I spent the day playing Norse and Harry's and Siege of Dumezil Hold scenario from the First Edition Redwake River Valley campaign (although actually a lot of the day was spent wandering around chatting and admiring other people's models).
Harry has created a lovely set of dungeon tiles to go with his Frostgrave winter terrain, which allowed for the exterior and interior of the siege / assault.
My lads were leaving the messy fighting around the gate to some other fools (who did have the help of a couple of giants!) while we attacked a couple of sally ports. Our objective was to kill the dwarf king and destroy an artefact of theirs, leaving them too demoralised to help in the war against Psammon.
An interesting aspect of First Edition is that a character's attributes are rolled and adjusted for their species. I ended up having my hero Gublub (formerly Grack the Wise) with a very low intelligence and subject to stupidity, while my shaman Gruk the Loon was subject to frenzy. The latter came in handy as he also rolled up a mostly useless selection of spells.
As with the system of traits in Dragon Rampant I do think these random attributes really add to the game. Although sometimes you're going to end up with something a bit duff it does make you think of the leaders more in terms of personality than just as a generic champion, and also embrace the possibility that they're not actually very heroic.
I'm not sure whether it was Gublub's stupidity or my own tactical ineptitude that enabled the dwarf king and the dwarves' sacred artefact to escape, but in my defense dwarves are no easier to dislodge from tunnels in first edition than they are in later versions. We did decide though that the surviving orcs wouldn't be too unhappy - with the dwarves having fled and their commander felled by the devestatingly effective elven bows they were now in possession of a rather comfortable dwarven hold. Given his size Gublub seems favourite to become the new leader but I'm not so sure - Gruk is just as good in a fight and being subject to frenzy might tip the balance! If nothing else if should make for some interesting leadership debates...
The Rise of Morcar
There were several other impressive games on the day but for sheer weight of models on the table a mention has to be given to the Rise of Morcar game.
This scale of battle isn't really my cup of tea, but it's good to see someone doing it, and not only to see some of the models that had been produced for the occasion. Though having said that, somewhere in amongst that lot for example are some of the most interesting chaos spawn (or other gribblies in that vein) that I've seen. But equally when you focus in on what looks like a "normal" unit, and it turns out that actually it's a unit of trolls, then that's not my Warhammer.
But if this is your cup of tea then Snickit's write up contains lots of pictures, if you've not seen them already.
