20mm Miniature Scavenger Hunt

For next year, I think I want to invest in some new figures for tabletop miniature battles. Since I'm playing ACKS, it's natural to look for a way to cover the (quite substantial!) range of different troop types. While most fantasy miniatures are released in the 28-to-35 mm range, smaller scale miniatures are often better for large battles between armies. Buying everything at 28 mm scale gets expensive, and for anything above human scale, it's hard to match the figure's footprint to a 1-inch hex grid.

Although 15 mm fantasy figures are available, the main appeal of 20 mm is the broader availability of 1/72 plastic sets. Some of these are released for games, and I've been using the armies from War of the Rings for the last couple semesters, even though these are at the large end of the range (more like 25 mm). The variety of troops and poses is pretty limited, and it's tempting to switch over entirely to smaller figures.

There are currently three sources of inexpensive fantasy miniatures in the 20-25 mm scale:

• Board games like WotR, Age of Mythology, and Age of Conan
• Plastic soldier sets from Caesar and Red Box (released under the Light/Dark Alliance label)
• Resold boxes from the recently discontinued Arcane Legions game

All of these provide a pretty generous collection of different poses, and usually sell at less than 50 cents per miniature. This is about a tenth the cost of a comparable metal mini, and a fifth of the cost of high-quality plastic minis. It's currently possible to field  hefty armies of humans, dwarves, elves, undead, and orcs, without breaking a $50 total budget.

Covering all the more obscure troop types in the D@W system requires a bit of scrounging. Here's a roadmap I'm considering for acquiring a more or less complete set:

• Start with the War of the Rings minis. This provides a nice mix of infantry and cavalry for humans, dwarves, elves, and orcs. As a bonus, you also get some (not-to-scale) war elephants and cave trolls. That's just as well, since a 1/72 elephant wouldn't really fit well on a hex map anyway. Already owned!
• Buy the Caesar Miniatures (or Red Box) sets necessary to get some undead and unique hero units. I think the cheapest options are Caesar F104-Adventurers and F103-Skeletons. That's another $30.
• Add all three of the Age of Mythology game piece sets, which can be purchased independently from the publisher's website. These provide alternate (and not consistently scaled) versions of ancient-world infantry, cavalry, giants, elephants, chariots, and lots of classic mythological creatures, for a very low price of $3 per set.

Even factoring in the cost of shipping and handling, that's not more than another $50 beyond WotR, which is a solid enough game in its own right so that the minis are virtually a free bonus.

Now it becomes necessary to fill in the gaps and find more obscure troop types.

• Camel Cavalry: HaT makes a few colonial-era camelry sets, including two of African irregulars (Hadedowah and Taaishi) that don't carry any weaponry that would place them outside the medieval era.
• Camel Archers: Probably the closest equivalent is Caesar's Bedouin set, which features Biblical-era Arab riders. But it might be better to just get...
• Horse Archers: This Mongol set from Italeri has a half-dozen of them. As an added bonus, it comes with more camels! On a tight budget, this could cover all three categories at once. For a more primitive take on horse archers, there's also this Scythian set from Zvezda.
• Cataphracts: These late-Roman and Byzantine cavalry are captured in all their glory by Zvezda. Of course, you can just use any old heavy cavalry and call them cataphracts, if you don't care about them looking particularly Byzantine.
• Dwarven (Mule-)Mounted Crossbows: This is virtually impossible to find. Medieval cavalry occasionally include a few mules, like this El Cid command set. But good luck finding a dwarf in a riding pose! Even human mounted crossbows are rare, although you can find some in this Zvezda French Knight set.
• War Elephants: Yes, these are already represented in reduced scale, but if you absolutely want them in true 1/72 size, this phenomenal Zvezda set is a wonder to behold. But good luck fitting these things in even a 2-inch hex map...
• Orc Boar Riders: You've got me. If I feel ambitious, I might try to pick up some vintage Britains Wild Boars (1360) and stick the Dark Alliance heavy warg riders on them with glue or pins.
• Goblins and kobolds: Caesar offers a goblins set. The Reaper Bones sets for kobolds are fairly inexpensive and don't look bad next to 1/72 figures.
• Centaurs: Age of Mythology has a some low-quality ones. The best source of these is probably Arcane Legions, where they appear in the Egyptian cavalry booster packs, which also provides more Mongol horse archers.
• War Bear Cataphracts: Seriously? Arcane Legions released these? How did this game die?!

Romans on armored bears = You win!

I don't know of any place to find gnolls, lizardmen, or bugbears. Fortunately, these are pretty easy to borrow from 28 mm collections, since it doesn't matter too much if they are a slightly oversized. The same holds true for dragons and other exotic fantasy creatures, where the real problem is finding small enough versions to fit in a hex at any scale.

I think my first priorities are grabbing the dirt-cheap Age of Mythology sets, the Mongol set (for some starter camels), and Caesar's Goblins and Undead sets. It also makes sense to buy up some discontinued Arcane Legions boosters before they disappear forever -- probably along with another game, the next time I want to mail-order a game.

