Song of Powder and Pike test

Song of Powder and Pike (SPP) is the working title of the new rules I am writing for Ganesha Games as a follow on Flashing Steel. The original Flashing Steel was designed for single figure skirmish, providing swashbuckling action. Very cinematic, with lots of character and detail to breathe life into the individual models. SPP is being designed to take the action up to the next level, that of the squad acting as part of a company or task force. Just like Warhammer, you could choose to imagine that a group of 12 models is a regiment of 600 if you want. Personally, however, I am invisioning individual men engaged in small raiding actions.

These photos show some of the tests that Greg and I ran the other night.

A group is the functional unit of an army. A group is composed of a Leader and anything up to 15 other models. The group is a loose arrangement: it is identified by proximity to the Leader, and they can be broken and reformed easily. A single figure by himself is also a ‘group’ for these purposes.

Basic features of Flashing Steel (and Song of Blades and Heroes) are retained such as turn sequencing (really the core catch of any system – change this and you have an entirely new beast), and the simple DBA-style single d6 task resolution system.

For fans of 17th century warfare, there are a few things that really need to be reflected in the rules to carry that correct flavour. They are, in no particular order: forming up to give protection with pikes, pike fencing in general, the lethality of muskets at close range but rapid drop off in effectiveness, the incredibly slow reloading times of matchlock muskets, the fact that infantry caught in the open by cavalry are mincemeat, and then the differences between cavalry performing the caracole, trotting and firing at close range but prior to contact and the bare-arsed all-or-nothing charge of the earlier Gendarmes, Polish Winged Hussars and Pancerni, later Swedes and the Royalist English.

The figures used here are Renegade Miniatures for the infantry and Eureka Miniatures for the cavalry. I added musket stands to the Renegade musketeers as I prefer the earlier 30YW look to the later ECW firelock look.

More posts to come as work progresses.

No victory for Parliament

The Vic Mega-game occurred today, Sunday 29 May. There were around 24 of us, divided into Royalist and Parliamentarians. Each player took a brigade of 4 regiments and then fought, campaign style, across a series of tables to assault the enemy capital. Where battles took place there were at least three commanders on each side. For the very huge battles at Cambridge and Newbury there were at least 6 players a side. Flanking manoeuvres from neighbouring tables also figured strongly in the ‘strategic movement’ phases that occurred every half-hour.

The dubious honour fell to me by vote to be the CinC of the Parliamentary forces. See here the photo of me, left, Martin for the Royalists in the centre and Mike, right, who organised and refereed the day.

In short, we held up a general advance on our left flank of tables, advanced strongly through the right and made a deep penetrating raid directly to Oxford. Had the campaign ended then, with the rout of the King’s forces on the table, victory would have been ours. However, this was only half the day, and the Royalists consolidated across the entire front of 3 tables (though never re-securing their home territory) and pushed hard.

At the end of the day it was a Royalist victory taken on points in the final round as they had control of tables right through the centre. A grand strategy and full credit to them, aristocratic swine. The Royalists were tenacious and well commanded by Martin.

More photos can be seen here.

The rules were Black Powder and I renew my thoughts that they seem better suited to Napoleonics than ECW, but that is just a quibble. The important thing was that games were played. A lot of people got to push around figures. I made many new friends, and hope to renew their acquaintance at another event.

Finally, I hope that my fellow Parliamentarians can forgive the many blunders that I must have made through to campaign. Despite my attempts to persuade any of the Royalists to change sides, there was only one taker, and sadly it was too late in the day to change the overall outcome.

A good and exhausting day of playing toy soldiers.

The chest at San Christobel

Had the first play of Savage Worlds/Showdown rules the either night . We used our familiar swashbuckling 30YW/ECW figures to test out how the system played. For both Greg and I this is a favoured period, so we felt pretty comfortable measuring the system against our expectations of how the genre should feel.

The scenario was ridiculously simple: two equally balanced groups meet in the isolated village of San Christobel in order to get the scroll from a certain chest in a certain house. All that was needed to secure victory was for a Wild Card character to succeed in a Smarts test when alone in the building.

