More Joy of Six prep

I've tweaked the Calais game mat with the addition of green edges to the roads and completed a few more village modules as well as creating some signs to identify the villages to onlookers.

I haven't used the "fill in mix" I created recently at this stage as I want to keep it available for use on the day.

I'm increasingly more satisfied with how this is going to look but I've every confidence that I'll come up with some kind of tweak, probably late on Saturday!

A bit of nostalgia

Forty years ago I was hanging around Sheffield wondering what to do with the rest of my life and combining the roles of magazine editor and librarian of NODDSoc, the University of Sheffield's role-playing society. 

The library consisted of a grey-painted steel cabinet somewhere in the bowels of the Octagon Centre, the university's recently completed conference and performance venue. I don't have a hugely clear memory of what games were in there but randomly I recall a copy of the almost-unplayably-complex Aftermath, the Thieves' World boxed campaign setting, and Village of Twilight, a scenario for a long-forgotten horror RPG called Chill. Oh and probably a copy of the Borderlands campaign pack for Runequest.

Anyway, in the course of my society duties I would host a taster session at the Student Union's Freshers' Fair. One of the players was a cute young blonde who had never tried RPGs before. My game-mastering skills must have done something to impress her because we've now been married for 36 years. We have three grown-up kids, two of whom have since attended Sheffield and become NODDSoc members. 

Our daughter has since become a member of the society's committee (and she's not the only second-generation committee member) and recently, after bit of a cock-up on the logistics front, I was delighted to find that the current incarnation of the NODDSoc library was residing in the back of her car until she could get access to its new home.

There's some really old stuff in there; some of which might well have been under my care in the 1980s!

I've completely moved on from RPGs but it was pleasant to wallow in a bit of nostalgia.

Prepping for Joy of Six

At the end of this month the Cold War Commanders are putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road using the TacWWII rules. 

I've created the game board by airbrushing the road network onto a suitably sized green cloth.  Although I've dusted on some yellows and paler greens to break up the overall colour, I decided it needed some of my field modules to give the proper Pas-de-Calais countryside look.

A shot from the first run-through of the game
with just a few fields

On Monday I decided to do another terrain test, with a larger number of fields present. This looked better but there's a strong sense of "these are terrain pieces sitting on a cloth" rather than actual countryside.

Then I was reminded of Al Seward's game at Ebor Lard a few years back and how he blended together individual terrain pieces to form a unified built-up area.

I decided to experiment with various flock and clump foliage recipes to disguise the boundaries of the terrain pieces. The starting position looked like this:

Here we see three field units butted up against each other and the edge of the table. They do rather stand out as separate pieces.

I've had some mixed brown flock stored in an old Lyle's Golden Syrup tin for years as well as a small amount of mixed green flock previously used on figure bases. I tried sprinkling them both into the gaps between fields.

Okay but not quite what I want. How about using tiny pieces of torn-up clump foliage?

Possibly better but this isn't Normandy; I didn't want to give the impression of hedge-lined fields.

In the end I settled upon a mix of all three:

and made up a batch that can travel to Joy of Six and be sprinkled into the joints and probably around the boundaries of terrain pieces on the day.

Here's the full table with all but one of the villages in place:

And here's the village after a couple of hours' painting and matching base shapes to the previously painted road network:

I'm now more happy with the look of the battlefield but I think I may experiment with adding brighter green verges to the sides of the roads outside the villages. That'll help them stand out better. As some of the pictures above show, they tend to disappear in certain lighting conditions.

Gangs of Rome - Episode 1, Wagons Roll!

Yesterday I finally managed to kick off the Gangs of Rome campaign. Gus, Graham, Jamie and Ron were able to visit Stately Counterpane Manor for what will hopefully be the first of six episodes (seven if you include episode 0, which was more of a learning/teaching exercise).

Jamie and Ron were already established as Green gang members so Gus and Graham were signed up to represent the Blues.

Each of the two street gangs has a list of six objectives that will need to be fulfilled over the course of the six-game campaign. The two lists are not the same and each side chooses a mission for each episode. Thus, at the start of the campaign even I as the umpire have no idea what each scenario will entail.

