Osprey Games Talk Design Goals & Combat In Oathmark
December 18, 2019 by brennon
Joseph A. McCullough has got involved as part of Osprey Games' blog to start talking about the design goals for Oathmark: Battles Of The Lost Age which is due for release next year in April.
Kicking things off, McCullough talked about the core ideas that influenced them when deciding on how they wanted the game to develop...
- Rules that focused on moving large units around on the table, but where one figure equals one man (orc, elf, dwarf, whatever) and featuring individual casualty removal.
- A combat system that featured fast, bloody results.
- A game that focused more on tactical play than special rules, power units, or ‘combinations’.
- The inclusion of a true campaign system that added a sense of narrative flair to the games.
- An opened-ended army construction system that allowed players to freely mix races and that also integrated with the campaign system.
- A classic fantasy feeling without binding players to a fixed, heavily-defined fantasy world.
All of these seem like pretty awesome and integral pillars to be working around. I particularly like the idea that you could play out big games where combat is decided quickly. Additionally, the option for a campaign system helping in the design if your army and the way that you could include a lot of different factions within one force also seems like a nice point of difference compared to other Fantasy games.
On top of that, McCullough also talked a little bit more about combat and how it's all going to work. The main focus of this lay in the dice you'd be using and how to get that feeling of rolling a bunch of dice, but not spilling them all out onto the tabletop like a dam bursting. So, 5D10 was settled on as the core dice pool that you'll need to play the game. You won't always roll five dice but it seems that's going to be the almost 'set' amount when it comes to larger units clashing with each other.
I like that this then gives you a nice degree of variance in terms of the modifiers you can play around with. It's not as wide-ranging as a D20 but it's also not as limiting as a D6. So, the focus is on some nice variation in terms of the array of options you bring to the tabletop and also then making it quick and easy to resolve these clashes between mighty armies.
This all sounds rather cool and next up they are going to be talking about building Kingdoms in the game!
"All of these seem like pretty awesome and integral pillars to be working around..."
A lot of it sounds interesting but individual casualty removal makes me a lot less interested
I have to agree. So many years playing Impetus (hist.+fant.), Hail Caesar, To the Strongest, Sword & Spear (hist.+fant.), and Kings of War have inured me against such mass-combat games.
These type of mass-battle games tend to be skirmish games pretending to be mass battle-games – Warhammer Fantasy is the perfect example. This is why Mordheim is such an awesome game.
That is my 2p on this, but I will wait till the games comes out before I judge.
Thing’s are sounding good so far with big formations clashing.
I have been waiting since the first figures arrived on the market. I have picked up a few boxes at various shows whiles’t I have been using some of them in Erehwon and Age of Magic, Most of them are still on the sprue as I would really like to know the size of and composition of units before I start putting them all together.
Is there context to the artwork at the bottom? Is it an upcoming Orc or based on the goblin kits they already produce?
Even though the rules and thoughts are clearly different, they seem to be wanting to evoke something along the lines of Warhammer Fantasy battles from maybe… 6th edition. Not a bad thing.
Its a goblin, own a box of the buggers and recognized it as soon as I saw it, you can even build that guy out of the box. They work well enough with the old WGF/Warlord’s orcs to get as goblin allies or even hunchbached members of the horde if you like a more chaotic look to your orcs.
I’m hoping we get an intentionally mass-battle game. I like big units and seeing a couple of hundred 28mm figures on the table feels like proper wargaming to me. I’ve got high hopes for this one as there has been so much at skirmish level recently.
Osprey Games (Frostgrave, Rangers of Shadowdeep, Archipelago) has a wide following, so I’m sure they’ll pick up this mass combat game. The rest of us… we’ll see. Unlike Osprey Game’s previous games, mass combat has a fair amount of companies already involved in the market. I own Frostgrave and Shadows, and, despite Osprey Game saying you can use your own miniatures, these games call for some pretty unusual, though not unproxiable, miniatures (eg. ghoul snake).
Thinking about it again maybe the units will be small enough to enable you to use dice frames to mark casualties or like the old days just use a bit of paper
This interests me. It has always interested me. Will I move beyond interested to committed? Not sure, yet, but I will be following …. with interest.