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!