He Has Risen!

The tomb is empty!

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Napoleonic Knockout # 3

Time for another battle in my Napoleonic Knockout campaign.

Geoff noted after the last battle: "Although the Russians were victorious and conquered Austria, it does mean that they now have considerably longer borders to protect from the Ottoman threat."

As it turns out, the Russians decide to neutralize the threat by invading the Ottomans.

Quick Game Notes

• I'm getting a little bored of the back-and-forth that can occur in this game, so I decided to move into sudden death. Whoever wins the battle wins the war and conquers the other side.
• Because the Russians have more territory, I gave them an extra unit. I also increased their break point by 1.
• I randomly rolled terrain and got a river. I decided that it was fordable.

The Battle

The Russian invaders approach a shallow river and find the Ottoman army opposing them.

The Russians try to cross via the bridge while their cavalry crosses some fords (right). The attackers take casualties but the Russians have some success with their cavalry.

The Turks push some Russian cavalry back across the river. Meanwhile, another division of Russian cavalry attacks the Ottoman artillery.

The Russian cavalry gets destroyed. The Turks now try to take the bridge.

And succeed! This routs the Russians.

Aftermath

Russia falls to the Turks!

Here is our current campaign map.

Next up - Roused from their complacency by the threat of Napoleon, the British invade France. Stay tuned for our next chapter.

Legionary and Orc

A couple photos from our small event today.

An Imperial legionary with an orc. Are they friends or foes?

I guess that answers it.

Anyway, I am really pleased with the look of my legionary kit.

More pics on Facebook.

To The Lodge

A Ser Killian Adventure

No spoilers today

A New Threat

After their success at Axeholm, Ser Killian and his party get some much needed rest. A few days later. a messenger rushes into town. He comes from Falcon's Lodge, a hunting resort for the well-to-do.

Falcon, the owner of the lodge, sends a missive for help. Orcs have been marauding in the area recently. One band even attacked a hunting party. Falcon wants someone to clear the orcs out.

Naturally, Ser Killian agrees to take on the quest.

Which Route?

The party has two options to travel to the Lodge

• The longer but potentially safer route (orange) is along the road to Neverwinter then by boat to the lodge.
• The direct route (red) has them traipsing through the forest/

Concerned that time is of the essence, Killian decides to head through the forest.

The Journey

The first stage of the journey passes uneventfully.

Once in the forest, however, our heroes get ambushed by a band of orcs (black).

Yes, I'm using Meeples. It helps having some marker to track the combat. But no, I'm not going to invest in miniatures. If I can find some tokens I like, I'll use those. But I'm not painting anything!

It's a bit of a drawn-out fight. Our heroes have no trouble hitting the enemy, but the orcs' armor prevents any telling blows.

Wow. My damage rolls were pitiful.

Eventually, however, the orcs fall. Killian suffered a slight wound, which Martin the cleric heals.

Later, they get attacked by a sentient tree.

Again, their blows have trouble penetrating. Killian calls for them to retreat.

The tree lashes out and knocks Martin to the ground. Its limbs reach out to grab him. Killian and the other turn back to help Martin. Haiden pulls Martin away while Nashad acts as rear guard.

The tree turns on Nashad but he manages to hack into it with his two-handed blade. The tree recoils, allowing the party to escape. 

As they bound through the wood, they hear thump, thump, thump. The tree is running after them! However, it is slow and our heroes outrun the pursuit.

The Lodge

After a few days hard marching through the woods, the party arrives safely at Falcon's Lodge.

What happens next? Stay tuned for more!

Prepping for RPG

In my last update, I mentioned that I wanted to complete a Napoleonic knockout round and an RPG adventure every month. Well, February is over and I already failed - no RPG session. But I made some progress!

Creature Cards

One of the deterrents to my solo RPGing is creating the encounter charts. I've been jotting down the encounter stats in a notebook and then running the game from that. But sometimes (often?) I don't feel like doing the prep work.

The answer is to have cards with the creature stats. Then I can reference them quickly.

I've dabbled with cards before.

• Here's an experiment from 2016.
• And a rather fancy design from 2022.

None of those prior efforts went very far, however.

Recently, I started a new project to make cards for the creatures from the 1st edition Monster Manual. First, I need to convert their stats to my system. I created an Excel spreadsheet to do the conversions, but I am still working on it.

I had some free time this past week and decided I wanted to play. I decided to jot the stats on index cards rather than in a notebook.

I ended up with this - a stack of cards ready for play!

Using the Cards

One of the issues I had with cards is with creating weighted encounter probabilities. Let's take a simplified example. I have two possible encounters - either a bunch of orcs or a dragon. I decide that the party is more likely to encounter the orcs than the dragon. But if I have one card each, then the probabilities are the same. To increase the probability of encountering orcs, I need multiple orc cards.

The solution is ridiculously simple, but I was so caught up in using cards that it did not dawn on me until now. I can still roll on an encounter table. Then I can consult the card for the stats. This saves me the trouble of jotting down the stats every time.

The Experiment

I started the next adventure in Ser Killian's tale using the cards. More on that at a later date!