Holiday Break

For Christmas Eve (with my wife's family), I ran a short game of Axis and Allies 1941, the newest (and smallest) iteration of the venerable AaA franchise. Despite being a game that supposedly can finish in a couple hours, we didn't even see the fall of Russia before we had to quit. As usual, the culprit was the entrenchment of builds into infantry categories, which turns everything into a Risk clone, but with double-strength defenders. In other words, a stalemate.

Russia crumbles before my onslaught!

The good news is that everyone had fun anyway. My nephews had never really tried a large strategy game before, but took to the mechanics quickly. My wife was predictably hyper-aggressive in an attempt to shorten the game and make more things happen before we had to quit. Always a good suggestion when introducing something to new players!

It's strange to go back to playing something simpler after years of high-level wargames. It's a little like developing a taste for double-shot espresso, and then trying to go back to drinking a Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha (or whatever sugarbomb equivalent is popular at Starbucks these days). It's exactly the same game I played to death in high school, but now I feel guilty about enjoying it. And worse yet, I have a desire to "fix" it, a project that would lead down a deep rabbit-hole of house rules.

If I could propose one (and only one) fix, I'd probably go for a weather system. I feel like a good weather system creates a "rhythm" to wargame play, with good weather creating "offensive turns" for conquest, and poor weather creating "defensive turns" for reinforcement and consolidation. It also provides the breathing room to regroup and build some powerful assault units for a coordinated attack, rather than just pumping out stacks of infantry while your navy and air force is frittered away. Finally, this allows for Russia to be plucked from the jaws of defeat by "General Winter" in much the same way that it was in the real 1941 Barbarossa offensive.

Below I've written a rule based on the assumption that every turn represents about a half-year. (For the 1940 Global game, using four seasons would probably fit the scale better.) I also assume that the game's focus is on regions with a temperate (summer/winter) climate. This is adapted from the weather system from my own Fantastic Frontiers project.

Axis and Allies Weather Rule

The first turn of the game is a Summer turn for all players. Every subsequent turn alternates between Winter and Summer. In regions on the southern hemisphere of the map -- anything with a northern edge lower than the northern edge of Brazil -- the seasons are reversed.

(Optional rule to handle tropical regions: Draw an equator across the map. Every region that the equator passes through, or that is adjacent to a zone the equator passes through, is an equatorial region that has reversed seasonal variation relative to the temperate regions in its hemisphere, to reflect Wet/Dry monsoon patterns. So while the North Temperate and South Equatorial zones have good Summer/Dry weather, the South Temperate and North Equatorial zones have harsher Winter/Wet weather, and vice versa.)

At the start of every combat round, roll a 1d6 to check for the weather conditions that round. In Summer, the weather is Clear on a 1-2, and Severe on a 6. In Winter, the weather is Clear on a 1, and Severe on a 5-6. Otherwise the weather is Average, with a mix of rainy and sunny days.

Clear weather represents perfect weather for modern mechanized warfare. All aircraft and armor increase the number of attack dice they are allowed to roll by 50%, rounding fractions up. For example, a group of 3 tanks would roll 3+1.5 dice, rounding to 5 dice, instead of their usual 3. This is calculated individually for each type of armor or aircraft unit present.

Severe weather represents storms or blizzards that are miserable for everyone. All attack dice are reduced to half, rounding fractions down. A group of 4 fighters would only roll 2 dice, and a group of 1 bomber would roll no dice at all. After Severe weather, combat must end with that round. If the battle is not won at the end of that round, the attacker must retreat.

Longview Gets A Game Store

Since moving to East Texas I've been mostly purchasing stuff over the internet, since the closest game store is more than an hour away. Just this month I heard about a small local startup called Three Suns Unlimited on the north side of town. Despite being busy with end-of-semester grading responsibilities, I've found time to drop by twice. Here are some of my first impressions:

• The majority of space is devoted to gaming tables, suggesting that Three Suns is positioning itself more as a venue than as a retailer. Both times I dropped by, there were relatively few shoppers, but plenty of actual players. Most recently I arrived in the middle of a Pathfinder Society event that seemed to involve at least a dozen players, or else there was a second game going on at the same time.
•  Most of the stock was skewed toward card games, both CCGs and some of the newer boxed "deckbuilder" boardgames. Since this is the end of the hobby with which I have the least familiarity, I'm not sure how to appraise the quality of their collection, but it seemed reasonably

  

  This must be an old photo. They have more shelves than this now!