Characters were straight out of the Fantasy Bestiary Toolkit: two squads each of standard Watchmen (three with muskets – blunderbuss, and two with pikes), and two wild card characters each who were Watch Captains.

Since this game was a learning exercise we spent less time trying to beat each other and more time trying different things such as exploring the movement/terrain rules, ganging up, shooting into crowds, and so on.

On the plus side I found I actually managed to get a firing line established, with pikes in support, and managed to attack with my pikemen and make a difference. This has to be the first time in any game where this has been possible. Every skirmish/squad game I have previously played has failed to allow me to feel the inherent usefulness of pike or to lay down that sickening volley of fire that I imagine. In terms of actual hand to hand fighting the results came quick enough once we became used to the funky dice system – I could imagine it becoming second nature very quickly. The game gave a concrete result easily enough. At no time did I feel I had no options or that the game was playing itself.

At the gear level, the muskets were suitably useless at long range, and tremendously lethal at close range, so I was as happy as a very happy thing.

On the downside, given that the card draw activation system allows/enforces that every ‘unit’ move in a turn, it did feel as though both sides moved to the middle and slugged it out. However, I did design the scenario to be absurdly simple, so it may be that this was a factor of the tactical scenario rather than the rules structure. On that score, I am sceptical of systems that allow me to move everything in a turn. I feel as though I am being let off the hook of making hard decisions. Similarly, the randomised turn sequence leads straight back to The Sword and The Flame (TSATF) and therefore has a rich pedigree, but maybe I don’t want to activate in that order. Maybe I would only activate a certain few in a certain order.  The retort to that is that SW gives you the option to Hold, so I still had that option. My reservations, then, are probably due to the system simply being ‘different’ rather than being inadequate.

My final thoughts are that the game played sufficiently well to want me to play again. No, even more:  I really enjoyed them. They are different from what I have been playing recently, but they are more like what I used to play way-back-when,- but with a face-lifted core.

Before I played I had already primed myself to like Savage Worlds/Showdown, so the test was biased from the start. So it is probably not too much of a surprise that my impressions are positive enough for me to dash out and buy Thrilling Tales and Slipstream. But the system is good enough to transcend even this bias as I recall being equally positively disposed towards Warhammer Ancients: but a read of those rules and the otherwise excellent supplement, The Art of War, soon turned me off again. The thought of playing that game fills me with dread.

Savage Worlds has managed to withstand the terrible trial of ‘high expectations’, in other words, and I am looking forward to playing again soon with a more interesting scenario. The generator in the back of Thrilling Tales looks just right for my Anubis Gates (formerly StarGate1900) campaign.

On the workbench -good progress for Queen’s Birthday

Long ago – twenty years or more – I decided that I wanted to skirmish war-game because the entry was so much easier. You only need up to a dozen figures and you were playing, rather than paint a dozen and realise that you are only a tenth, if that, of the way through one side. But there was no usable set of skirmish rules as far as I was concerned. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have talked up the Song of Blades and Heroes engine from Ganesha games.

So now I can churn out a couple of complete ‘armies’ a weekend, and cover a much broader range of historical, fantasy and science fiction settings.

Take for example these beautiful Brigade Games swashbucklers, just perfect for the heroes of my 30YW/ECW games using Flashing Blades.

Or these modern Bundeswehr from Eureka Miniatures, painted in a generalised camouflage pattern and useful for my science fiction games. The rules for these, Flaming Plasma, are approaching a good play-test state.

So all is well. I see that Eureka have some modern French Foreign Legion that have not even made it on to the website yet. Man, am I salivating for them… FAMAS armed troops? You bet. Just the ticket for science fiction Colonial militia. I can’t wait.

But now: Mega Miniatures villagers. A topic that is a little dry, but one that is essential for Renaissance skirmishing. After all, someone has to be tending the pigs that the ‘heroes’ come to scrap over.

