Blood & Chivalry Abroad

 My correspondent very generously recreated some key moments from his Hastings test game using Blood & Chivalry and sent a short battle report. I was excited to see the game played out. As you can see in the pictures he made some clever data sheets for the various units involved.

I will now turn the narrative over to Stefan:

The set up for the Normans was as follows:  Light infantry crossbow unit on the left flank, with Arriere-Ban medium infantry behind.  Light infantry bow unit on the right flank, with heavy infantry spearmen unit behind.  Heavy cavalry knights behind in the center and right flank.  

The set up for the Saxons was as follows:  Medium infantry Select Fyrd unit on the right flank.  Heavy infantry Huscarl unit in the center and another unit on the left flank.

The Normans advanced their crossbow unit on the left flank and their bow unit on the right flank and, once in range, stated inflicting missile casualties on the Saxons.  The Arriere-Ban medium infantry and the heavy infantry spearmen unit advanced behind the light infantry.  Eventually, the Norman light infantry bow unit and the right flank scooted further to their right so as to make way for the heavy infantry spearmen.  They could do so because, as light infantry, they are very maneuverable.  On the left flank there was not enough space to do the same with the crossbow unit and, unlike the bow unit, the crossbow unit could not move and shoot.  So the Arriere-Ban medium infantry started a ponderous wheeling maneuver to try to get at the Saxons.  As feudal medium infantry they could only wheel or turn about.

The Saxons started getting annoyed with the missile fire and the Select Fyrd unit on the right flank came off the hilltop to chase the crossbow unit away, while the Arriere-Ban medium infantry was still trying to wheel into place.  The crossbow unit elected to stand and fire, but incurred casualties and had to flee when the Saxon Select Fyrd meleed the crossbowmen.  

At the same time the Norman heavy infantry spearmen engaged in suicidal charges by throwing themselves at the Saxon left flank Huscarl unit.  The  intent was to inflict damage on the Huscarls but also to clear the way for the Norman heavy cavalry knights.  These feudal forces are very restricted in their maneuverability, and there really was no way for the Norman heavy cavalry to proceed forward unless the Norman heavy infantry was first destroyed.  After a couple of attacks, which resulted in the smaller Norman heavy infantry unit being repulsed, the Norman heavy infantry unit was finally destroyed.  This then allowed the Norman knights to charge,

The Norman heavy cavalry's charge hit the two Saxon Huscarl units, stationed in the Saxon center and the Saxon right flank.  The charge was devastating, resulting in the two Saxon Huscarl units recoiling.  While casualties were inflicted on the Saxons, the Norman heavy cavalry also incurred casualties.  However, in their morale test, the Norman heavy cavalry rolled a morale result of "battle ferocity."  So, they successively continued to charge the two Saxon Huscarl units before them, eventually routing these two Saxon units.  However, by the time of the last charge, they had incurred substantial casualties themselves, and their morale roll ended up in the Norman heavy cavalry routing also. 

[The bit about Blood & Chivalry that I'm quite proud of is the Morale Testing. The rare professional troops roll 3d6. Feudal troops roll d20, Mercenaries roll 2d6. Everyone uses the same table. So Feudal troops are more likely to get a '20' "Battle Ferocity" and mercenaries are quite in danger of rolling badly since you need a modified result of 9-19 to be in Good Morale. But in the above case the Norman cavalry rolled a "1" and with negative modifiers for casualties they'd break.]

At that point we called the game.  The only Norman units left on the board were the Norman light infantry bow unit, crossbow unit, and the Arriere-Ban medium infantry; the latter still trying to wheel into place.  The only Saxon unit left was the Select Fyrd medium infantry unit.

So very exciting to see my rules used in the wild by people who don't know me. The armies are all 15mm figures from Two Dragons, Thistle and Rose, and Old Glory.

A Shadow From the Past

I got an email through the Hotlead website trying to contact "the author of Blood & Chivalry." They're planning a Hastings refight and think B&C would be the perfect rules for it. But they had questions.

Fortunately the questions were mostly "did we do this right?" to which my answer was uniformly yes. There was one bit of confusion caused by an unfortunate omission in a Morale results table.

One issue that basically boiled down to I was naive and assumed that everyone would do things that way. Of course I've learned a lot about rule writing since then.

Digging out my old copy to look up answers I found the first version published by my friend Don in 1992. I think the entire print run was done on DND office equipment. The layout was pretty basic.

