Dragon Mounts in Regiments

    The OPR Regiments hype train has not stopped. The cult has grown and we have a lot of cool stuff lined up. We’re talking map campaigns, regiments of renown, magic items. Those are all posts for another day, though. Today, I am writing about dragons.

    Steve and I played a little undead on undead game this weekend and it marked the latest escalation in weapons of mass destruction: dragon mounts. His vampire on zombie dragon marks the first major monster riding hero to hit the table for our little group and, even though its only been a few days, I know of several generals already making moves to join the dragon rider club. Characters mounted on dragons is one of the fantasy wargame classic tropes, so I can’t blame anyone. It also doesn’t hurt that they are one of the better bully units in the game, crushing infantry under their claws and blades while sporting defenses that will keep them in the fight throughout all four rounds of play.

    That last part is what I was missing in my off the table analysis. I completely underappreciated how difficult it is to deal with a tough(15), 3+ Def, Fear(2) unit. At one point in our game, I had a unit of 10 skeletons able to get a flank charge on Steve’s dragon rider. Some quick statistics showed me that even with the dragon unable to fight back, my skeletons would lose that combat more times than not and crumble for their efforts. I had an opportunity to rear charge his dragon with ambushing zombies and that, too, was more likely to result in me losing half my unit without the vampire lifting a finger. Fear is a huge issue for non-elite troops. These are not models you can just throw dice at. When you do fight them head on, you’re usually going to be dealing with 3 AP(3) and 12 AP(1) attacks at Quality 3+ or 4+, with many dragon riders sporting some form of Furious. There aren’t many units that can weather an onslaught like that and most monsters will take enough damage to get close to a morale check. All while Fly lets them jump over screening units and hide behind terrain. Its going to be fun finding a strategy to address them.

    A lot of armies can take dragon mounts, but there are three heroes that stand out to me as being the best. Each of these has something that your average dragon rider lacks: improved defenses, raw power, or a competitive advantage in monster fights. 

    Let’s start with the guy who made my life miserable for two hours; the Vampire Master on Zombie Dragon.

    While pricier than many heroes with access to a dragon mount, the vampire master is about as complete a package as you could hope for. Insatiable Hunger boosts its offensive potential, making its Furious trigger on a 5 or 6 on 13 attacks. War Disciples have access to this, too, but what they lack is this model’s survivability. The protected upgrade ignores one point of AP, making this dragon rider effectively Def 2+ versus most of what your opponent will use against it. AP(1) weapons become completely worthless and the versatile AP(2) weapons that normally flex well between armored infantry and monsters suddenly under perform. The zombie dragon’s Regeneration adds an additional save to the model for anything that sneaks through its defenses while the Undead rule ensures it will not route or shake if it does lose a combat. Probably the best all around dragon in the game. 

    On the raw power front, it is hard to compete with this behemoth from the Eternal Wardens faction: the Eternal Lord on Great Dragon.

    With a staggering 18 attacks plus a breath weapon, no other dragon rider can come close to this attack output without getting very lucky with Furious rolls. The 3 additional tough is not a tremendous improvement over the tough(15) of most other heroes, but fearless helps keep it on the battlefield when it is below half strength. Most dragon riders are best as a bully unit, fighting medium or light infantry to clear them out and get an activation advantage, but the 8 AP(2) attacks let the eternal lord be a little more flexible in who it charges. This is the sledgehammer of dragon heroes. 

    This is the dragon rider I expect others to end up fearing: the Black Orc Boss on Wyvern.

    At first glance, there is not much very exciting about this hero aside from its significantly lower cost and Furious. It has a pretty standard dragon profile but trades a breath weapon for a few additional claw attacks and has quality 4+ compared to the Quality 3+ of the units we looked at earlier. Goblin Shroom Sniffers, which should be in just about every orc army, gives it +1 to hit in melee so its on par with its competitors. Beyond that, the Black Orc Boss has two rules that make it one of the best dragon hunters in the game: War Cry and Headtaker. War Cry adds +2” to advances and +4” to rushes/charges, giving it a larger threat range than all non-Lust Disciple dragons. This gives you a ton of board control and gives you a very good chance of getting the charge against other dragons. Headtaker gives AP(+2) whenever fighting a unit where most models are tough(3) or higher. That turns all 16 of the black orc’s Furious attacks into great weapons against monsters. On the charge, that averages about 13 AP(3) hits, putting every dragon without regeneration into routing territory in one combat. Easily clearing monstrous infantry in addition to chaff is a nice bonus. This unit is the best dragon killer I’ve encountered so far and I expect in the next few months, as players assemble their scaly beasts and they get more table time, our greenskin players will initiate the next round of nuclear proliferation.

