Avernos' Rorke's Drift

The British are an easier task to research and sort out their statlines for the game. Any google search for colonial British troops will quickly give you the uniforms you need, the only variations required are the facings for the 24th Warwickshire Regiment of foot, in this case a green and the Royal Engineers, Chard only, have blue velvet.

For the units, everyone is lead by a Hollywood inspired character. Starting with Chard and Bromhead with the best leadership and going down to my Knaves Ardendorff and Hook. All the British have discipline +1 across the board.

After some playtesting I pushing Chard to having a Leadership of 4, which isn’t given in the game, but since the British have nowhere to run I felt keeping them firing until the end works well.

In the initial six unit game I also pushed  the firing to 4+ for the British with the elite rule. With eight units and a force more able to fill all the gaps along the all I returned that to the regular 5+ This just left me with the special rules.

For every unit I wanted to give them a unique rule and bit of fluff from the movie. Zulu doesn’t have a couple of good quotes in it. The entire screenplay is practically quotable from start to finish. Daniel Mersey has included fun rules for the overall force commander, but I decided to take it further. I won’t list them all here, they’re on the PDF if you want a look, but to give you an idea of what I mean here are a couple of my favourites.

Corp Allen “Fire at the smoke” His unit removes one level of cover from the target unit. For those who haven’t seen the movie, he complains that he can’t see the Zulus to fire at them, and is told to have his men fire at the smoke to pin them down.

Pvt Hook “You’ve done your bit now out you get” is an interesting combo meal of a rule. Since he was defending the hospital with mostly walking wounded in the film, I decided to not allow the unit to ‘at the double’. But it gives Hook’s unit move action as a free action. So no dice rolling and more importantly no unfortunate fluff rolling when you’re attempting to evacuate a burning building!