1992 version of the rules

Interior of 1992 edition

Interior of 1992 edition. Don was pretty chuffed with his top down figure graphic

A little later I got a chance to redo it. New name, layout by a graphic artist, who did the drawings inside too. Distribution through his connection with Old Glory. A shiny and expensive 4/1 cover (outside cover full colour print, inside black and white). I insisted on the more expensive spiral binding because I think it's nicer for players to use that way. Should've gone with perfect or staple binding in hindsight.

Looking back at it though, I'm pretty pleased with the product. 

Interior 2001 

Lots of diagrams and pictures

A map! I should revisit the scenarios again.

I do like that the pages are white, instead of the soft taupe or fuzzy background graphics behind the text that is the current fashion, but which often make it a bugger to read.

Unfortunately a Quick Reference Sheet was forgotten. The inside covers are taken up by ads for the short lived La Gloire magazine (Old Glory's attempt to revive a US wargaming magazine and sell their miniatures like White Dwarf was doing) that my publisher also edited, and I helped with, and a Dark Ages Scenario and Army List book that never got published. Womp womp...

My correspondent would have really liked the Dark Age supplement. Fortunately for him I still had my long hand notes buried at the bottom of my filing cabinet.

I've sent him my files for Blood & Chivalry 2, which I recall was pretty much done, I just couldn't find anyone to do the layout and publish it. I suppose 15 years  further along I could probably fiind some layout software and post it on Wargames Vault or Drive Through RPG.

This Old Black House

At Hotlead I bought a box of lovely poured resin Hudson & Allen early and high medieval buildings from an estate sale. 

As purchased there's a couple of smaller buildings not pictured 

The three stone "dark ages/highland" buildings were what I really wanted because I've always fancied doing some Picts to fight my 3rd century Romans, especially now that there are a couple of plastic options to build a Pictish warband with. The Medieval buildings were a nice extra and worth paying a few more dollarbucks for the lot.

As you can see my friend had painted them rather unimaginatively without much in the way of shading or depth or highlights. As you can see above, the roofs on two of the Pictish houses were a solid dark green, the same green he painted the grassy bits on the integral bases with. And the third with the sand roof is just well.... ummm. Let's just leave it at that.

So everything got a nice coat of burnt umber ink and then I started drybrushing. Couple of shades of grey on the stone. Couple of shades of green on the sod roofs and the grassy bits of the bases.

After fretting over how to paint the sod roofs I said "Sod it!" and decided to just use the same flock that I would put on the ground.

 This took a couple of nights to accomplish. And then after shaking off the excess I went over the bare patches, which were sculpted to look like old roof in need of refurbishment, with watered down burnt umber.

With out any Picts yet, some of my Romans are checking the village out.

And the Quar like them too. I think these will be nice for any Quar living in the rugged mountainous regions of Alwyd.

Medieval Midgard Massacre!

Dan has been building a large number of angry peasants for his German Medieval armies so he wanted to do an 11th-12th century feudal era battle. So we met to decide who's candidate would be Pope, or Holy Roman Emperor, or Chief Dog Catcher of Altdorf.

His army at 450 points and 11 Reputation was pretty huge. He didn't add any upgrades to anyone and he had 8 or so horde units of peasants.

My cavalry foreground. Sergeants in the van, which was a fatal mistake.

My army was 442 points, 12 Reputation and had a lot of expensive knights. I outnumbered his cavalry 8 squadrons to 3.

Dan's cavalry

Dan's foot sergeants

Some of Dan's archers, peasants, and his thematic dice tray.

My center. three units of foot sergeants and two units of crossbows

Dan had his peasants massed on his left, but the frontage was constricted by some woods and a mountain side which wouldn't give my cavalry space to effectively smash into them, so I put the bulk of my cavaly on my left, opposite his cavalry.

I lead with my sergeants hoping to wear him down so my knights could then overthrow that flank. Instead my sergeants were defeated and thrown back onto my knights, which gave Dan's cavalry the impetus.

The Red Knight tries to stem the tide and dies in the melee

In the center my crossbows didn't do badly against Dan's foot sergeants, but it wasn't enough.

With my squadron of knights destroyed my army commander, Count Raymond the Good was on his own. Dan's cavalry commander challenged him to single combat and rolled four hits to my one. Ouch. My Reputation plummetd to -2. Troubadours will sing of his tragic fall for many years.

