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.

First game after lockdown

I finally managed to get a game after the two months lockdown.

We had a little 500 points game using another Siege and Conquest scenario: "The messenger" using the Warhammer fantasy 6th edition rules.

It was a fun little game and very close until the very end.

This time I was in control of the orcs and (mostly) goblins.

The game went down to a challenge between the two force commanders and the orc hero prevailed and killed the Empire captain.

The highlight of the game were a couple of trolls that failed every single stupidity test and kept going towards an empty table quadrant for the whole game.

An actual game of Dragon Rampant

Yesterday IlVJ had a game of Dragon Rampant with a friend.
Given the lockdown they had to find a way to do it from different places and ended up setting up the table at my brother's place and his opponent was on the phone and giving him instructions and rolling dice on the other end.
It took longer that being in person and in a couple hours they managed to complete about a third of the whole game, but it was apparently a good experience.

Here you are a few pictures of the game

Dragon Rampant

IlVJ has recently gotten into Dragon Rampant.
He decided to use it as an excuse to get some of his old miniatures painted and did two armies, one is a men army with some summoned beasts, he went for a slightly barbaric theme, so there are both knights and barbarian types, with a king riding a lion and some valkyries.
He then did an "Underdark" army, which is not yet complete, with drows, an hillithyd, spiders and driders.

The following pictures are not of a game, it is not easy to get those going these days, but he set up a board with some Warhammer Townscape card houses, so I thought it would be nice to share the photos.

City of the damned

In February, just before the start of this weird situation, I introduced the D&D players to Mordhaim.
We only managed to have a single 3 players game, with somewhat improvised terrain and figures, but it was fun and we plan on kicking off a campaign as soon as it is doable.

The game was a rush to collect scattered wyrdstone chunks between Reiklanders, beastmen and dwarves.
The dwarves won, but only because the beastmen and imperials fled the field once they had the majority of the wyrdstone.

We only took a couple of not so good pictures, but it's still better than nothing.

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.