  respectable for a startup. Many of the deckbuilders have demo packs available, and at some point I want to go back and try some of them (like Paizo's Rise of the Runelords or Cryptozoic's The Two Towers).
• There were plenty of demo games on the shelves. Playing them would have been a good use for an entire afternoon, but I had to leave because 1) it was a bit noisy with the PFRPG people there, and 2) my 2-year-old daughter was in the process of systematically rampaging through the store and causing mayhem with sticky candy-cane fingers. At some point I'll go back without those complications and see if I can't round up some MEK OPS Saturday night folks to try out the games on the shelf.
• The RPG selection was pretty heavily skewed toward Pathfinder and D&D. I did see a stack of Troll Lord Games sourcebooks (most of which I already own), and a beautiful OD&D reprint boxed set (for $150!!!), but for a retro-oriented player there wasn't anything that seemed usefully system-independent. I'd like to see them invest in a respectable stock of inexpensive 25mm fantasy figures (like Reaper's Bones line), which could support some of the ACKS campaign stuff I want to set up or any other generic fantasy-based miniature system. It would be nice to be able to snap up exactly the specialty mini I need for a Saturday Domains at War session. (Get me a club-wielding stone giant in hide armor, stat!)
• Helpful hint to game store owners: You get the best revenue stream by selling minis and miniature accessories! This is the stuff that people want to touch and inspect before they buy it, which means that you won't be replaced by online pdfs and Amazon.com. Plus, there's an unassailable cool factor when you can set up a glass display case full of Dwarven Forge dungeon dioramas. Diehards are going to drop in just to gaze longingly at it...
• I really wanted a small collection of 8mm d6 dice to replace the ones that Walley took back home to Arizona with him. They are currently retailing in large lots at eBay in larger quantities than I want to pay for (when I only need a dozen or so). Buying unusual dice types in bulk and then selling them individually is a good way for a small store like this to beat online retailers. The employee working behind the desk said that they had tried to buy them, but ended up with even tinier 5mm polyhedron dice instead! Cool looking, but at about $6 for a set, a little pricey.
• They have very limited selection of historical games, which is pretty much my experience at every game store these days -- I'm part of a dying breed, I guess. I did pick up a copy of the latest Axis and Allies release, the lightweight 1941 set. It supposedly plays in 90 minutes (we'll see about that!)  I'm also going to keep my eyes open for any other players of the Axis and Allies War at Sea miniatures game, which was represented there by a single starter set. That's the sort of thing that I could justify purchasing only if I knew I could get some use out of it -- my last attempt to run a tabletop naval miniatures battle attracted only a single player!

Hopefully they can expand the variety of their product offerings. Otherwise, it looks like a good place to stop and pick up dice/card games, or look for RPG or CCG players.

MEK OP Game Night: Semester Finale

Saturday featured the wildest finish yet to War of the Ring, with a 2-vs-1 game that ended in... a military victory for the Free Peoples!

Shadow initially set up for invasions of Gondor and Rohan. The Gondor invasion went relatively well, taking Dol Amroth and Pelargir. But Rohan held firm, and was relieved by substantial reinforcement out of Edoras, eventually enough to break the siege. All of this unraveled slowly, with the game under little time pressure due to some horrific damage inflicted on the Fellowship by hunt rolls; the Ringbearers ended up holing up in Lorien for several turns in a row, having lost both Boromir, Pippin, and Gandalf.

Meanwhile, the North had been left nearly depleted. Elves sallied forth, first from Rivendell, and then from Lorien, to pressure Moria and northern Dunland. The first invasion was thrown back, but the followup from Lorien was sufficient to seize a mostly-depleted Moria. The Shadow retaliated with a counter-siege out of Isengard, but pressure from Rohan made reinforcing the invasion difficult.

"No worries, folks, we got this."

The final blow came from Erebor. Gimli and a reconstituted Pippin commanded a combined force of Elves, Dwarves and Men through Mirkwood to challenge the Witch King and his Dol Guldur army outside of an undefended Lorien. The Witch King attacked, hoping to defeat both the army and then Lorien. Gimli prevailed, slaying the Witch King personally! The remaining garrison of two trolls fell to a Later-than-Last Alliance of 4 dwarves (leader, elite, 2 regular), 3 northmen (2 leader, regular), and 4 wood elves (leader, 2 elite, regular).

All in all, a relief to finally see the Free Peoples win a game for once.

Tournament Rules (As In, Rules For Simulating Tournaments!)

For a while I've been bothered by the fact that the Adventurer, Conqueror, King system (ACKS) seems to give fighter-type classes a less inspired domain-management endgame. They get to do all the same basic functions as other classes (trade, stronghold building, and basic economics), but they don't really have any special flavor elements that they don't share with all the other classes. Worse, clerics seem to be able to do all the same things, and do them better, thanks to having larger strongholds that can control more land and population. Fighters ought to be the best at something!

To look at the Platonic ideal of what it means to be a Lord (a name-level fighter with a stronghold), let's look back to the original OD&D booklets, and see what happens when a party of adventurers trespasses on the lands of a mighty ruler from each of the three archetypical classes (this is pre-thief!). From Volume III: Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, page 15:

• Fighting Men within castles will demand a jousting match with all passersby of like class. Otherwise they will demand a toll of from 100 to 600 Gold Pieces from the party. If a joust takes place (use rules from CHAINMAIL) the occupant of the castle will take the loser's armor if he wins, but if the character wins the castle owner will host all in the party for up to one month, supply them with two weeks of rations, and provide warhorses (Heavy) if the party so requires.