That's two posts in a row where I have written a wall of text about Regiments. Though there will be more of these posts in the future (sorry Gage!), I have a number of units for my Undead nearing completion so expect some hobby posts in the near future!

Why I Love Age of Fantasy: Regiments

    I jumped into OnePageRules’ Age of Fantasy: Regiments along with a few other War Council guys and was impressed by the depth and replayability such a simple game could have. Over the last 5 months, its become our primary miniatures game and it doesn’t feel like that is going to change any time soon. Its inspired us to make scenery, create some rules supplements, and pick up multiple armies. I have a map campaign brewing that I can’t wait to start this fall or winter. It has firmly entrenched itself in my brain. That’s not surprising as the game has a lot going for it; its rules light but strategic, list building is easy and fun, and it is easily hackable. 

    I used to be drawn to high complexity games where rule knowledge was a big determining factor in game outcomes. I play wargames largely to solve puzzles and the 300 page rule books for 40k and Warmachine gave my brain a lot to consider. As much as I loved my time playing these games, in hindsight I was not being rewarded for understanding the mechanisms that drove play. I was being rewarded by throwing more time at reading than my opponents.

    Regiments is on the other end of the spectrum. Its core rules fit on a handful of pages and can be comprehensively reviewed in a matter of minutes. All of the armies share common keyword abilities. There are significantly less “gotcha” moments as a result. Those interactions where you don’t have the necessary information to make an informed decision and get mercilessly punished for it are the primary cause of most bad wargaming experiences in my mind. This was common for players new to WHFB and there was always a number of people who quit the game before they left the “you’re going to lose a lot” phase. Eliminating this knowledge differential allows veterans to play novices and not have the games feel miserable.

    Units have their points calculated with an algorithm and as a consequence are much closer to each other in power level than in other games. This flatter army composition means that how you use the units you’ve taken matters a lot more than finding the most efficient, and often unbalanced, ones. There’s no wrecking ball to reliably throw at whatever you want to destroy. A player will need to angle for good match-ups for their units rather than just using brute force most of the time. Flank and rear charges reward skillful positioning and feel impactful, allowing you to strike your opponent without getting attacked back and giving a penalty on the enemy’s morale. You feel like you did something powerful and that you earned it.

    Building your army list for Regiments is incredibly fun. OPR’s army builder, Army Forge, is one of the better web based wargame tools I have used. It is relatively intuitive, provides full text for every keyword, and exports as cards for each unit with full rules. The factions all have flavorful keywords that establish their core identity and influence how they will be played on the table. There are 28 factions to choose from and you may use up to 2 to create an army. This freedom to combine any factions unlocks an incredible amount of options. Want to play a WHFB 4th edition style undead army? Choose Vampiric Undead and Mummified Undead. Have a narrative idea about Beastmen and Wood Elves repelling a horde of Skaven looking to chop down a forest to fuel their war machines? Great, go for it! It also lets you combine two factions to represent an army there aren’t explicit rules for. For example, if I wanted to play a Nippon army, I could take Human Empire and use Weapon Masters as samurai and ally with Ogres to represent Oni. If I wanted an Albion army, I could take Beastmen to represent clansmen who ignore difficult terrain and take a Mage Council from Human Empire to represent a coven of druids. There are a ton of possibilities.

    The simple nature of the game gives players plenty of room to include homebrew rules. OPR encourages this by providing members of their Patreon with access to a version of the army builder that allows the creation of new units and factions using the algorithm that balances the core game, guaranteeing fair point values for whatever you create. If a player is missing some mechanics from WHFB, it is relatively easy to create analogs in Regiments. Challenges could easily play out exactly as they do in Warhammer, while magic items could be represented by granting a unit or hero additional keywords. The advanced rules have stats for castle walls and other fortifications that could be the basis for a siege scenario. There’s a lot of room to get creative and make the game your own. We’ve got some good stuff cooking.

