Part 1

So with the lockdowns lifted here in Oz my gaming group decided to get back into gaming with a campaign. The first thing we discussed was genre, warfare scale (nation, warlord or warband) and rulesets. We decided on the Dark Ages in North Western Europe. That was easy. What followed next was a very interesting discussion where several great suggestions and fantastic reasons were raised.

At a national level we all love Shogun and Blood Royal. Shogun is a great game set during the Shogunate where rival families fight for control of Japan. Shogun has a great abstract combat system too. It is simple and could easily be adapted for Dark Ages Europe.

Blood Royale is an old GW boardgame set during the 14th Century. It has a great ‘family tree’ mechanic that we had modified and used in other campaigns. Each member of the royal family is a character you can use to lead armies or as diplomatic devices (ie Marriage-cows). In s slight modification that we have previously done, Characters are pre-generated and shuffled into faction decks so that famous characters come up randomly.

We had used Mighty Empires as well before but it really didn’t offer much, especially when compared to the excellent afore mentioned systems. What we did salvage from it was the idea of building various structures in a province and how that adjusted your kingdom.

We had several large scale combat rulesets candidates. We restricted our selections to rulesets we all had or could get easily. Kings of War, Hail Caesar, Warmaster, Warhammer Ancients, Lion Rampant and Clash of Spears. We restricted our selections to rulesets we all had.

Kings of War and Hail Caesar are both great games, but both do that thing where the unit remains at full strength until it is suddenly destroyed. Warmaster is essentially 10mm Hail Caesar but units are broken up into ‘stands’, essentially a ‘Troop’ from KoW. Why didn’t they just break big units into collections of troops in KoW and Hail Caesar?

Warhammer Ancients stats are 1-10 which we all prefer because of the better range than 1-6 in nearly all other games, BUT we all hate removing individual models in large scale battles.

Most of us were relatively new to Lion Rampant and Clash of Spears so we decided against these two otherwise wonderful systems.

For smaller scale we were all happy with Saga, although Shield Wall obviously ported into Hail Caesar seamlessly. Saga isn’t the most complicated system and in fact that’s what makes it so awesome. Now with Epic Saga larger battles of 3 warbands a side are available to us.

So the next step is putting all this together.