Count Raymond (R) in red cloak dies in Single Combat

The White Knight also found himself alone and fighting a squadron of Dan's knights single handed. 

A squadron of my knights charge Dan's hero hoping to kill him and knock some of his Reputation down.

My right wing, two squadrons of Knights tries to squish some peasants. They do, but it's not enough.

In the center I try and launch a counter attack with my foot sergeants but fail some Command Tests and it doesn't happen.

At the end of the turn we were at -1 Reputation for my army and 6 Reputation for Dan's. A mighty victory to be recorded in an illuminated manuscript or bawdy ballad. Or perhaps a bawdily illustrated manuscript.

Dan (L) likes thematic headgear and had to show me (R) his new nasal helm

This was my seventeenth game of the year! It was great to return to get these figures out again. I just love the early medieval period. There's something about knights in chain hauberks, kite shields, and nasal helms with lots of flags and colourful shields crashing about scaring the livestock and disturbing the peasantry.

Obvioudly I need to edit the army list though....

Midgard in Mantovia

Played a 400+ point game of Midgard last night with Scott, Brett, Dan, and Pat.

I got out my 11th-12th century Medieval stuff and was able to build armies over 400 pts and still leave troops in the box! So I guess I don't need to buy any Victrix Norman cavalry or infantry. Which is good to know. I think as is, I can build armies up to 500 points easily.

Fulk the Bastard has once again raised the banner of rebellion to overthrow his father, Count Raymond the Good in my Medieval Imagine-Nation of Mantovia.

I was so absorbed with playing and guiding my friends through the rules that I didn't get many photos.

But here are some:

The centers clash. Cound Raymond's ward crashes into the Black Company

View from my ward. My crossbows are having trouble finding targets.

The Red knight smashes the Saracens mercenaries lead by Khalid al-Babar in his sedan chair.

End game. My ward has been bashed about. Losing it's commander in a duel with the perfidious Black Knight. Count Raymond having lost all of his troops is coming over to take command, but the enemy center is in not bad shape either.

The game ended with both sides into negative Reputation Points, but Count Raymond was at -2 whereas Fulk only had -1. Very bloody! Count Raymond is wounded and will have to retreat and regroup. Fulk will need to regroup as well before he can lay siege to any castles.

I like that with Midgard I can incorporate my head fluff for the different characters.

I need to buy a big bag of glass beads for Reputation Tokens. They're easier to pull from the Tea Mugs of Reputation than plastic bingo chips.

Midgard

 

In my on going quest for some satisfying Middle Earth rules, I have purchased Midgard, the exciting new "heroic era" wargaming rules by James Morris (see his Midgard stuff HERE and his Middle Earth stuff HERE) and published by Too Fat Lardies. Find the Lard TV Midgard videos HERE.

I've watched the development of these rules with interest. The 20% off pre-order deal was just too good to pass up on so I jumped on it (especially with the current exchange rate with the Pound).

A nice value added with TFL products is getting the pdf when you purchase the physical book. Normally I am not overly bothered with the pdf. I dutifully save it to all my devices. I will open it to print the Player QRS. And then promptly ignore it. 

Canada Post going on strike while my copy is in transit was a bit annoying. But thanks to the pdf, I can load it onto Mrs. Rabbitman's tablet and get stuck in and start thinking about elves, dwarves, and orcs again. 

There will be a tiny bit of reorganization required, but nothing too onerous. Midgard doesn't use fixed unit sizes. But it does use a fixed unit frontage. Everything is based on the "spear throw". Nominally 120mm, but you can make 80mm a "spear throw" if that works for your armies.

My dwarves already fit nicely into 120mm x 40mm for a unit. Or I might make a spear throw equal to the nice movement trays Don designed and printed for me. I can cut different measuring sticks and see what I like.

Elves and orcs will need some trays. But with everyone being on washers, I can do that easily. 

My Medieval armies are already on 40x40 bases, so 3x stands across will be a unit. Which is 12x heavy infantry or 6x skirmishers, which is how I organized them for Lion Rampant, so no rebasing required!

Midgard might even work with Samurai. The Age of War is starting to get away from the heroic leadership of earlier Samurai wars, but sub commanders still got stuck in.

Could these rules be the "magic bullet"?

We won't know until we try.

Watch this space!