• Magic-Users from castles will send passersby after treasure by Geas if they are not hostile, with the Magic-User taking at least half of all treasure so gained, the Magic-User having first choice of magical items and automatically choosing Miscellaneous Magic, Wands/Staves, or Rings (in that order) in preference to other items. Otherwise, the Magic-User will require a magical item from the passersby as toll, and if they have no magical items suitable for use the Magic-User will require a toll of from 1000 to 4000 Gold Pieces. 

• Clerics will require passersby to give a tithe (10%) of all their money and jewels. If there is no payment possible the Cleric will send the adventurers on some form of Lawful or Chaotic task, under Quest. Generally Evil High Priests will simple attempt to slay Lawful or Neutral passersby who fail to pay their tithes.

Here we have the endgame focus of each of three classes. Mages covet magic items above all else. Clerics covet money (ahem, "tithes") above all else. Both of these are well-represented in ACKS, which gives mages all kinds of crafting systems to invest their time and money, and gives clerics lots of revenue enhancing perks.

What do fighters care about? Challenges! High-stakes challenges, where the victors are rewarded handsomely as celebrated new champions of the realm, but the losers are stripped and kicked to the curb. OD&D is mostly concerned with the high medieval period -- hence the special attention to jousting -- but almost every other pre-industrial culture had its equivalent quasi-martial spectator sport: the Greeks had the Olympic (and other) games, the Romans had Colosseum and the Circus, the Byzantines dropped gladiators but doubled down on chariot-racing, and jousts were really nothing more than a more genteel version of free-for-all melees arranged as recreational activity during the Dark Ages.

This aspect of the ancient world deserves a new and improved implementation in the ACKS style.

After floating the idea for new fighter perks on the developer forum, I got mostly recommendations that involved personnel improvements to henchmen or hirelings. For example, the cap on henchmen could be relaxed, or the pool for recruiting them could be expanded. I'd really like to make a system that involves active decisions and resource management, rather than just a passive bonus, for sake of consistency with the highly customizable crafting systems for the other classes.

In my approach, fighters would not only build a physical structure for games (a stadium or something similar), but would also schedule competitive events. This would be in conjunction with the usual "feasts" required for domain morale purposes, as part of the celebration. The events would have different costs, and attract different types of (pre-rolled) contestants. By observing the outcome of each contest, the sponsoring lord (and any visitors from other realms) could learn something about the skills and attributes of the contestants in advance of recruitment, instead of the usual system of hiring henchman and then "rolling them up" to discover if you got a valuable one. A winning contestant would make a good choice for a henchman!

Here's a brainstormed list of different contests and games, some of which might be restricted from a given setting (i.e., no jousting in a bronze-age campaign). The "formula" determines how contestants will place during competition, based on their skills and attributes. Each contest has a base cost of 5000 gp associated with it, which mostly reflects creating a sizable purse of money for the winners as well as the cost of offering hospitality to celebrated contestants. Increasing the purse will improve the number of contestants who arrive to compete. Contestants will only compete in events that match one of the prime requisites of their classes (i.e., a bard would compete in recitation, but a regular fighter would not).

• Horse racing: 1d12 + DEX + STR / 2
• Chariot/harness racing: 1d10 + DEX + STR / 2 + INT / 2
• Jousting: 1d6 + STR + DEX / 2
• Sprinting: 1d6 + STR
• Distance running: 1d6 + CON
• Javelin throwing: 1d6 + DEX
• Wrestling: 1d6 + STR + CON + DEX / 2
• Boxing: 1d6 + STR + DEX + CON / 2
• Gladiatorial combat: 1d6 + STR + CON + DEX
• Hunting: 1d6 + DEX + WIS
• Recitation: 1d6 + CHA + INT / 2

By observing the outcome of many events, a shrewd ruler could identify the most outstanding young warriors in his region of the world, getting an early chance to recruit a potential Lancelot or Hercules. As sponsor, he'd have first right to offer something to a contestant. Of course, rivals might arrive to make offers to any contestant who wasn't successfully recruited, or to try to enter themselves or their own henchmen for a shot at the purse!

I'm try to work this idea out into some more formal rules that include adjustments for level and proficiencies.

MEK OP Game Night: Domains At War

As seems to often be the case for the end of the semester, I don't have enough time for a full write-up on the Saturday sessions. Last week we had three new players, so I did another intro scenario for the Battles system in D@W with some alterations to the Chaotic force. I let the new players design their own divisions using a point-buy system based on BR values. This time we had four divisions of Lawful troops against three divisions of beastmen (orcs, hobgoblins, ogres, and a troll platoon). Surprisingly, no one elected to play the elves, or to add any extra heroes to a division.

