A Viking in the Sun

As usual, my GADD-addled mind has been wandering again.

What Now?

I recently picked up this Lion Rampant supplement, A Viking in the Sun.

It covers the campaigns on Harald Hardrada during his employment with the Byzantines. Being a fan of Byzantines, I've had my eye on this and finally decided to splurge on it.

Why?

As usual, this latest foray came quite by accident. I've been crazy busy lately so I took a day off to recuperate. My thoughts turned to playing a game, but I couldn't decide on a period for the game. I've got a bunch of campaigns in progress yet I struggled to muster the enthusiasm for any.

I started perusing some gaming books for inspiration. While reviewing Lion Rampant I came across a reference to A Viking in the Sun. I got hooked.

What's Next?

I started to peruse VitS. It has 3 mini-campaigns that should be perfect for me! You may see them soon.

But first, I decided to complete a campaign before I embark on a new one. Hence, you will see the finale to my Napoleonic Knockout coming soon!

Random Thoughts

Just some random gaming thoughts.

MOAR Tanks!

After playing my Memorial Day battle, I've been in the mood for some tank battles. Rather than play more Tank on Tank, I decided to put together some generic modern counters that could work for sci fi as well.

Here's what I've come up with so far - tank, artillery, missile launcher, infantry, and infantry in powered battlesuits.

I want to add some light armor and a helicopter or dropship.

I plan to mount these on half inch counters (which I need to order). Then I can use them individually for skirmishes or combine 2 into a unit for larger battles.

Unfinished Campaigns

I recently started a new campaign (stay tuned for the first battle report). I probably shouldn't do that given that I have a bunch of unfinished campaigns already. Off the top of my head, they include:

• Five Klicks from the Zone
• Napoleonic Knockout
• Icespire Peak D&D
• 1666 horror
• Fantasy Romans
• Revolutionary War Florida campaign (hope to finish it this July 4th)

And there are probably many more!

One day I should catalog all my ongoing campaigns, and finish them!

A New Campaign - Fantasy Imperials

Inspired by some suggestions made by Geoff (aka elliesdad) on a recent post, I decided to start a new campaign.

The Setting

As mentioned, I plan to run the campaign in my LARP's setting. It will follow an as-of-now unnamed Legion from the Aurelian Empire, which is a Roman-like state.

An AI creation from Gencraft.
I'm playing around with AI illustrations for some of my posts.

Note: I'm not doing the Chimera Legion, which is my LARP group. Their battles will strictly be LARP battles.

QUESTION: What should I name my Legion? I have an idea but am looking for others.

Legion Make-up

Horses do not exist in this setting so there is no cavalry. To make things more interesting, I added a variety of foot types. These are the unit available to the Legion.

• Regulars - standard heavy infantry. I decided not to make any distinction between spears and blades. Despite the historical performance of Roman infantry, I'm not convinced that blades are inherently better than spears. I think training and experience are far more important factors.
• Auxiliaries - medium infantry that still fight in heavy infantry formations. The most common troop type in the legion.
• Warbands - allied tribal warriors. Fierce but brittle.
• Scouts - bow-armed light infantry.
• Artillery - bolt throwers or other types of siege weapons.

For battles, I will randomly determine the Legion's make-up.

Handling Enemies

As Geoff suggested, I will hide enemy troops types until Legion troops make contact. This will introduce an additional element of fog of war.

Representing the Armies

For now, I'm going to use my current armies of counters. Eventually I want to make counters representing all the different troop types.

I plan to make enemy counters two-sided. One side will show the troops in formation and in such a way that I can distinguish the type. The other side will have a generic block of troops representing an unknown body of enemies.

The Palmyra Campaign

I toyed with running a campaign against the Dark Magi, which are my Persian stand-ins. However, our most recent LARP campaign featured a war against the Dark Magi. I did not want to repeat it. 

In the end, I decided to set my miniature campaign in Palmyra (not-Egypt). The main enemy on this front is the Hyenids, as I call them. They are essentially D&D gnolls.

The Hyenid Army

These are the troop types found in the Hyenid armies.

• Elite Warriors - essentially the equivalent of heavy infantry.
• Warbands - masses of ravenous but undisciplined warriors.
• Bows - missile armed.
• Beasts - various ferocious animals, such as giant hyenas.

MicroBattle - Scenarios and Campaigns

 In my previous post, I laid out the rules for my latest incarnation of MicroBattle. Today I would like to explain how I set up games.

Battle Scenarios

Using One Hour Wargames

My method is not exactly original. I generally rely on Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames.

Aside - I just noticed that this is the first photo I posted to this blog in 2021. I need to play some games with minis!

