead army without help from my figure collection.
Continue reading Photos from a Fantasy Rules! Battle

Fantasy Gallery #1

15mm fantasy figures, based for Hordes of The Things (HOTT) or Fantasy Rules! (FR!). Many of the figures are long-out-of-production Ral Partha 15mm (from when they held the AD&D license, before WotC bought AD&D from TSR and started producing plastic crap); the rest are a mix of Reaper & Ral Partha 25mm monsters and Chariot 15mm (now produced by Magister Militum/Navigator.
Continue reading Fantasy Gallery #1

Links: Fantasy Wargaming

Chipco’s Fantasy Rules! Links

Hordes of the Things & Misc. Fantasy Links:

Related Links:

  • Dan Smith’s Fantasy Fonts for Windows has Tolkein-inspired and other fantasy fonts, plus lots of related links.
  • Flat Earth Games have very cool fonts and other gaming information. Beautiful looking site, as well. [DEAD LINK?]
  • Warflags has free flags for wargamers – they’re intended as historicals, but a number of them work all right as fantasy flags, especially the mediaeval ones.
  • Leonardo da Vinci – diagrams, drawings, & models of his work, including many of his fascinating machines.
  • Town of Vinci’s Leonardo Museum has information and loads of great diagrams. Vinci was Leonardo’s hometown…
  • The Myths & Legends pages have good information on real-world dieties, myths and legends. Useful to inspire your fantasy-world mythos.
  • Information & Links on real-world Ancient Civilizations. More inspiration.
  • Worlds in the Net is a catalog of people’s fantasy and science fiction worlds on the WWW.
  • Xenite.Org: Worlds of Imagination on the Web – Science fiction & fantasy.
  • RPGnet has loads of interesting links and information, including a good review of FR! 2ed.
  • Lots of amusing RPG stories – should probably be called “Stupid Gamer Tricks”…or sometimes “Stupid GM Tricks”… [DEAD LINK?]
  • Not a fantasy wargames site either, but L-Space is the best Terry Prachett site going. Wonderful site if you’re a Pratchett fan. (Who isn’t?)
  • Sir Clisto Seversword’s Tome of Adventure & Knowledge – the site isn’t quite as long as the name, but nearly! This is a medieval-themed collection of links, very well sorted and indexed. Lots of good stuff. [DEAD LINK?]
  • Tempus Peregrinator’s Little Heraldry Book is a good heraldic primer, glossary and dictionary, online with good links.
  • The Medieval Sword Resource Site is a sort of online museum dedicated to the medieval swordsmith’s art. Great links, information and images.
  • Landsknecht.com is actually an SCA site, which has loads of information, links and images for Renaissance warfare.
  • The Dwarven Delving is an RPG site, but it’s got great images and some entertaining information on everyone’s favourite short axe-wielders!

Tony’s Undead FR! battle report

This is a battle report from the old Warbard – Corey

Tony wrote this battle report after our most recent FR! game, the first in which his Undead appeared.

“When an invading force crosses a river in its onward march, do not advance to meet it in midstream. It is best to let half the army get across and then deliver your attack” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

On Wednesday night, Brian, Mike, Darren and myself played out a 750 point FR! battle. Mike and I allied against Brian and Darren.

It was cool to finally get a game with some undead on the table. I had some lucky rolls, but overall I was pleased with how they played. They are pretty tough to kill (being undead and all), and demoralization is a waste of time. I did manage to summon one unit back, although it was rather difficult. I always find that few spells go through in FR! Part of it is that the army pool is always so much bigger than the second level magic users pool, so it is easier to dispell than cast.

It is tough to say where the battle was won or lost. I think that the western side where Mike was was decided by his massed archers. That gave him the ability to sit on the south shore of the river and fire arrows at the dwarves. That destroyed one unit, and broke up the line enough that his troops could get across the river. Also, Brian had a series of abysmal rally rolls…

On the eastern side, the early loss of the battlewagon was disheartening for the dwarves. They never really recovered from that. The skeletons were able to prevent the human villagers from attacking the flank, and managed to roll really well in combat. By the time the wolves were in striking distance, that part of the battle was already over, with only one dwarven unit left standing.

Tony

Three-player FR! – Capture the Flag!

This is a battle report from the old Warbard – Corey

This is a battle report from this summer – I wrote it up for the Chipco List, but just found it again and realized I’d never HTML’d it. Here it is, then. Enjoy!

Had an interesting 3-way FR! fight last night – three 750pt low magic armies, racing to grab an ‘alien artefact’ that was in the center of the table in a stone circle.

The ‘Capture the Flag’ format works really well for more-than-two-player matchups. It was close and tense right until the end!

The armies this time were Dwarven, Medieval human, and Orc/goblin. First turn, the humans Flew a HW w/ Hero into the stone circle, grabbing the artefact. The rest of the forces raced toward the center, with Orc forces moving to block the human’s retreat.

The Orc wolves and wolfriders hit the flanks of teh human force, while the orc infantry and the dwarves faced off up on the central hill and the human HW w/ the artefact ran as hard as they could – the humans couldn’t manage another Flight spell.

The dwarven infantry blew away the orcs & goblins, swiftly reducing them to utter rout, but the humans deployed a few units in a screen to stop the dwarves, sacrificing them to get the HW w/ artefact marched off the table. Damned close – the humans left the table at One on the Morale Clock…

The Dwarves were left in possession of the field, but the humans had the powerful mystic artefact!

