Tony Bath on Fantasy Gaming (1975)

Thanks to Zhu Bajiee (Realm of Zhu blog), we have another article written by Tony Bath to share. It's again an article from "Games and Puzzles", issue 39, published in 1975.

The article is titled "Fantasy Gaming" and outlines Tony Bath's view on the (at the time) new genre of fantasy wargaming.

Click here to see the full article

As with the previous article, we will analyze it further in follow-up posts, but for now, it's interesting to quote the last paragraph:

What is the reason for this sudden popular upsurge of interest not only in fantasy literature but fantasy gaming? We could say a little pompously that it is a revolt against the materialistic world we I ive in; this undoubtedly has something to do with it but I think it is more likely that, in these bleak and troublous times of unrest abroad and economic depression at home, we turn to the escapism inherent in fantasy. Once it was Cowboys and Indians or International Intrigue; now-as in the hard times of the 30s-Fantasy has struck the public imagination. What better way to escape from a world of strikes, pay claims and rising prices than to adventure through a mythical world, living by your sword and your wits, to trade spells and enchantments with master Wizards, and to drive through space and time in a mighty spaceship to fight the monsters from beyond? These thrills and escapes have long been available in the pages of fantasy literature; now they are also available in the form of fantasy board and table games and people of all ages and sexes are eager to try them.

You can still see all collected Tony Bath's materials on our Hyboria webpage.

Horn of the Dragon (2)

After a first playtest of my homebrewn fantasy rules, I decided to set up a second battle. When testing new rules, I always like to go for what I would call "unusual situations". After all, most wargaming rules operate within a specific set of assumptions: density of troops, density of terrain, etc. But they also operate under scenario assumptions - whether the game is a straight battle or whether roleplaying and other story elements are part of the scenario.

So for a second playtest I decided to set up a classic scenario, based on Thistlewood, an article that appeared many decades ago in White Dwarf (issue 45) for Warhammer 1s edition, and written by Joe Dever. It is the type of fantasy battle that drew me into fantasy wargaming: a combination of battle and certain elements of roleplaying, which is also something I would like to see  in my own Horn of the Dragon rules.

(There is a whole series of blogposts on Thistlewood on the BroadSword and Beasts blog).

But first, the original article. I still have a complete run of White Dwarf 1-84, so it was easy for me to look it up.

 

Then, the setup. I do have a decent collection of late 80s fantasy figures and scenery, so to remain in the spirit of Thistlewood, these were drafted once again in service.

An overall view of the battlefield. I tried to recreate the original map as close as possible, but some interpretation is always necessary. It doesn't make much sense to recreate maps to the millimeter, but it's more important to capture the spirit of the scenario.

The Village of Thistlewood. The houses are cardboard houses from the old Warhammer Townscape set, and originally made available through the Warhammer 2nd edition scenario packs.

The Wizard's Tower. It's a resin model by Gedemco, and 80s Belgian wargaming company.

Since my rules are unit-based rather than figure-based, I had to translate the figures given in the text to a number of equivalent units. Nothing too complicated ...

Orc units and Pack Wolves.

More Orc units, the Wyvern, and Ugrash Ka, the hill giant leader of the Orcs.

The King's Army.

More units of the King's Army. I used some of my old chaos centaurs for the Royal Centaur unit.

More units of the evil forces. Trolls as well as undead.

Another view of the troll and undead units.

Now the only thing left to do is to play the game :-)

Horn of the Dragon (1)

Last night Eddy and I playtested my new set of fantasy wargaming rules. Originally, there would be 5 of us, but due to various personal circumstances, three of my friends had to cancel, so this left the both of us with plenty of time to test out some rule concepts.

It has become a running joke in our gaming group that one day I would design "the ultimate set of fantasy rules". That is of course a moving target. Rules ideas and fads in wargaming come and go, so any ruleset will only reflect the preferences of the wargamers at that point in time. But it is fun to tinker with one's own rules (at least I think so). So we had a first playtest of "Horn of the Dragon". The title is a playful reference to a fantasy roleplaying campaign I played many, many years ago, but I think it sounds cool. Wargaming is an industry of cool, after all.