Anyway, OHW provides streamlined rules for wargaming 8 different eras in history. While I admire their design simplicity, I find them a little too bare bones for my tastes (although I must admit that OHW does influence MicroBattle). 

Nevertheless, this book is a gold mine because it contains 30 different, generic scenarios. When I want to play a game, I just pull out the book and roll randomly to select a scenario. Thomas also includes tables for randomly generating armies of 4 to 6 units (it is not a coincidence that MicroBattle uses the same sized armies). With a few rolls, my game is ready to go!

Just beware that Thomas's scenario objectives may not be achievable in his standard 15 turns when using different rules (activation rolls. different movement rates, etc.). I'll generally adjust the number of turns on the fly to compensate.

Aside - I have OHW on my Kindle but as I was writing this I was thinking that I should get a physical copy. Then I saw the price on Amazon!

Wow! I guess it has become a collector's item!

My Random Battlefields

I find the OHW battlefields to be a bit barren. Other times I just want to set something up without using a OHW scenario. In either case, I have devised a method to create random battlefields. I created a set of terrain cards. I'll draw some from my deck and lay them out to determine the battlefield.

For example, the above battlefield will have woods in the upper left, hills in the upper right and bottom left center. A river begins in the lower right; I will roll to determine if it runs vertically or horizontally.

I created the cards in PowerPoint, with 8 to a page. I just created colored boxes and then pasted some generic icons on top. I fit 8 cards per page. All told, I have 8 each of woods and hills; 2 each of rivers, rocks, fields, and buildings; and 16 clear. I printed them on cardstock and cut them out.

When drawing, I can adjust the probabilities of certain terrain by dropping some cards from the deck. For example, if my battle is in a desert, I can drop the woods cards and maybe the river cards. Simple!

Campaigns

Battles will be more interesting if there is some impact to the outcome. Thus, I and many other wargamers will move beyond one-off battles to campaigns, series of linked battles that lead to a final conclusion.

I've tried different campaign ideas in the past, but lately I've been using the extremely simple format suggested by Neil Thomas in One Hour Wargames. Essentially, it is best of 5 battles, with each battle determined randomly. The winner of a battle gets to choose to attack or defend in the next battle. This choice can be crucial because some of the scenarios are more difficult to win as the attacker. This provides a nice handicap to the victor.

Francesia

Thomas's campaign may be too simplistic, especially for those who want to move troops on a map. Years ago I devised a simple system based on the Diplomacy board game. I created my own map, set on my fictional continent of Francesia (so named because I drew the map during Hurricane Frances back in 2004). I designated certain areas to contain supply centers, then assigned an army or navy to each center (the symbols on this version of the map all represent armies).

I then proceeded to run the campaign like a game of Diplomacy. I controlled one country then randomly determined the moves for the other powers. When opposing forces disputed a territory, I would play out the battle. The main contending armies would be 6 units each. Supporting armies would add 3 units to the fight. I would randomly generate the battlefield. The winner of the battle would seize the territory and the loser would have to retreat. This all makes more sense if you are familiar with the rules of Diplomacy.

One issue with this system is that it can generate a lot of battles. Therefore, I simplified by being selective about which contacts to turn into miniature battles. Most contacts would be determined by the standard Diplomacy rules. If there was a particularly interesting or crucial battle, I would play that out and then apply the results.

The system worked well enough for my purposes at the time. I completed an entire war, with Redgrave (my red army) emerging victorious. I'm not sure if Diplomacy works as well for a straight-up 1v1 conflict, which is my standard campaign these days. While I no longer use these rules, you will still see the armies of Redgrave, Bluderia, Grayrock, and the Empire clash on my miniature battlefields.

A New Aerial Campaign

A few months ago I finally put together enough supplies for a full-scale mission using the Tiny Air Combat / Battle of Britain rules. I promptly stopped playing the game. What happened?

Well, I think it just grew too much for me - too large, too many minis, and too much bookkeeping. I found that I wanted a more streamlined version. Recently, I started playing around with some changes:

Smaller Board
The first thing I did was to shrink the game. For the full-scale version of the game I used a 16 x 30 square grid but I preferred a game that could fit into a pencil box. I wanted to squeeze onto an 8 x 10 grid. The movement rules of the original game were problematic, however. It is possible for some planes to move 8 squares in a turn. For the smaller grid, halving movement distances seemed like a good solution. I could effectively do this by doubling the movement cost of each maneuver but that left some maneuvers to expensive. In the end, I just upped the cost for each maneuver by 1 point. It seems to work fine.

Smaller Forces
In order to reduce the board I also had to reduce the size of the forces involved. I now use a single squadron of bombers + 2-4 fighters per side.

