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!