Campaigning, two nice sources.

 

This post is just drawing attention to two very good sources for running an easy campaign.

The first is a very visual resource - YouTuber Dicey Tactics, is just starting a new campaign with the Triumph rules (think DBA plus). In the first vid, he outlines the sequence of play, which I think might be useful universally to anyone wanting to run a campaign.

The second useful resource is the fairly recently released Wars of the Roses supplement from Warlord Games for Hail Caesar, which is superb. There is a ton of info in there, including a raft of battle scenarios. At the end of the book is a campaign system. You can do your own generic campaign or select one of the other 5 ‘ready to go’ campaigns.

The main highlight of the Warlord Games system are as follows;

They give you a map of England, Wales and part of Scotland. There are 15 locations on the map i.e. Nottingham and these are called ‘nodes’. The nodes are linked by highways in various configurations, so for example, you can move from Nottingham to Coventry or to Northampton or to York.

In each scenario, each side (Yorkist / Lancastrian) starts the campaign with 2 armies each, which are given starting locations.

The supplement campaign lasts for 4 turns, which they say represents about 6 months, though I quite like the way that Dicey Tactics is rolling at the end of his 10th turn (I can’t remember how much time that represents) to see if the campaign ends, it makes things a bit less certain.

During a turn, armies can march, swift march, besiege, fight, garrison, recruit etc.

There is an events table that is rolled against each turn.

The point of the campaign is to turn locations to your side and score victory points for doing that. In the supplement, these victory values are fixed, but in the Dicey Tactics campaign, he is rolling a D6 per objective to establish VP’s, I quite like that variable, but perhaps with something gentler like a D3 or an Average Dice.

Anyway, it strikes me that as with the Dicey Tactics campaign, the Warlord games system is a good model for applying to multiple periods and locations and you can fiddle around with them to make things work for you and pull in the best bits of both approaches.

I am just setting up a generic campaign that is set very early in 1471. Each of my armies will have just 3 leaders, each leading either the van, the main or the rear.

[As an aside there is an official 1471 scenario in the supplement called Warwick’s Judgement and the blurb says - ‘Can Richard Neville keep all of his plates spinning in the air without everything coming crashing down on him?’]

Rather than use the units that the WotR supplement suggests for the generic campaign, I will let the Test of Response rules determine how many units are in each battle formation, what type they are and what their quality is. This should mix things up a bit and draw players to do things like garrisoning a location with their levy / militia.

Historically, this is the year that Tewkesbury and Barnet are fought, so I am just getting in a bit handy and starting manoeuvres in February, so some winter weather rules will be needed.

To give the campaign a bit more of an earthy feel, I am in the process of painting up my own map, I have yet to pen the locations and the movement routes. 

The campaign will open with the following armies;

Yorkist

Welsh Marches - Hastings, Gloucester (will be Richard III one day!) and Ferrers.

East Anglia - Norfolk, Cromwell (Humphrey Bourchier) and Suffolk

Lancastrian

Coventry - Somerset, Dorset and Wenlock 

Devon - Buckingham, Exeter and Devon

Anyway, I don’t think I will be blogging about this campaign, rather just enjoying it for its own sake, though I may put up some end of campaign notes to show any best practice or other tweaks that ended up enhancing the campaign.

Resources

Dicey Tactics LINK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACCA7cl-ZdE&t=28s

 

My other bit of webspace is the COMMANDERS site, which is a bit more snippet based than here - LINK

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html