But anyway, for this first game I dug out some old fantasy collections. One is a Barbarian army, mostly old Citadel and Grenadier figures, and the other a Lizardmen army, mostly Harlequin figures. I also wanted to add some fun elements, and hence I introduced the "Behemoths": elephants for the Barbarians, and giant reptiles/saurians for the Lizardmen. I set the game in an Egyptian desert. It's a fantasy game, after all!

The rules were inspired by well-tested mechanisms that I particularly like:

1. Roll for activation on a per-unit basis;
2. All combat is done by units (no individual figures);
3. No figure removal (keep as many figures on the table for as long as possible, that's the whole point of miniature wargaming), so that means keeping track of the status of each unit by markers;
4. Combat must be fast enough such that it doesn't become a slug, after all, movement and manoeuvre is the fun part in wargaming, not the endless rolling of dice.
5. Hex-based, so that movement is quick. No fiddling around with tape measures.

As I mentioned before, I also added "Behemoths", and the mechanisms for those were inspired by an article in Wargames Soldiers & Strategy issue 97, "Elephant Archos", written by Jeff Jonas. It describes a game featuring elephants, and based on the battle of Raphia, and apparently one of the few ancient battles in which there was actual elephant-elephant combat (didn't check that, though). Behemoths could be hesitant to move forward, or get into a rage  making them stronger, but also more prone to stampeding.

During and after the game, we had some good discussion about what worked and what didn't, and how we would tune the rules towards the next playtest.

I won't bother the reader with a detailed battle account, so here are some pictures (more pictures in Eddy's battlereport on BGG):

Fantasy warband game

FInally, we managed to stage a game! JP was so kind to host a game for us. The game used the "Fistful of Lead Fantasy - Might and Melee" fantasy skirmish rules. We had 4 players (me, Wim, David, Eddy), each commanding a warband of 5 figures (Orcs, Hobbits, Humans and Goblins). JP was umpiring. Fun game!

The usual pre-game banter. Coffee and beer ready to go.

Contemplating tactics.

The cattle pen was an objective for some of the players.

The game starts!

The goblins knock on the door of a house and discover what's inside. Nothing! It's the other house!

Humans guarding the cattle pen.

Hobbits approaching through the fields.

Some more action ...

A wild boar suddenly appears!

Heavy melee between humans and orcs.

Orcs trying to run away with the cattle.

More cattle stealing going on.

Creating fantasy maps

A few weeks ago Henry Hyde's new book "Wargaming Campaigns" was published. I haven't read all of it yet, but it's definitely worth its weight. The book outlines various ideas on how to run wargaming campaigns and how to make them work in practice.

I've long toyed with the idea of starting some sort of fantasy campaign, and the book contains some useful pointers on how to build your own maps using software. One of the tools mentioned is Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, a free mapping tool that runs in your browser. Sounds good, so I wanted to give it a try.

Last week I toyed around with the tool and trying out various options and what one could do. Then, it was time for some real work, and I started to create the World of Do, a fantasy world me and a few friends invented back in the 80s for a roleplaying game we published (more details about that game here).

I started out with an original hand-drawn map of our fantasy world (this map is over 30 years old).

Original map of Dor, drawn in 1990.

 

I then used Photoshop to make a quick (manual) mask to distinguish between land masses and water:

This was imported into Azgaar, and with some manual tweaking a height map was the result:

Then I started to define the various states and give them names. Here are some screenshots of my efforts so far. Some of the content such as city names, heraldry, etc. are still randomly generated, but I was very satisfied with the results so far.

Map with the various states.

Zoom of the region of Atumbar. All city names (except Atumbar) are randomly generated.

Same regions, but with some layers made visible.

3D view of the map

Map projected on the globe, which also allows for defining climate zones etc.

Heraldry layer made visible. I experimented with a few emblems myself, but almost all of them are randomly generated.