    The basic rules are available here for free if what I’ve shared has you curious. The Advanced Rulebook, which has a number of excellent optional additions to the game, can be found here. They’re simple enough that you probably don’t need me to walk you through any of them. Its the most fun I’ve had on the tabletop in a long time.

A CALL TO ARMS!

 This fall, I will be publishing the first issue of PORTCULLIS MAGAZINE! Inside, you'll find new rules for games, interviews with artists and people in the community, hobby articles, and more! I have some great stuff lined up, but I know there are many, many talented people out there who could have something to share. If you have homebrew rules, battle reports, ttrpg adventures, art, or anything else you'd like to contribute, email me at portcullismagazine@gmail.com or find me on discord!

The 2.5 Hour D&D Session

    The biggest challenge running the Angstlands is ensuring the session is productive and fun despite its short runtime. Our sessions are scheduled for 2.5 hours and we usually lose half an hour to chatting, book keeping, and/or starting late because of work or traffic. Its taken almost the full year we’ve been playing to develop a system and set of tools that keep the action moving without things feeling too rushed - huge thank you to my eternally patient players!

    I imagine that the majority of the people reading this have limited time to engage with the hobby given the average age on the In Rust We Trust discord. If you’re interested in trying to squeeze in some D&D between kids/work/family, there’s a bunch of stuff that makes the 2.5 hour game happen. Some of it is campaign design, some is pregame prep, and some is watching the clock and adjusting things as needed.

    When building the Angstlands hexmap, I made sure there were plenty of small dungeons, combat encounters, and RP encounters that could be resolved in one session. For the small encounters, I have a rough outline of what the story is there with a few NPCs to facilitate it. I never 100% know where my guys will go, so that’s about as much prep as I want to have for those. When they pop up, I try to meld what I have with what my players try to do. It really is an emergent story to some degree, I just give prompts and then react to their characters. If there was a random encounter on the way, I may try to incorporate that, too. On paper, these encounters may feel like they are too little to be interesting but players will almost never go the most direct route to resolution and usually end up doing something I never thought of and changing how I want it to play out. With a group like ours, four sentences and a stat block can turn into a great session.

    Doing any preparation I can do to speed up gameplay is key. For example, I pre-roll three or four random encounters based on where the party is planning to go. That could save up to 20 minutes of me just rolling dice and I can better incorporate the encounter to what the group is doing. I also screenshot stat blocks for monsters and make little stat cards so I don’t have to flip through the book. If I suddenly need stats for an enemy because the players pick a fight I wasn’t expecting with an NPC or something that isn’t meant to give the party a challenge, I just give them a +0 bonus across the board and have them do 1d6 damage to keep things moving.

    It can be hard to give everyone their time in the spotlight with these short sessions, so I have been using “always-on initiative”. Even outside of combat, the players will take actions in initiative order. This gives everyone roughly equal playing time and stops my open-table game from excluding shy or new players. Its given us a great rhythm when exploring dungeons and increased the number of rooms explored per session. Its also made the game feel even more collaborative!

    I do my best to keep the focus on the players and watch the clock. I try to have NPCs talk the bare minimum so more time is there for the players to interact and RP. I focus on what needs to happen to drive action and resist the urge to goof around. These sessions are like a short story and you need to use every line of dialog to keep things moving. I try to be flexible and remove parts of the plot that are not key when the time is getting low. If players feel stuck or directionless, I give them a nudge or a clue. The last 20 minutes of play are almost always reserved for encounters, dividing treasure, and wrapping up. This last method is often aspirational because it can happen close to the sessions climax and everyone wants to see it through!

Don’t worry about mastering all of it at once and just start playing! You can figure it out on the way.

Dungeons of Dracathen

    For the last year or so, I have been running an open table “West Marches” style campaign using Shadowdark. Its been a fantastic time, forcing me to push myself creatively, hone my skills as a DM, and giving me a chance to hang out with friends from all over this country (and continent!) regularly. I’ve given this campaign a link to my long running DCC game by using the same homebrew setting. Its opened up what was once a small collection of towns I used to string together some of my favorite modules into two continents with a growing shared history. The best part is getting to expand on that collaboratively with two groups of friends.