If you want to do multi-sided FR!, I really recommend trying the Capture the Thing idea – makes for a really good game.

The advantage of a “Capture the Flag” game is that it doesn’t make any sense to hang back – you either want to grab the ‘flag’ first, or go beat on the guy who grabbed the flag and grab it from him.

The other thing to do (ahem…) is have a beer with your game… puts you in that “charge…charge…charge!!” medieval frame of mind! If you’re running an actual Medieval army – knights and all – have two beers. (but not if you’re driving home right afterward, of course…)

Gladius & Axe: Roman Early Imperial Legions Vs. Dwarven Axedwarves

This is a battle report from the old Warbard – Corey

Neil and I had a very interesting FR! battle on Sunday – 1000pts of Dwarves vs. 1000pts of Romans. These are the two ultimate Handweapon armies – fairly small battlelines of really, really good troops. My Dwarves had a Light-Artillery equipped Battlewagon, a flying Small Monster, 1 Elite HW, 8 regular HW and 3 crossbow units. The crossbows had stakes, and the regular HW all had Bombs. Two Traps filled out the list.

Neil’s Romans were an entirely ‘straight’ historical early Imperial army – a line of Elite HW Legions with throwing weapons, backed by bow-armed Skirmishers, with some throwing-weapon equipped Mobs and Light & Heavy Cav as support, and one light artillery piece.

What was really unique was that the Romans had no magic user at all, while the Dwarves had a Level 2 War Cleric. As it turned out, this mattered less than you might think. The Romans stubbornly refused to believe that magic was really happening, it seems – using just their Army Pool, and some luck, they stopped the bulk of my spells in their tracks!

The battlefield was quite crowded – a very large hill and a pair of smaller hills dominated the center of the field, with a river and small forested area off on one flank.

Roman setup had the Legions, skirmishers and light arty. together in line, at the back of the large hill. The mobs deployed along the bottom of the large hill, and the cavalry deployed farther out along the flanks, the bulk of it on the right flank.

Dwarven setup was my standard Dwarven setup – a line of 6 HW, with refused flanks of crossbows & HW and a pair of HW behind the main line as reserves. The battlewagon was on the right flank with two of the CB units, facing down the Roman cavalry. I`ve found that this double-refused flank with reserves setup works very well with Dwarves, and helps protect this slow-moving army`s flanks very well.

Both armies advanced slowly toward each other, the Dwarven light arty getting a couple of shots in, but the Roman artillery being masked by the bulk of the hill they were behind.

The Dwarven wargod`s Avatar, summoned by the War Cleric, howled forward and engaged the Legion`s righthand units, being banished shortly but throwing that flank into terrible disorder. Down on the flat, the Dwarven CB deployed their stakes and faced down the Roman cavalry, with both Traps holding units stationary for turn after turn, securing the flank. The battlewagon had charged forward to attack the cavalry, being eventually surrounded and destroyed but fighting grimly for many turns and leaving the cavalry in disarray.

The first clash of the infantry battlelines was thunderous – Dwarven Bombs versus Roman pilum and shortbow, with the bombs destroying the center of the Legion`s line, including the light artillery piece. Although the Dwarves were fighting uphill the whole time, they generally prevailed, gradually grinding the Legion down, although not without cost.

One notable (although temporary) setback for the Dwarves came when a valiant Roman mob beat a Dwarven HW unit twice, throwing it back off the hill in disorder, although not destroying it.

On the left flank, the Dwarven flying small monster (a small Silver Drake) had flown forward and destroyed the only Roman Light Cavalry unit on that flank, while HW & CB units slowly flattened the Roman mobs.

The Dwarven general challenged a Roman Hero to a duel, but the craven Roman, muttering something about `…being an officer, not a duelist, dammit…` went and hid in the rear ranks. The Roman general had more guts – and, as it turned out, more skill, slaying the Dwarf general in epic single combat. The Dwarven axers where not much dismayed, however, and continued to battle it out with the Legions, although both armies where now very much in disorder. (Both armies had been chasing each other down the moral clock, with the Dwarves hitting 4 first, then stopping at 3 while the Romans continued to fall…)

The turning point came when the Dwarven Silver Drake shook off it`s fatigue and soared over the Roman lines, terrifying and then destroying first a unit of skirmishers and then a Legion HW unit, while at the same time the Dwarf War Cleric convinced the wargod to return, slaying one of the trapped Roman Heavy Cav units. Dwarven axers continued to fight grimly, and some sembelence of order was imposed on sections of the Dwarven line.

All of this was too much for even valiant Legionnaires to take, and the Romans fell back, ceding the field to the Dwarven forces!

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Thoughts on ‘Magicless’ FR! Games: I’m not going to claim that magic had no effects at all on this fight – the Dwarven wargod’s Avatar was instrumental twice, although he didn’t stick around a long time. Part of this has to do with the peculiar nature of the War Cleric’s spells – the bulk of them are far more subtle and tactical, so that while they can change the outcome of the game, they’re not going to do it single-handedly. Even if you had a more distructive spellcaster – the Fire Shaman comes to mind – the deciding factor of the battle is always the actual clash of units, and usually the clash of battlelines.

It also shows off, I think, the integrity of the FR! ruleset – the tactical, combat part of the rules are sound enough, and the magic is not generally overpowering, so that a pure tactical combat army – which is what Neil’s Romans were – can still give a magic-enhanced army a stiff fight. This game, as I said in the report, was neck-to-neck almost right to the end. A really great game!