Was notified that i would need a sidekick for #rangersofshadowdeep so i painted this in a matter of 45 minutes.
Yes you probably recognise Boris Johnson in this. It's post apocalyptic BoJo by @FenrisGames and I bought it for my proxy #BloodBowl#CountBBFace team, in case the revised Vampires had a Thrall lineman.
We finally played "1066, Tears To Many Mothers" last night and it was good! It'd work well as an introductory wargame (it's really a very interactive tableau building card game).
The artwork is amazing on the cards too, though some of the noble folks look a bit too clean & modern for the 11th century. I'm sure the artist based some of the characters on moderns actors too, Harold Godwinson looks suspiciously like Russell Crowe! :D
You start off with the appearance of Halley's Comet & progress through several objectives to get to the Battle of Hastings (strangely the Saxons took the comet as a bad omen, and the Normans took it as a good omen. Not sure how that's decided!). While you're doing that you can pick off/damage units that are being build in your opponent's tableau, move your cards around, & do other actions. The resources to buy cards are very tight in this game & it seems that it's best to get the resource generating cards out there as early as possible - otherwise you need to spend cards from your hand as resources & it's easy to run out of cards there! You're also somewhat at the mercy of the random draw to determine what is available on a turn - at the end I had some very high cost units in my hand that I had no way to pay for and put in play!
I started off pretty well as the Saxons, fending off Vikings in the north and then tromping down to the south of England to face the Normans. But I got stuck on later objectives as I didn't have a lot of cards with Zeal and so the Normans beat me to the Hastings objective and got a headstart attacking the wedges there. By the time I caught up I was already demoralised and I hadn't really arranged my units in the wedges very well - in the end the Normans took two wedges and won. I almost killed William with my archers earlier but he managed to shrug off all his wounds with a timely "heal one character" card!
It's a fun, clever, thematic game with lots of interesting decisions - worth checking out! #wargaming
The original game Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (or just Fantasy Wargaming in some editions) was a 1981 book by Bruce Galloway, a clear variation on Dungeons and Dragons, based on Galloway’s home rules. Unlike it’s competition it was not afraid of using actual historical concepts like astrology and occultism in it’s descriptions, although it also was written so densely it was hard to make sense of it in any shape or form by someone not already familiar with roleplaying games. And, well, it was called Fantasy Wargaming.
Which made this a problem, as the game was published both in the UK and the US by mainstream publishers obviously trying to break into the nascent TTRPG market. The most available version was most likely the one published by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, which made the game available to many people who did not have any experience with roleplaying games before.
Unfortunately one has to say, as the game’s size (300pgs) and conceptual denseness made parsing the book quite a feat, meaning if people used this as an introduction to roleplaying, it might not have been very successful.
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming goes into this, and into the development of the game. It could have been a bit more thorough and a bit more critical, but for what it is it’s a nice look into the environment that created it. And well, it’s free.
(I learned about this book from an episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast which had the author on and talked about this project. Well worth a listen)
@zdl@gmkeros.wordpress.com@gmkeros.wordpress.com If I remember correctly, a lot of FW seemed to be riffing on C&S specifically. I may or may not be remembering correctly.
@edheil@gmkeros.wordpress.com@gmkeros.wordpress.com I've read it. I've read (and played) several editions of C&S. I have no idea. The writing in Fantasy Wargaming was just that bad.
Little palate cleanser figure before I dive into heresy ultramarines. A Stormcast Eternal with badly chipped enamelled armour and an opalescent prismatic sword.
Don't know what army I want to do for 4th edition AoS but I loved painting this woman in a way I wasn't expecting and it's nice to do a more grounded, weathered armour for a change.