    Whatever it was in my youth that caused an appetite for rigorously developed settings like Forgotten Realms and Mystara has disappeared with age. While I have enjoyed reading about their mythologies and defining characters, I feel increasingly caged by metaplots and ubiquitous personalities put forth by corporate entities developing “lore”. With a published setting, there is a pressure to adhere to what the people know and expect. There likely are YouTube series and TikTok videos dissecting all the details. The world is largely mapped, making adding a large dungeon somewhere difficult without causing ripples in the goings on of the surrounding area. There was no one with a whip and cattle prod forcing me to slot my imagination into their fictional history textbooks, but it was difficult to silence the nagging voice in the back of my head that, upon writing my plans for the next few games, whispered,

“Does this conform to the canon?”

My last encounter with this was the birth of Dracathen.

    As I am sure it is for any DM reading this, my setting lives and breathes in my brain but much of that has not yet hit pixel or paper. Rather than bore you with my own history textbook brain-dump, here is an excerpt of the introduction I sent my players:

    “For nearly a thousand years, the Empire of Dracathen has been in a dark age. The gluttonous aristocracy's taxes keep peasants impoverished. Famine and drought have ravished the land. All manner of monster encroach on the ragged edges of civilization. The people cry to the heavens for relief and are met with indifference.”

Those five sentences have everything I want Dracathen to be on full display. No one will mistake it for a nice place with happy people who will have a happy ending. Maybe a future post will get into more detail, but for now that’s the medieval hell that serves as the backdrop for my games. The Empire of Dracathen is sprawling. It is primarily human. It is xenophobic. It is theocratic. It is oppressive.

   That intro is how I started my DCC game and everyone immediately got it. The light but flavorful background was working. The game was going well, but I wanted to play more. Children, jobs, and all the other outside forces that keep us from the table as adults made that impossible with the players I had. I started thinking about leveraging the In Rust We Trust discord where all the friends across the country I have made playing wargames live when they are not in my immediate field of view. The release of Shadowdark, a particularly good modernized OSR game, got me off my ass and figuring out how to make this work. My biggest struggle was creating an area where genuine exploration could take place plausibly while inside such an all encompassing empire. Much of my first Dracathen game is structured around a criticism of capitalism and wealth (yes, politics belong in gaming) and I thought it could be interesting to have a game do the same with colonialism. I admittedly have done very little with that concept so far, but that thought is what created the Angstlands.

    I used the same broad strokes as my other game to set the tone, but this was the real birth of any internal history. I captured the premise of the game with this introduction:

    “A century ago, the Empire colonized the sparsely populated continent of Theysia. Its idyllic shores hid unfamiliar dangers that frustrated expansion; a cursed forest, roving bands of savages, and forgotten demigods and their cults. Waging wars on multiple fronts on the mainland, the Emperor was forced to order a retreat. Many were abandoned in the haste to withdraw. The tales soldiers brought home with them quickly spread across the land. The cursed land of Theysia became known as the Angstlands.

    Now, the decades long war in the west has been won. Emperor Wilhelm VII, convinced of Dracathen’s divine right to rule over all, has ordered a return to the Angstlands. Rather than risk another military failure, the Empire looks to explorers and adventurers to scout the land and map its features in return for the right to all spoils recovered. The Fortress of Ulm has been rebuilt and each day desperate people arrive seeking fortune and an escape from the oppressive life on the mainland.”

   Last week, I had a discussion with Rory about DMing this kind of game. I had hoped to write a bit about the challenges of running a 4-6 player game in 2.5 hours and having it feel fulfilling, but this “short” introduction to my games has spiraled into an 800+ word post and I have tortured you enough. We’ll save that one for next time.

The Barrow Legion Rises!

 One Page Rules' Age of Fantasy: Regiments is exactly what I am looking for in a rank and flank wargame right now. Maneuvering and deployment are incredibly important, there are tactical decisions to be made, and the rules are clear and concise. This last bit has been especially relevant as I wrap up an escalation league for the Old World where half the game is spent trying to sort out rules! I joined that league to have some pressure to make progress on a fantasy army that would be playable in Old World, Regiments, WHFB 6th, or whatever game captured everyone's attention that month. I was planning on rebuilding my childhood night goblin horde, but seeing how many I'd need to paint to fill an Old World list pushed me to choose Undead instead.