New Campaign Rules
The original rules involve a bit of bookkeeping (especially considering that I game solo) as you have to track the fate of 18 squadrons. I wanted to reduce the record keeping so I decided to follow the fortunes of a single fighter squadron. It dawned on me that a fighter squadron could do more than escort bombers, so I came up with additional missions. Eventually, a new set of campaign rules evolved.

Campaign Rules Overview

• The campaign follows the fortunes of a single squadron of 4 pilots/planes
• A campaign will consist of 5 missions. The squadron wins the campaign if it succeeds in 3 of the 5 missions.
• Possible missions are patrol (fighter vs. fighter dogfight) escort (defend your side’s bombers), intercept (stop an enemy bombing raid) and attack (strafing run on ground targets)
• To reduce the death rate, planes that get “shot down” get a chance to escape instead. Also, I gave the player characters a bonus when determining damage – there will be less chance of them getting shot down in a single hit.

Introducing the New Campaign
During the Lucranian War (set in my 1930s-style imagi-nations), Capt. Devin Drake, veteran of multiple aerial campaigns, has been selected to lead a new squadron. Known as the Dragons, the squadron has been outfitted with the latest Peregrine fighters.

Drake has 3 pilots under him – the veteran Howell Green and two promising novices, Taylor Hicks and Ike Peters.

Notes:

• Player characters are rated as novice, veteran, or ace. The rating affects movement points, chance to hit, and chance to escape.
• I came up with the name Devin Drake on my own but the other names came from a name generator

Initially things are quiet in the Dragon’s sector of the front. Drake decides to take Hicks on a patrol over the front.

Notes:

• The campaign rules call for a random roll to determine the mission type. I decided that I am just going to do one of each mission, then roll randomly for the last.
• I rolled randomly for the force make-up for each side. The Dragons start with 2 planes; I decided that Drake and Hicks will be the pilots. We’ll see what the Dragons will be up against.

FIRST AFTER ACTION REPORT IS BELOW

Introducing Armoria

As my MicroBattle rules for land and sea progress, I've been thinking of ways to combine them into a unified campaign. I came up with a simple system, but thought that my current imagi-nations worlds would not do it justice. In particular, I wanted a world with two major powers vying for control of minor nations scattered across a sea. I thought this would provide the most options for both land and sea battles. With this in mind, I came up with a new world.

The Setting
Welcome to Armoria!

I called it Armoria because the nations are named after the armorial/heraldic terms for the various colors. The main powers are Blue (Azuria) and Red (Guleslan).

I can imagine a whole host of conflicts raging across the islands, from ancient to modern times. I have visions of galley battles and air raids swooping across the sea (not at the same time, of course).

The Campaign
The system is very simple. A campaign will represent a war for dominance over a single island. The war will consist of 6 battles - both land and sea, as noted below:

1. A Sea Battle - the victor will be considered the invader of the island while the loser defends
2. A Land Battle - using a One Hour Wargames scenario
3. A Sea Battle - the defender tries to sneak reinforcements to the island
4. A Land Battle - as # 2
5. A Sea Battle - the defender raids the invader's shipping
6. A Land Battle - as # 2

The side that wins the most land battles will win the war. Somehow I will make the results of the sea battles affect the land battles.

Stay tuned for the first Armorian campaign - the Orlan War.

Drawn-Out Campaigns

All month I had been hoping to play another battle in my Lucranian campaign. However, I have been very busy and too tired to set anything up. Instead I have been thinking about my campaigns. Unfortunately, they have been drawn out over time. Many are unfinished. Here is a list of campaigns I have played since starting this blog:

• Eindekker and Down in Flames - when I began this blog I did not have any miniatures so I played a few commercial board/card games. These 2 have campaign but I never bothered to finish them.
• Grayrock Revolution (horse & musket) - My first miniatures campaign. It took over 2 years, but I finally completed it.
• Redgrave Raiders (medieval) - sort of Dux Brit light. I'm not going to bother finishing this one because I replaced it with:
• Redgravian Conquest (medieval) - I played out the conquest of Transflumia as a single, winner-take-all battle. Then I decided I would play a separate Neil Thomas style campaign for each of the remaining provinces. In April, I played out 2 (of 3 battles) in the Meditera war.
• Artemesia (sci fi) - I played 3 scenarios in this campaign before it went on hold.
• Tweenwater War (horse & musket) - played 1 battle and then stalled because I "needed" to paint Imperial troops.
• Lucrania (dieselpunk imagi-nation) - just started this.

As you can see, I have a bit of GADD, hopping between periods seemingly at random. Because of this, my campaigns go in starts-and-stops. Anyway, over the past few weeks I kept telling myself that I should finish one of these almost abandoned campaigns. So today, when I some time for a game, I decided to complete the Meditera War. The report of the final battle has been posted.