Flashing Steel – flushing test

Another test of Flashing Steel last night, this time bringing every element together in an asymmetric encounter (heroic characters versus ordinary). The scenario was based on one of Greg’s sample campaign scenarios: on the road to Calais, a captive is being held.

I had five powerful models (for example: Philippe. Q3C3. Rapier, Pistol, Panache, Blur of steel, Danger sense, Hero. There were others with variations on this theme having special rules including Impetus, Multiple foes, Follow on and Great defence). Greg had a whole bunch or ordinary soldiers who did not have the crucial specials of Panache, Blur of Steel or Hero.

The key finding was that the system, as we have designed it, holds together well. It still falls far short of the free-wheeling And One For All, but that was a specific set designed for a convention and really tailored for a role-playing audience. Flashing Steel, on the other hand, allows plenty of cinematic action, while still holding it together as a coherent rules set. Players will be able to ‘work the rules’ just as much as they can work their imagination to come up with thrilling stunts. And this is good since most wargamers I know are shocking rules-lawyers. Most importantly, we confirmed that these extensions to the Song of Blades and Heroes engine do not break the fundamentals of that system.

Specific findings: guns work exactly as intended. They either have no effect in a clean miss, or the victim goes down like a sack of potatoes. A little more clarification is needed for visibility.

Barring disaster preventing these final few edits, we are well on track for the self-imposed submission deadline of this Sunday. And already we are thinking of the next, and the next after that, era and setting that we wish to work on.

Flashing Steel – the bar room brawl

Greg and I conducted a detailed test of Flashing Steel last night. We explored three separate mechanisms for Panache, finally settling on the most conservative. The major driver for this decision was the rhetorical question: this works well for a bar room brawl, but how can you use it in a forest clearing? Because, we figured, if the rules are to have the widest possible utility both for ‘romantic’ and ‘serious’ warmers, then these special abilities have to be useable in these diverse environments.

In the end, I think we have made the right decision, though it is a step back from a more role-playing mechanism. This draft, v11, will see the main rules stabilised, and only campaign and example characters remaining. Completion for submission is just around the corner.

First 4 groups

Here are the first four completed groups in More Escarmouche organisation. The figures are Renegade.

More Escarmouche design issue

How to achieve a mass fire effect, but still have hits against individuals. This is the problem of tactical, but not so personal that they are really role-playing, miniatures games.

The goal is to allow the volley, because ten men could actually get together and do that. But at the same time we want to allow sharp shooters. Just because the matchlock had a low rate of fire and short range, there is no reason why some men would not have chosen to master the weapon and get the most out of it. Most would not, of course, but at the individual level it is only reasonable that we make provision for the individual shot.

It’s easy enough to have one man shoot at one man. It’s easy enough to have a mass of men shoot at a mass of men when at the end you are removing abstract homogenous casualty figures. But if you have a mass fire effect, say from a volley of muskets, when every shooter is a known individual shooting at a group of targets who are also known individuals, the problem of hit allocation rears its head.

Guerra Floridas apportions the hits according to the target ranks – an automatic assumption that cannon-fodder get it first.

Avalon Hill’s Up Front applies a base number for the volley, and then adds a random modifier and inflicts this on every target figure. But in this case they are modelling potentially high rates of fire.

But then again, to talk of rate of fire is to talk about time. And what is the time scale for More Escarmouche? Certainly a personal scale, measured in minutes. But is it so short that we are addressing individual discharges of matchlock muskets, as we are in Escarmouche?

These thoughts have been chasing themselves in my head over the last 48 hours. The main cause is my natural revulsion at the idea of a table. The idea of table implies a slowing down of the action. Tables have gone right out of fashion. The second is the fear that the dice economy will either level out differences so greatly that any talk of individual differences in the characters is simply window dressing. Or worse, that individual differences become so strong that the dice roll is irrelevant: “Sgt Cleft never misses”. Or, even worse still, that the whole thing becomes too luck driven.

These are normal considerations, and they only really come out at play test time.