Undead were at their absolute coolest in WHFB 4th edition, before the schism between the brooding Vampire Counts and aesthetically bankrupt Tomb Kings. When mummies, carrion riders, liches, and skull chukkas shared deployment zones. A similar feel is found in the Army of the Lichemaster, a White Dwarf list representing Heinrich Kemmler's forces during the Battle of the Cairns in WHFB 6th. I decided to smoosh these two themes together and create an army raised from the barrows surrounding the Border Princes filled with skeletons and ghosts while the vampires stayed home. So far, the decision has been great in my Regiments games. I can't say the same for TOW!

I stumbled across these skeletons from Wargames Foundry on a clearance shelf while on a weekend getaway. I snatched up two boxes, delighted at the sheer value I walked away with. That enthusiasm waned as soon as I saw the sprues inside. These guys are a million fucking parts! Separate weapons, arms, heads, torsos, legs, FEET! While I love the Clash of the Titans feel their grimacing skull faces have and their posable nature, these were a slog to assemble. You get what you pay for, I guess.

With the quantity of skeletons I'll eventually be fielding, I decided to cut down paint time by priming bone. I followed this with a brown wash, a bone drybrush, then a white drybrush on some areas as a highlight. Weapons were done with a few bronze colors in keeping with the ancient warriors of barrow kings theme. The weathering was done with one of those Citadel technical paints that looks like corrosion. 

The unit of 20 has a full command taken from an older GW kit as well as a crow's cage as a unit filler. I can't recall what line this is from. I picked it up with the intent to use it on another project years ago and my hoarding paid off. This unit has few details left to finish up but they're good enough to serve their necromancer on the tabletop.

No undead horde is complete without some creatures of the night! These bat swarms were a challenge to paint - too many eyes and fangs! In the end, I abandoned the idea of doing it all and made sure all the wings were leathery. No one is getting that close to vampire bats anyway! One of the biggest surprises coming back to the hobby is how far 3D printing has come. These bats are from Wyrd Miniatures and were generously printed by a friend of mine. 

And finally, we have the leaders of this small army - for now. On the left is Mikael the Exiled, a former member of the College of Magic forced to flee from Reikland due to his interest in necromancy. He was taken in by a powerful lich and now stalks the Black Mountains, raising an army from the barrows for his unholy master! Beside him is the barrow king Von the Depraved, risen from his forgotten tomb to lead his men once more. This army is a great home for this classic chaos sorcerer and mummy. Painting them was a lot of fun and its pushed me into more of an oldhammer direction for the army, though it will mostly be recasts and new sculpts in that style rather than the pricey originals.

I have unit of black knights, a terrorgheist, and a barrow king on a chariot in progress for a future update!

The Dead Do Not Rest Easy

 Welcome to Portcullis, a home for all my hobby thoughts, miniature painting, and homebrew creations. I've wanted to return to the era of hobby blogs for a while and felt like now was the right time. Instagram has been a fantastic tool for meeting hobbyists with similar interests and seeing some inspirational models, but it is horrible for conveying the non-visual and thoughts that can't be summarized in one or two sentences. Beyond its shortcomings as a tool, I am interested in reducing my time engaging with social media.  Follower counts, likes and shares, and the quest for better engagement do not interest me and I could feel their tentacles taking hold in my brain.

Here, I will feature some of my previous hobby projects along with what I am currently working on in the worlds of RPGs and miniature wargaming. I have been collecting miniatures and building wargaming scenery for about 20 years. I took a long break from the hobby and sold much of what I had as I finished grad school, but I am slowly building my collection once more. I have warbands for Mordheim and other similar skirmish games, Necromunda '95, Flames of Orion, and I am in the process of expanding an Undead army for OPR's Age of Fantasy: Regiments and Warhammer: The Old World. I have been playing tabletop RPGs for a similar amount of time and run DCC and Shadowdark games regularly. I am lucky enough to have a great gaming group filled with creative and passionate people, so I am sure I will be playing plenty of other games, too.

I have a good number of projects in the pipeline, so the good stuff you're here for is on its way!