Warhammer/Oldhammer 2019, 2020

As previously mentiones, one of the players in my D&D group used to play warhammer 6th edition when he was a teenager, so why not start with that edition?
I easily got another couple players involved and we had four games between august 2019 and February 2020.

As per Battlesystem, I used quite a few old Ral Partha and RAFM historical miniatures, it has a nice old school look and I can enjoy painting many different miniatures which are a real pleasure to work on.
We started with Dogs of War Vs Orcs and Goblins (mostly goblins), simply because that's what I had on hand.
Since we have been using roughly the same forces for all four games, I am trying to get a kind of narrative feeling and would like to turn it into a campaign, I started giving characters a name, since I think that is the first step to link games together.

One of the games, the third one, to be precise, was fought on Boxing Day (to keep a very old tradition from home alive).
We used to play some kind of big multi player game back in Italy with some close friends and we would call it the Emperor's Birthday.
It used to be 40K games, then Necromunda and, over the last few years DBA games.
I guess the Canadian version will be a Fantasy game from now on and the Emperor whose Birthday is being celebrated would be Karl Franz.

The first game involved Dogs of War VS Goblins with the help of a unit of Hobgoblins (orc) spearmen.
The humans had to defend against a humanoid tribe in the Border Princes.
The goblin warboss lost his giant ally very quickly under a barrage of arrows and spells, but  managed to break through the human defenses and keep raiding the area.

The second game saw roughly the same forces facing off, this time the humans had to defend a village.
They tried very hard, but did not manage to keep the raiders at bay and the village was sacked.

 The third game had, again, the goblins trying to break the dogs of war resistance, in order to gain access the the mountain passes leading into the Empire.
This time both armies had some artillery (as I got more stuff painted).
As can be foreseen, the goblins managed (not without trouble), to defeat the army of men again and could cross into the richer lands of the Empire.

For the Emperor's Birthday we had a bigger game that involved almost all the painted miniatures I have here in Canada.
The scenario required the Goblins to gain control of a Wizard's tower in order to steal some badly needed magic items to make the invasion of the Empire less difficult.
The warboss managed to hire a full tribe of giants, a necromancer with his undead minions and a chaos warrior with a minotaur.
It was a hard fought battle, the humans (this time an empire army) suffered horrendous casualties, but the evil forces barely managed to get to the tower before its owner (a very powerful wizard) got back to lock it, so the loot was very meager and the Waaagh lost steam and dispersed into the mountains.

After this we had another game, but there were no pictures taken.
This game was a scenario from the Warhammer Ancient Battle book Siege and conquest, it was an assault on a village containing some supplies that had to make it off the table to a city.
A small Empire force (defending the village), managed to capture and drive away one of three pack mules, the remainign two did not make it off the table and the goblinoid lost them, so it was an Empire win and the beginning of a new phase of the campaign.

Battlesystem games so far

I had a bunch of pictures from games I played during 2019 and, since they had not previously been published on the other blog or anywhere else, I decided that it would be nice to post them in a few posts now that the general mood for meeting with other people would prevent any more games for at least a while.

I'll start with Battlesystem, I had only two games in 2019, but it was nice to bring out the rulebook and start playing again.
The perfect excuse presented itself when most of the D&D players couldn't make it to a game session, so, with the two that could, I put together a small scenario loosely connected with the campaign, it involved a former PC Rootin, the female barbarian, defending the village where she was raising her newborn twin children.

It was a small thing and some of the terrain was not painted, but worked well as an introduction to the players.

Rooting (in the pictures with her loyal dogs), managed to defend the village, even if she was herself wounded, but drove off the raiding humanoid party.


The next game was a more loose affair, just practice and get more familiar with the rules, but the models we used were essentially the same, with just minor variations.
As you can see from these (and the future) pictures, the terrain slowly improves with every game.

Next posts will deal with Warhammer 6th edition, which one of the D&D players used to play when he was in hes teens and wanted to try again. It did work pretty well and we have had a few games of that as well.

Battlesystem semi-historical experiment

Hi all, this is the first post of a new blog that I hope will have enough material for about a post per month.
On my other blog: The Owlbear's lair I post what my brother and I paint every week and sometimes we also had posts about games we play, but I think it would be tidier to have a blog dedicated to the gaming aspect, let's see how it goes.

For the first post I have pictures about a game of Battlesystem I recently GMd at my friend Garner's place.
He loves working on terrain and is on a grail quest to built the perfect and never warping gaming board.
The one we used for this game is one that he finished last year. He is obviously not satisfied with the result and is currently building a new one.
I think it looks great, but will never even consider preventing him from building a better one.
The buildings are from my collection, but everything else is from his.

For this game we used AD&D second edition Battlesystem rules. I have recently played a couple of games and Garner had last played the game probably close to 30 years ago.

We used Garner's massive Italian wars collection of miniatures, a mix of Citadel, Old glory and Perry.
The first game was a "humans only" affair, but we plan to add more and more fantasy elements and turn it into a campaign based on the historical events of the Italian wars.

There were two teams facing off, on the French side were Adrian and his brother Simon, while the Papal army was led by Garner and Rohen.
I was the game master and tried to make sure we did not forget any rule, I barely succeeded, but the game was a lot of fun non the less.

The battle was way too big for a first warm up game, but I think that it's better to tackle a big game right away and not worry about mistakes too much.
With a game this size we had plenty of situations to cope with and learned a lot about the rules and will be ready for the future of the campaign.

The game did not end with an obvious winner, so the next game will be the actual beginning of the campaign.

My idea is to use Battlesystem as the basic ruleset, but to add scenarios or random rules from older warhammer edition, from Warhammer ancient battles supplements and from any source I can find useful.
Maybe we will also be able to connect this campaign with a RPG one that can run along with it, but let's not get ahead of ourself and see if we can get a second game soon.

It's all for now, happy gaming to all