I now have one more campaign completed. However, I now have ideas for a new one. With [spoiler alert!]'s victory, I envision the next stage in his career, which of course will include some conflict. Will the madness ever end???

Your World Sucks

I can't find it now but I vaguely remember reading a blog post once that made the statement that your world sucks. The basic point was that the blogger preferred his own, home-brew campaign world to any commercially available product. Essentially, the blog post espoused the creative process of making your own rather than slavishly adopting someone else's handiwork. This argument has come to my mind recently because of two developments:

• Over on TMP (and elsewhere, I'm sure) there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the Age of Sigmar, the new set of fantasy rules by Games Workshop. The big issue is that they are discontinuing their venerable Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WFB) rules. Fans of WFB are up in arms about the change, partly because GW is completely re-doing the setting, making all their old army lists obsolete. Of course, this does not bother me a bit. I never really was interested in WFB, to a large extent because I was never all that crazy about their world. I much prefer playing out battles in my own imagi-nations.

• Last weekend, I ran an RPG session inspired by Colonial Gothic. While I like the general concept of the setting (supernatural horrors during the American Revolution), there are many aspects about the setting as described in the rulebook for which I don't particularly care. What did I do? I tossed out the "official" backstory and substituted my own. Once again, I am essentially creating my own world rather than using a commercial product (although I like to "borrow" ideas from commercial games).

Anyway, I just find so liberating not to be tied to some official setting but to use my own. I also love the creative process. So, from my perspective, other people's worlds do pale in comparison to my own.

On Campaigns

Or "What's Next for Grayrock?"

The rebel victory at Nieuville creates a dilemma for me. What next? Prior to the battle, I assumed that a Bluderian victory would end the war and snuff out the cause of Grayrock independence. But now that the rebels have won, have they gained their freedom? I'm not sure.

This is one of the difficulties of a linear campaign like Bob Cordery's Restless Revolutionaries. If the two sides alternate victories, as has happened with the Grayrock Revolution, then the war just keeps going. That may be realistic, but I start getting bored after half a dozen battles or so. How do I bring the war to a close?

In One-Hour Wargames (described in this battle report), Neil Thomas provides an excellent, quick-play campaign. The 30 battle scenarios in his book are divided into five groups of six battles. The campaign opponents randomly select one battle for each group. The winner of the previous battle gets to choose which side they'll play in the scenario, giving them an advantage without laborious record-keeping. Whoever wins the most battles is victorious in the campaign. I think this will be an excellent means for running 18th-century style, limited wars in Francesia. I'm already envisioning a war between the Empire and Redgrave for the coastal province of Blancport.

Will this work for Grayrock? I think I'm already over 5 battles. Besides, I don't know if Thomas's system is best suited for revolutions. There is, however, another campaign system with promise. A few months ago, Kaptain Kobold described a system for the Wars of Liberation in colonial South America. It involved collecting political tokens as a result of victory in battle. Victors could issue a proclamation; if successful the campaign ended in victory. I think I could use something similar for Grayrock. Excuse me now, I need to peruse Kaptain Kobold's campaign system in a little more detail.

The Artemesia Campaign

As I mentioned earlier this week, I have been building up forces for a series of linked sci-fi battles. Below are the scenarios that I jotted down. I used the generic moniker of Galactic Authority vs. Rebels. In my Artemesia campaign the Galactic Authority is the Federation and the rebels are backers of a dictatorial coup. The situation could easily be reversed - an evil Empire against freedom fighters.

Galactic Authority vs. Rebels

Background

Rebels have overthrown the rulers of the planet and have installed their own government. They have marshalled their ground and space forces to repulse any attempt by the galactic authority (GA) to re-instate the old rulers.

Scenarios

Clear a path (space battle) – the GA space navy must defeat the rebel forces, opening a path to invading the planet

• Give the GA a set number of attempts to clear a path
• GA forces return at full strength. Rebels retain losses to ships (although damages may be repaired and fighters return)
• This represents the greater resources of the GA
• Failure ends the campaign with a rebel victory
• Success allows the campaign to proceed

This was the scenario for my battle last Sunday.

Desperate defense (space battle) – As GA ships move into orbit around the planet, a sortie by rebel ships (especially fighters) tries to knock out GA ships

•  If rebels win, reduce the size of the GA forces in the next battle

Assault (ground battle) – GA land forces try to take the rebel HQ

• Victory by the GA will end the campaign

Blockade runners (space battle) – rebels are trying to sneak supplies to the planet. The GA navy must prevent it.

• If rebels succeed, increase or improve their army for the next scenario

Counterattack (ground battle) – rebel forces try to drive off the GA

• If rebels succeed, they win the campaign
• Otherwise, replay the scenarios beginning with Assault