Bloody Fields, Petty Kings

With the Game of Thrones campaign now at an end I am going forward with the rules as a more generic fantasy rules set, tentatively titled Bloody Fields, Petty Kings.

First - the focus; Like the GoT campaign, the rules will be for small level petty wars. Slightly larger than skirmish, but not mass battles. Too many fantasy rules try to include everything and I believe what is left out will be as important as what is left in. To that end it is assumed that;

1. The technology will be pre gunpowder, that sort of generic fantasy mish-mash time period.
2. The style of warfare is similar to all factions/races.
3. The battle rules should be able to play without campaign rules, but still be enhanced when they are included.

Also I need to remind myself of what I find engaging

1. The game should include both players at all times. Just rolling dice is not being included. There should be decision points at every stage of the turn and game.
2. All mechanisms should move the game forward and do so in a timely way.
3. Decisions should have meaning.
4. Tables are bad - I rely on them too much.

So what did I think worked last time?

1. The combat cards - I thought these worked well in concept (though bad in balance sometimes, ONSLAUGHT anybody?) because they allowed the player decision to be as important as the dice.
2. The surge - I still like the idea of limited command and control, even though I know it chaffed on others used to Warhammer.  For the initial move I want to go to what I discussed concerning an initial battle plan that has order chits - Hold, Take and Hold, Advance, and Withdraw probably. From there the game devolves into desperate measures to change the situation. To maintain this it is necessary for combat to be a tad bit less lethal.
3. Prebattle set up. It needs reworked for balance but the scouting and such seemed to flow smoothly.

And what didn't work?

• The combat was too lethal too fast and not very balanced.
• Army lists. These take a ton of balancing, so to help I would like to go with the broad asset method of selecting units.
• Rules on 3x5 cards. Sorry, this is purely a result of my distracted procrastination.
• Flying units - While the image of the charge of the Ghost Riders of Khos from Divine Right will forever be locked in my heart, flying is a powerful ability that has major implications for any game. Some brainstorming options to balance/hinder the ability include weaker units, can only fly once, easy to route,  hard to control, and high cost.
• Magic I am going to leave this one alone.
• Terrain needs to be better described in ability so that players are not too surprised.

As to new ideas;

1. Baggage
2. Unit cards
3. The storm of Doom

3d printed window

 I finally got a chance to use the Replicator II 3d printer the public library got. At some point soon this will be available to the general public, but for now you need to schedule a time.

Any way -the Replicator II at the library uses a hard PLA plastic. The good is that this is a hard plastic that should stand up well to gaming, downside is that hard plastics are harder to trim.

 

And as this super crappy picture shows, there can be a lot to trim. The fill is laid down in tiny ribbons of plastic at 45 degree angles. For some reason it left some over run in the window area - not on the file, but it still had to be removed.

 

After trimming I put a quick coat of grey craft paint on the window. As you can see there flat surfaces are not smooth and indeed show the 45 pattern of laying material down. Not a problem here but it didn't smooth out after I tried wiping it down with a dab of acetone.

 

Still it's good enough and I am going to get to work on the project and should be able to add some more baroque details.

 

File wise I did the project in Sketchup, scaled it down there, saved as a .dae file which then had to be converted to an .stl in meshlab and then made into a .x3g in makerware.