Battlesystem again

 A few days ago I was talking with Cyrus about playing some game and he asked to play Battlesystem again.

I was quite surprised, but accepted right away. He aslked to play something connected to our ongoing D&D campaign. 

Now I had to find a scenario for which I had enough stuff and that wouldn't take too long to play through and that was connected to the campaign, not an easy task.

Then I remembered reading module I14, Swords of the Iron Legion. This is a D&D/Battlesystem campaign set in the Forgotten Realms. The setting is about all that links it to our campaign, but I thought, better then nothing.

I was also curious to play some of the weirder scenarios in the module. Reviews are not too kind to this module, the connection between the various adventures is poor and the main plot not even apparent to the players. My idea is, therefor, to play the Battlesystem scenarios ignoring the RPG parts and just using them as a backdrop to tell the story of the campaign.

The first scenario, The storm of Greshlyrr, sees a force of Kobolds assaulting a gnome village. It is a very small scenario, so we managed to play it over a couple of hours.

I obviously don't own enough kobolds or gnomes to field armies of them, so some proxying had to be done, here are some pictures of the game.

The preparation and selection of the scenario.

The village of Gildenglade and its defenders, some militia and civilians

Greshlyrr and its kobold tribe.

More shots of the village and some of its inhabitants.

The battle was closely fought, in the end most of the defenders fled back into the village, but the kobolds leader also fled the field and the remaining kobolds decided their lives were more valuable then loot or revenge, so it ended as a draw.

The next battle involves a lot of cavalry on both sides, I'll see if and when I can gather all the troops, but it won't bee too soon.

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