In this case the Blue gang of Tarquinius Caerulius elected to "dispose of a body". This saw them having to get a body to one of two manhole covers and chuck it into the cloaca maxima (Rome's main sewer). To add complications, they had to do this while no-one was in line of sight! At the start of the game the body was in a raeda, a four-wheeled, ox-drawn carriage.

Meanwhile the Green gang of Spurius Verdius had to escort a wagon-load of wine to the gates of the Spurius townhouse.  

With both sides driving wheeled vehicles this had to be a night-time scenario as they are banned from the city during the day. I created a new Action for the driver of each wagon. Drive would allow a wagon to be moved four inches. A given vehicle could only be subject to a Drive Action once per turn. Obviously the Fail State for the Drive Action is "The vehicle doesn't move, Activation ends here."

Junius encourages the oxen forward

My creative input to the process is in deciding on the detail of the objectives, such that conflict is at least reasonable if not actually required! In this case the Greens had to cross the table diagonally and the Blues had to get to a location near the centre of the table so a clash was likely.

And a clash there soon was. The action opened with Maximinus (of the Blue gang) shooting an arrow at Plinius. He missed and to add insult to injury his bowstring broke! Almost immediately further injury was added as his target closed the range and beat him unconscious.  First blood to the Greens!

Maximinus (top right) shoots at Plinius (off camera)

Things continued well for the Greens as Laetius shot Januarius and took him too out of the fight.

The Blues, given a choice of two manholes down which they might dispose of their incriminating cargo, elected to move to the one nearer the centre of the table rather than the one nearer their opponents' deployment area. In retrospect this was the wrong choice but with limited intelligence as to the Green gang's mission this was definitely forgivable. They reached the manhole but with both Greens and vigiles milling about, there was never a quiet moment to ditch the body.

The raeda has just crossed the manhole
but the vigiles are nosing around

The German slave siblings Clovis and Arminius fought fiercely for the Greens, Arminius mostly against the vigiles and Clovis against a series of Blues.  In the end Clovis was stabbed by Pomponius and breathed his last just outside the temple of Minerva. 

Pomponius (in the purple tunic) prepares to stab
bare-chested Clovis as Musca and Titus look on

Arminius holds his own against the vigiles

In the meantime Junius of the Greens had got the wine most of the way to the Spurius mansion.

For a while it looked like Balbus might have a go at interfering with the delivery of the wine as he lurked behind one of Spurius Viridius's ornamental trees,

but in the end, with the law on the scene, he decided to withdraw.

In the event, with time moving on we decided that the Greens were close enough to the mansion to claim victory and that the Blues, who had finally decided to try the other, now deserted, manhole would be able to dispose of the corpse.  

Both sides were therefore awarded three points for achieving their main objectives. In addition, both sides had put out of action two of the opposing side (one of them permanently). They each therefore received a further two points. The campaign score is therefore now as follows:

Blue Gang - started with six VP, spent one to make sure we were playing a nighttime scenario, gained five this time around, new total = 10 Victory Points.

Green Gang - started with one VP, spent none, gained five this time, new total = 6 Victory Points.

Several gang members came away with injuries. For the Blues, Maximinius has a sprained ankle and will be unable to benefit from his personal ability for episodes 2 and 3, while Januarius has a head wound and won't benefit from any re-rolls for the rest of the campaign. 

For the Greens, Plinius has severe lacerations and will be limited to three Actions per activation for the rest of the campaign whereas the unfortunate Clovis has gone to feast with his ancestors. Doubtless his brother Arminius will be out for revenge next time!

-o0o-

I was slightly disappointed with some aspects of how the game went. The rules for using vigiles in a night-time scenario are unclear to me. I need to do some more reading of the rules and perhaps ask a few questions on the dedicated Facebook group. Whatever, I'm confident that we can come up with an acceptable solution, even if it means house-ruling the situation.

Thanks are due to those who contributed to the planning stage and to playing the scenario. Watch out for the next episode soon!

 

Gangs of Rome - the Patrons

With Episode 1 of our Gangs of Rome campaign coming up this weekend, I knew that sooner or later I'd need miniatures to represent the patrons of our two gangs. The way the campaign is organised, there's always the possibility that one side or the other may have to deploy their patron on the table during an episode.