Durnovaric Expeditionary Force
Company A (Father Padeen BacCorleot, 5th Level Cleric)

• 2x Heavy Cavalry
• 2x Longbowmen
• 2x Slingers

Company B (Lord Damuth, 5th Level Dwarven Vaultguard)

• 4x Dwarven Heavy Infantry

Company C (Magister Finbar Crowne, 5th Level Mage)

• Heavy Infantry A
• 3x Longbow

Company D (Sir Asmund Crayg, 5th Level Fighter)

• 1x Heavy InfantryA
• 2x Longbowmen
• 2x Light Infantry F
• 1x Medium Cavalry

Beastmen Horde, Legions of the Undying
Company A (Warchief Khazay)

• 1x Trolls (with 27 unit hit points and 7 attacks!!!)
• 2x Light Ogre Infantry
• 2x Heavy Orc Infantry

Company B (Chief Awitar -- Kyle: "Hey, didn't we already kill this guy?" No, that was Zraqua!)

• 1x Heavy Ogre Infantry
• 4x Light Orc Infantry

Company C (Engineer Ursk)

• 4x Hobgoblin Bowmen (desperately needed some infantry support!)

By sheer luck, the dwarves and cleric set up on the same side as the hobgoblins, and the mage's division got the trolls. This allowed the mage to keep the trolls locked down with web spells, and the cleric to tie up the hobgoblin commander with hold person, as the dwarves slowly chewed through the ogres and orcs. Web is another good example of a spell that works much better on a large battlefield, where it's essentially perfect crowd control against a single tough opponent.

Once the orcs in the center crumpled, the game quickly moved to morale checks, and Chaotic troop armies never survive more than one of these. None of the commanders were slain, but all of the units routed off the map. Arguably, the trolls were trapped and couldn't escape, but I want Khazay as a recurring villain, so I'm going to assume that he was stronger than his trolls and could break out of the web. (A more detailed system like Pathfinder would allow individual characters a combat maneuver check to escape from web.)

I'm feeling more ready to start on a full campaign with production mechanics included, although I might need to try simplifying the mechanics to accommodate the fact that not everyone has a rule book. For the moment, I'm working on creating more Excel spreadsheet tools to avoid having to look through a zillion photocopied tables for monthly recruitment limits.

YAC Pwn Fest: A Big Success

Last night MEK OP hosted the board game room for the Yellowjacket Activity Council's fall-semester gamer event, Pwn Fest. Despite the obvious popularity of console video games (something like eight different rooms of Call of Duty, DoTA, LoL, etc), we still attracted enough players to run five multiplayer tabletop games simultaneously.  I had a group playing War of the Ring that went until midnight!

MEK-OP Game Night: Savage Reaches Wrap-Up

November 4, Caudex Annales 70 AUP

The climactic defense at the Roaring Banks left gnollish power permanently broken in the Savage Reaches, and left little opposition along the river valley. With poor treasure to claim from the nomadic gnolls, attention turned to the forsaken swamplands to the west. Saurian forces marching against Fort Diffident had been neatly rebuffed two weeks earlier, but the pale dragon commanding them had retired from the battlefield with a haste beyond the possibility of a pursuit. Locating the dragon's lair seemed a lucrative alternative to mopping up fleeing slaver caravans, and so the leadership of the Briarwood Irregulars turned westward at the mountain spur, following the footpaths into the murk and fester of Pallid's Abode. 

The saurian tribes were primitive and dispersed into tiny hovels throughout the swamp, offering little opposition and indeed, little evidence of any recent habitation. The trail itself branched into a sinking complex of broken temple structures being flooded by water and overgrown with razor-thorned vines. Double-lidded eyeslits peered out from the water, then extinguished themselves to leave only ripples as the cavalry companies rode past.

The mouth of the great cave discovered outside the complex was worn smooth by passage, and a team of officers and heroes was already alert to dangers below. The passage sloped down into a chamber of muddy waters, where three saurian elders had elected to make a final stand. Two of the lizardkin were dispatched with fire and sword, and the third fled deeper into the tunnels. Swift pursuit brought the explorers into a throne room full of caged prisoners, waiting to be served as meals to the cave's draconic master. Pushing onward with growing apprehension, the warparty discovered a deep underground pool of acrid waters, churning and bubbling. And then the waters parted and the head and sinuous neck of a young dragon erupted into a furious gout of acid. Even those leaping aside in the nick of time were horribly choked and staggered by the rolling fume-clouds that blossomed around the splashing torrent.

Burning Hands: Need a light?

Both knights of the Irregulars, Thorgood and Wilson, fell in battle to the claws and fangs that followed up this noxious barrage, but not until after the dragon had been dazzled by a burst of light that left him stumbling and swinging wildly. As the surviving saurian burst from another nearby pool to employ shamanic arts to heal his master, scholar and magister Arthur Firebrand moved to catch them both in a fan of crackling flames. With the shaman scorched beyond life and driven into the caustic waters of the dragon pool, all focus returned to containing the dragon's fury. Thorley took a final stand beside the gruff Father Otis, notching arrows as the dragon closed in on them.

Surprise! Dagger KO!

