McCullough Talks Kingdom Building In Osprey’s Oathmark
January 10, 2020 by brennon
Osprey Games got Joseph A. McCullough back to talk more about the campaign element of their upcoming mass battle game, Oathmark: Battles Of The Lost Age. This is pretty fascinating stuff!
The focus here is that, unlike in a skirmish game, your army and its characters won't be the ones which are developing and gaining experience as you play through your games of Oathmark. Instead, the focus switches to your Kingdom and how the battles you fight shape the development of your lands, expanding and retracting dependant on your victories and defeats.
When you start playing the game you will start to fill in a Kingdom sheet which will document what regions you hold within your Kingdom. This will then give you access to the units that you can bring with you to games. If you command an Orc City then you'll be able to bring their warriors to your aid or if you marshal great mountains then you might be able to call on the power of the ancient dragons.
As they mentioned in the article, as you then build and develop your Kingdom, you begin to expand your army list options. This is where one of the core differences pops up in Oathmark too. If you have a Kingdom which spans both Dwarven and Elven lands then you can call on the aid of both factions to fight beside you.
For those worrying that they're going to lose the use of certain units when their Kingdom is occupied by enemy forces, don't worry. They have mentioned that you'll still have access to those units, they will just fight at a less efficient level and you'll be encouraged to wage war in order to get it back!
Pretty much everything else in the game will be very typical to your normal mass battle games. You'll have points values to keep everything equal between players but your choices on the Kingdom map will start to shape just how specialised (or not) your force is going to be.
This sounds like a really interesting way of developing a mass battle game with a twist!
"This sounds like a really interesting way of developing a mass battle game with a twist!"
Sounds like an interesting idea, I’d like to see how this plays.
Aye, it will be very interesting to see how the gameplay works on the tabletop and how it all ties together.
Even if these kingdoms aren’t used in the actual game it is a cool method of creating army lists with their own unique flavour.
It may even help you decide what terrain your army bases need to be.
Lots of neat background info that can be used when assembling and painting your army.
No two elven kingdoms are going to be the exact same thing, because where the various terrain regions are located changes the army they can field.
It’s a cool take so you can have different types of units. I kind of like it.
Sorta reminds me of an RTS after you capture a base of an enemy and can pump out their units.
Really looking forward to this… And the potential campaign map making shenanigans.
This sounds like a great idea and gives the game a good usp. I can see myself wanting to represent the kingdom maps themselves and I’ll probably use so old Mighty Empires kits for that.
My concern is will this pull in many people from the kingdom building game’s they love now.
Civilization the RPG/wargame.