What luck, then, that issue 462 of Wargames Illustrated, out this week, provides just the minis I need! As a promo for a gladiatorial combat game called Blood on the Sands, WI this month includes a cut-down version of the rules and a sprue of suitable figures from Wargames Atlantic. 

The sprue provides the parts to build two gladiators (a murillo and a thraex) as well as these two:

They're intended to represent a pair of lanistae (owners/trainers of gladiators) and as that pretty neatly reflects the day job of our two gang-patrons, it was a no-brainer to pick up a copy.

They've had a fairly rushed paint job because I wanted them ready for the weekend. The basing is designed to work in either the arena or on the streets of the city.

-o0o-

Because a rule of the campaign is that player characters don't appear if their player is unavailable, I needed a few more gang members. A quick rebase of the servi castrensi from my Polybian Roman army gave me some useful additions:

Secundinus the Assassin

Plinius, who thinks the blood
of a snake can cure poison

Titus, who prefers camel meat
to pork or chicken

Maximinus, who only uses
arrows with barbed heads

Iovianus, born half a world away

and Balbus, who once killed
his landlord with the leg of a chair

Sharp Practice terrain sources

On Friday Baroness Counterpane and I were at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire to see our daughter give a talk about the history of the estate's private fire brigade. 

The talk, a ticketed affair, took place in the Harley Gallery and while we were waiting for it to start, my eye was taken by a seventeenth century oil painting.

Apparently 'View of Antwerp' has been attributed to a number of artists including the elder Breughel and Peter Paul Rubens. What caught my eye, though, was the foreground detail.

When building terrain for northern European Sharp Practice games this kind of thing is gold dust.

This one, for example, has a nice old cottage with washing drying on the grass outside, a field of enormous cabbages, and a couple of fence lines overgrown with long grass...

While this one has a wonderfully tumbledown fence...

...as well as a nice little chapel.

Finally this one shows an interestingly wide street as well as a nice selection of outbuildings.  

Worth noting by the way that at least one of the horses towing the wagon in that last section is hitched centrally. That's going to be pretty typical. It's my belief that the country lane we're familiar with today, with its central strip of grass between two channels of bare earth, is an artefact of the internal combustion engine. It shouldn't be seen in horse-and-musket-era or earlier terrain.

Gangs of Rome - The Campaign

Chatting with a few fellow gamers after the installation of the new Lord Mayor of Sheffield (congratulations Andy), I was reminded that people are keen to do some more Gangs of Rome.  This prompted me to finalise the structure of our campaign. 

I wanted something that be low-maintenance, time-limited and capable to progressing when enough of us could get together to play, rather than needing all participants every time a new episode took place. Ideally, players who aren't able to get to Sheffield to sit around the table should also be able to contribute. This is what I came up with.

Spurius Verdius and Tarquinius Caerulius are competing big-wigs in Rome at the time of Emperor Vespasian. They are deadly rivals whose followers contend to control the neighbourhoods where their territories overlap. This contention is often violent in nature, at least until the Vigiles Urbani turn up to restore order!

Our campaign will consist of a maximum of six episodes (in addition to The Brawl scenario that some of us played last Christmas, which counts as Episode Zero). Each gang has a list of six missions they must complete over the course of the campaign. Each mission may be selected once. Note that these lists are not the same for both gangs. The Gang with the highest total of Victory Points after six episodes is victorious in the campaign.

Each player in the campaign is associated with either the Spurius Verdius (Green) Gang or the Tarquinius Caerulius (Blue) Gang. In addition, each player has a personal character that only they will play. If that player is not present, their character will be replaced by another, either the personal character of another player or a non-player character to be run by the rest the gang’s players.

Choosing a Scenario

Before each episode of the campaign, the umpire will ask the players of each gang to agree which of their six listed missions they wish to carry out.

At that point, Victory Points earned in previous games may be spent to influence events:

Victory Points spent in this way are lost to the Gang’s running total.

The umpire will work out the details of the scenario taking account of the missions chosen by the two Gangs. Where the chosen missions clash, for example if one side has chosen a mission that can only take place at night but the other has chosen a daytime scenario, priority will be given to the side that has spent most Victory Points to influence events in this episode.

Status Quo Ante

Following The Brawl, the Blue Gang have six Victory Points while the Greens have only a single point! The Greens are going to have to work hard to catch up.