In the end, the wyrm met an ignoble death. Firebrand, his magical arts exhausted, flew at the dragon's right flank with an unsheathed dagger and plunged it into the beast's scarred breast through a rift left by the enchanted sword of Sir Charles. The dragon stumbled in blind agony, and then at last lay quietly on the floor in a pool of fuming gore.

Amazingly, neither warrior was permanently injured after falling in battle to the strokes of the dragon-claws, knocked senseless by the impact but otherwise protected from laceration by sturdy mail, artful parrying, and Sir Humphrey's Ring of Protection.

With magical arts, the dragon horde was quickly identified among the acid-washed bones of hundreds of unfortunate captives. Great treasures drawn from the smaller pool where the lizard-priest had been concealed included (after return to civilization and careful identification): a Ring of Spell Storing with 5 spells, ample compensation for a wizard's valor, as well as a Shield +1. There were additionally strewn about the room a pair of scrolls, one (perhaps not coincidentally) with the fourth-level arcane spell spell storing, and the other with the lesser spell hypnotic pattern. In other corners, bones concealed a second set of Leather Armor +2, a Potion of Clairvoyance, a Potion of Invulerability, and a mildly cursed (but potentially also useful) Philter of Love. The floor was littered with offerings to the dragon from his saurian devotees amounting to the weight of nine thousands of gold pieces, and several rare gems: a flawless facet-cut diamond, a ceremonial jade belt, a wrought silver diadem, and a glamoured moonstone with patterns that swam beneath its surface.

In all, the wealth amounted to over 20,000 gp of monetary treasure, but with the further value of the spells beyond simple enumeration. Thorley Acquisitions now had access to one of the few techniques known of creating items that could store magical energy in any common jewel or ornamental band -- a talent prized beyond nearly all others by the great arcane loremasters of the world!

Notes: Prior to this encounter, I would have rated the battle at roughly even odds, but now it's clear that it required a lot of good luck to go as well as it did. Not only did all three PCs make a successful saving throw against the (basically lethal) dragon breath, but the dragon failed a saving throw against glitterdust. Otherwise it would have been unlikely that the party could have survived long enough to grind it down over multiple rounds. After seeing how lethal the breath attack could be, I didn't use it again during the battle, ostensibly on the grounds that dragons that are attacking by smell (instead of by sight) prefer to claw and bite. Another two breath attacks would have finished the battle quickly and sorrowfully.

Acid? Yeah, whatever. We're all good! (By Howard Lyon)

After the battle, the two rolls on the Mortal Wounds table were totally optimal. That is, both fighters rolled a 20 on 1d20 (for survival), followed by a 6 on 1d6 (for severity of wounds), which let them both get off with nothing except some flavor text about a near-death experience! Not so much as a scar to brag about later. The odds of doing this are essentially 1 in 20*6*20*6, or 1 in 14,400!! This is, to put it mildly, not the standard outcome of being ripped apart by a 30-foot-long acid-spouting dragon in his own lair.

Finally, I'd like to salute playtester (and walking Warhammer 40k encyclopedia) Jeremy Walley, who had to move back to Arizona last week. We all miss you already.

Rate Of Attack

There's a split in RPG design between systems that represent a combat round/turn as being short (6 to 10 seconds) or long (a half-minute to a minute). This divide traces all the way back to 1st edition, where AD&D switched to the "long round". The latter interpretation requires that a "round" be interpreted as multiple extended exchanges with an aggregated outcome.

When playing ACKS last night, I was impressed by just how quickly the battle was over. Essentially from the moment cave entry until the fall of the dragon (split over two separate encounters), the fight took roughly 10 rounds, amounting to about a minute and a half. On that time scale you'd expect that an entire dungeon floor could be cleared out in 20 minutes. Granted, it would require amazing stamina to fight continuously for that long!

That carries over into the tactical battle system as well. A battle involving huge armies clashing still ends in a couple minutes. And that can involve a single hero wiping out multiple platoons, probably amounting to a kill every three seconds or better, under calculations based on the surprisingly generous cleave rules. Any class but a mage can cleave multiple targets, and even bows can get off a number of shots in that ten-second round under the same rule (which I guess means it should be called cleave/multishot!) Shortbows have a natural edge in this system, since they trade in their shorter range for a better cleave multiple, providing a definite incentive for an experienced fighter to downgrade to a lighter ranged weapon.

To provide some visual reference for the standard arguments for this compressed time scale, I did a search for rapid use of realistic weapons by modern-day specialists.

Here's a video of some Viking reinactors:

There's an absolute imperative in this style of fighting for taking shorter, weaker thrusting strokes, rather than the stereotypical wide and reckless swing. It's not particularly theatrical in appearance, relative to your average Hollywood movie, but the sharpness of sword-points makes it mandatory to create constant distance with any opponent. That requires both the sword and shield to be pushed forward at all time, moving in small, unpredictable arcs.

