Cartful of Gold - Missing Photo

Now here's the photo Dick demanded I take. It's his flyer hero - basically a lunatic dwarf strapped to a glider - diving at my commander, trying to kill him.

It went almost entirely to plan. A moment after this shot, Krassush got knocked clear off his seat, face first into the mud. However he was lucky enough to get clear without a scratch, watching the flyer zoom past as he got to his feet.

 

Growling annoyedly, he set Wuff loose, the hellhound eagerly bounding after the kite, catching it in a flying leap just as it struggled to pull up away from the ground. Instants later, there was little left but a bloody mess of wood, cloth, string and dwarf.

For a cartful of loot.... This One's Split Playtest

The last playtest session saw an orcish tribe throw themselves on the dwarven trading caravan, hoping for easy plunder. Unfortunately the dwarves take their trading dead serious, sending half of their army along with the yearly trade expedition where they trade gold, high quality metalwork and porc (Yes, porc. Don't ask me, I'm just the messenger) for goods such as spices, fabrics, wood and just about anything that can't be grown under a mountain.

The game went well, with real high and lows for both sides. We came across a fair few sections of the rules were some clarifications would be helpful, and these have since been added. Overall the balance with e.g. giants seems better now, and the order system seemed to do it's job just fine. Also, the recommended number of units per command seems to give the right kind of flavour for both the orc and dwarf armies.

Below picture shows the starting deployment, with the dwarves deployed behind a gully, with an impromptu barricade blocking off the open field in the middle. The orcs deployed across the width of the table, with 2 commands on march column on their far left.

 

The remainder of this report is written from the glorious point of view of his greatness tribe leader Krassush of the most powerful orc tribe ever. It is an entirely biased report - just because I can.

Feudal humans, army lists and some small tweaks

As I have been slightly busy re-enacting, I only got around to working on the rules again today.

The army lists have been enhanced with a description of the army structure, including the number of heroes and mages that may typically be included.

I've also added the feudal humans army list, with the renaissance humans to follow soon (I hope).

Some minor tweaks have been made, in particular to the mechanism for infantry fighting cavalry (attacking infantry no longer have to charge into certain death vs counter charging cavalry)

Playtest: Feudal humans versus Undead

We held another playtest today, with Michel's feudal humans versus his Undead.

The feudal humans were loosely based on english medieval troops, with generous amounts of heavy cavalry, archers and spear armed infantry. They had some pretty good troops and good commanders even if a bit rash - giving the overall commander some grey hairs in keeping them from going on the attack at unwanted moments.

The undead had a large horde of skeletons, some giant skeletons and a brigade of cavalry, a chariot and a skeletal dinosaur monster.

 

Single colour vector graphics

The previous attempt at vector grqaphics results in some pretty chunky files (lots of vectors to render), and I'm worried it will cause issues in the combined book. I've tried something simpler now, with just the outline filled in in black. I think it will work just as well, and potentially distract less from the message I'd be trying to get across.

I'm also not sure whether I want to give them more of a mob-like appearance by rotating them by increments, as in the other picture.

 

Vector graphics of units

I've been playing around with my photo camera and inkscape for a bit, working out how I want to make the diagrams for the illustrations.

Even though I do want to include some wargame porn colour shots, I don't think they are the way to go for the regular illustrations. But just blank rectangles gets boring too.

So, I figured I'd use vector graphics for the 'men' on the bases. I went tand took some nice high-contrast shots looking down on individual figures, hiked up the contrast still further, and vectorified them using Inkscape.

The result lends itself to easy modification and tuning, and I created the below 'unit' using just one of the pictures, copying it and tweaking the angles to create a nicely random orc mob.

Feedback on whether you like this approach, and comments on how to improve would be appreciated.

Added definition of orders

I spent some time this week jotting down the definition of the various orders that can be given to a commander. I've chosen to differentiate between:
* Attack
* Defend
* Support
* Maneuver
* Reserve

Each of these orders will have an impact on the options available to that commander. The overall text is much more extensive, I have included only a summary below.