This is, in some sense, a justification of two tropes of fantasy wargaming at once: the short strokes happen fast (allowing substantial improvement in attack rate with experience). But they also aren't very effective at finding more distant kill zones, justifying the value of armor (as blocking instead of absorption) and the idea of whittling down health of a skilled opponent in small increments ("HP loss") to represent declining stamina or coordination-impairing bruise wounds to the sword-arm or shoulder. On the other extreme, an inexperienced or slow defender would take a single stroke to the neck and go down in a matter of seconds.

For ranged weapons, there are plenty of videos communicating the speed of a polished archer with a lightweight recurve bow. In a competition requiring careful aim, the limiting factor is always aiming, not the mechanics of notch and release. Here's a speed shooter firing on the move:

If you wait until the end, you can see that she's just burying the shots in a canvas screen with no attention to precision. Still, the idea of a company of composite shortbow archers unleashing this kind of barrage gives you a sense of how you really might get a chance to fight in the shade as you attempted to close the range on them.

All of the above videos involve normal humans, using mundane weaponry, in non-life-or-death situations. I'd wager that being an immortal elf defending your homeland with a magic bow is worth at least another factor of two in terms of attack capability. Five lethal shots in 10 seconds doesn't seem so crazy in that light.

ACKS: Classifying Combat Actions

This Saturday will lead off with an incursion into the lair of Pallid, a juvenile albino black dragon who has been functioning as the ruler of, and object of cultic adoration from, the Savage Reach's local saurian tribe. The saurians themselves were eliminated in a conventional action, but the dragon worked his way back to the main cave. Although the D@W rules officially state that commanders die with their units, I ruled he would have been operating as an independent hero from the air, and could make a swift escape if the battle turned against him.

Going into the lair is a man-to-man (i.e., traditional RPG) scale encounter, so I've been paging through the core rules to figure out the sequence of battle. One aspect of the game that could probably be clarified is which actions are allowed in different stages of combat. Here's the result of reading through several paragraphs of text and determining how different combat actions would be classified in a "modern" post-3.0 vocabulary.

In general, every character may make one move action followed by one attack action, in order of initiative rolls using 1d6+DEX modifier. (Note: not 1d20!) Initiative order may be delayed until after any other combatants with lower initiative scores.

A free action may occur in addition to a move action, before or after it. A full-round action replaces both. A declared full-round action also replaces both, and must be declard before any initiative rolls. A spontaneous full-round action can occur at any time in reaction to an opponent, regardless of initiative.

Move Actions


Overrun demo, courtesy today's OOTS

• Move any distance up to combat movement, if not engaged in melee
• Make an overrun special manuever, to move past an opponent without engaging (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
• Set a polearm or spear to receive a charge, against a charging opponent (delays the attack action until a charge occurs)
• Stand up after being knocked down by a special maneuver or ability

Attack Actions

• Make a missile attack
• Make a melee attack
• Perform a special maneuver or other special ability (usually involves additional modifiers to save from any size differentials)
• Brawl with a punch (1d3) or kick (1d4), to inflict non-lethal damage (-2 to hit with kicks)
• Disarm an opponent (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
• Force back an opponents (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis), may result in a collision causing knock down and damage
• Incapacitate an opponent using the flat of the blade to inflict non-lethal damage (-4 to hit)
• Knock down an opponent, granting +2 to attacks against, and inflicting -4 on his attacks (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis)
• Sunder an opponent's weapon or shield, using a forceful blow from a weapon or shield (various hit modifiers and save modifiers, based on types and enchantments)
• Wrestle an opponent to create a hold that guarantees automatic future hits to brawl, force back, disarm, or knock down, and allows +4 and backstabs with any future allied attacks (-4 to hit, allows save vs Paralysis every round)
• Light a torch
• Throw flaming oil or holy water, or some similar liquid
• Ignite military-grade oil (on the floor or on a target), using a torch
• Use an item (wand, staff, rod, ring, etc)
• Attempt to turn undead

Either Move or Attack Actions

• Sheathe a weapon and draw another
• Ready or loose a shield
• Pick up an item from personal inventory or the ground

Free Actions

• Draw a weapon into empty hands
• Drop a weapon, shield or item, and immediately draw another weapon
• Activate a rage effect
• Make a melee cleave attack against a new opponent within reach, after slaying another (up to class level for fighter-type classes, or half-level for cleric/rogue-type classes, classified by attack throw advancement rate)
• Make a missile cleave attack against a new opponent within range, after slaying another (same class limits as above, plus capped at 2 for crossbow/arbalest, 3 for longbow, and 4 for any other ranged weapon)

Full Round Actions

• Charge into combat and attack
• Run away from a battle (when out of melee), at triple normal movement

Declared Full Round Actions

• Cast a spell from memory or a scroll
• Make a fighting withdrawal
• Retreat from melee

Spontaneous Full Round Actions

• Make a reaction attack with any missile weapon, spear or polearm, against a closing opponent within range/reach

MEK OP Game Night: More D@W Playtesting

Usually I try to put up an in-character recap of the previous session, but this week the detailed roster for the player army was taken home by Walley to prep for next week. So instead I'll just provide a summary.

• We fought four battles, three of them relatively balanced. The humans won three battles, and the beastmen won one.
• In the first battle,  the player army split, and a couple companies of cavalry rode off to intercept a company of lizardmen that were getting rather close to a supply link. Both sides had roughly 30 BR, including a small dragon commanding the saurian troops. This resulted in a strong victory for the humans, at the cost of a heavy cavalry platoon.
• In the second battle, which was concurrent with the one above, the remaining infantry force attacked a mobile gnoll company investigating from the south. This featured a little under 25 BR for each side, and was again nominally balanced. This time the humans fared much worse, and were sent quickly into a rout. Without any "tough" units to take losses, the humans had to lose a larger number of units, and were on the losing end of the +2/-2 morale modifier for number of units lost.
• In the third battle, the cavalry returned to regroup with the survivors, and pursued the gnolls and their prisoners. I allowed a spy to roll as an act of "sabotage" to see if he could release some of the prisoners to fight in the battle (the non-wounded ones from routed units, presumably), but this failed. In any event, the gnollish survivors were totally outclassed by the cavalry, and were destroyed.
• In the fourth battle, two more companies of gnolls joined up to meet the humans at a bridge. A human mage went all Horatius Cocles on them, and fireballed the bridge as they were attacking. I ruled this was good for a -4 terrain penalty, forcing them to hit only on a 20. The gnolls then proceeded to roll 87 consecutive non-20 results! Outcome: Human victory with no casualties, and a river that you probably don't want to be drinking out of, any time soon.
• After cutting back on the number of recon rolls (using range modifiers) and eliminating the distance modifier, the recon system seemed to work more smoothly. I'm contemplating adding a "rumors of distant battles" trigger for long-range recon, i.e., battles count as a recon-triggering event with a longer range. That will give distant domains some chance to be aware of the outcome of a major battle, which seems like the sort of thing that would more easily attract the attention of scouts from dozens of miles away. I like the idea that a dramatic victory by an invading army puts all the other domains in the area "on notice" that something new is happening.
• Spoils/experience calculations are still a bit slow. I think it might be possible to speed them up with a standard worksheet form. It would also be nice to have a worksheet to keep track of wounded soldiers, and when they recover from wounds, as well as experience point totals for units working on Veteran status. All of this is something I could do myself... if I had more time!
• I feel like I'm gaining a better understanding of the strategy of assigning losses. There's a natural need to find balance between trying to kill only your weak units (which pushes you quickly to being forced to make morale rolls) and killing only strong units (which are valuable and can't easily be replaced, providing more staying power in one battle at the expense of hurting you in the next one).

A Cleric Spell Glitch And Textual Criticism

The character creation rules in ACKS seem to be organized around using the four classic classes (fighter/cleric/mage/thief), in their original incarnations. Most of the sub-type classes are implemented in rather novel ways, with the Gnomish Illusionist (for example) looking very little like the original 80s-era version of the illusionist class. But the Basic Four are almost exactly copied from their primitive form. To be precise, they resemble the Greyhawk/Holmes/Moldvay implementation of each, aside from some clean-ups like using d20 for thief skills instead of d100.

One of the places this is most obvious is in the cleric spell progression. The original 1974 release of Men and Magic includes this table:

You can see that the cleric is differentiated from the mage in two general ways: Slower initial spell progression (the text description suggests that the clerics need to "earn" their spells by service), but rapid progression after level 4.

But even stranger is the irregular at level 5 (or actually "4+1", in these pre-Grehawk booklets designed to mate perfectly onto the Chainmail rules). At the following level, suddenly the cleric gets two spell levels at once! The line that reads "2 2 -" should probably have read "2 1 1" for the sake of a smooth "one spell level per player level" progression. The removal of this discontinuity in both 1e and the Rules Cyclopedia suggests that it was a mistake.

This glitch is reproduced faithfully in the ACKS core rules. This has the effect of artificially weakening level 5 clerics, who are missing the 3rd level spell that they "should" already have in place of that additional 2nd level spell. I'm debating whether to put it back in, or leave it in the currently quirky form as a nod to tradition. There's something charming about it being a permanent monument to the amateur proofreading of TSR during the early garage-publishing era.

There's a fascinating parallel here in Biblical scholarship, where early scribal transcription errors that result from skipped lines (called "haplographic" errors) show up in many older texts that are used as the basis for modern translations. This creates a situation in which a modern translator is forced to make a choice between fidelity to the flawed text, or inserting a reconstructed version of the missing line that might not perfectly replicate the original material.

No more pink Vaseline!

In some ways, the RPG-writing community (or at least, the retro-RPG community) shows many of the same passionately conservative exegetical tendencies as a Hebrew or Christian religious community. Errors are first a source of confusion, then grow to become viewed affectionately, in the same way that some Star Wars fans would rather watch the original theatrical version of Star Wars with Vader's uncolored lightsaber and the smear of Vaseline that hides the wheels on Luke's speeder.