Warhammer Fantasy Brawl

To me the best bits of the gaming blogsphere are posts which make you think, and Whiskey Priest's SuperUltimateHammer post from a few weeks back is one such.

I feel that while system is important the scenario is more important, which got me thinking in a way I haven't before about the scenarios I enjoy and why. A big influence on what I feel makes a good Oldhammer scenario are the ones I had access to when new to the hobby, shaded by more recent gaming experience. Key factors seem to be size and mood.

In terms of size less than 100 models a side seem right to me. I don't want a true skirmish game of around a handful of models per side, I want the scenery to be something you can make use of rather than manoever around, and (surprising to me) I don't really want the massed ranks of troops. This isn't so much about avoiding all the painting so much as a magpie nature, I'd like to be able to do lots of different forces and setups rathern than build a monolith.

Mood is less easy to define but part of it comes back to the size question. I'm much more interested in a game about a boatload of vikings up to trouble or a raid on a caravan rather than formal battles, which especially in Warhammer seem to quickly tend to the self-important. I can't imagine an old school scenario which involves having to stat up the Emperor Karl Franz, nevermind putting him on a griffon...

Slann raid on Skeggi - a brawl not a battle!

Going back to the system question, it's noticable that older scenarios tend to be much smaller, and I think it's no coincidence that with these the rules creak a lot less, and can have some of their quirks be strengths. So I thought I'd count up the troops involved in the scenarios which I had access to in my youth (even if I didn't get around to playing Kremlo until last year).

• The Legend of Kremlo the Slann (1st ed, 1983)
  • Young Slann braves attack a Norse village as part of a coming of age ritual. The Norse try to destroy the Slann village in revenge
  • Players: GM ("essential") and 2-6 players
  • Skeggi - Troops A: 15 warriors, approx. 30 civilians (5d6 villagers, 12 fishwives) = approx. 45
  • Skeggi - Troops B: 4d6 braves = approx. 14
  • Zapotec - Troops A: 27
  • Zapotec - Troops B: approx. 42 to approx. 64*
• The Magnificent Sven (2nd ed, 1984)
  • 7 washed-up heroes / personalities are recruited to save a village from Slann raiders
  • Players: GM and 2 or more players (up to 14 all with victory schedules!)
  • Troops A: 7 heroes, 40 villagers = 47
  • Troops B: 77 Slann
• The Dolgan Raiders (2nd ed, 1985)
  • A tribe of nomadic humans attack a hobgoblin caravan passing through their lands
  • Players: 2-4 players (GM not mentioned)
  • Troops A: 45 humans, a centaur, 5 war dogs = 50
  • Troops B: 6 lobotomised slave ogres (chained to caravans), 52 hobgoblins and goblins, 20 "civilian" goblins, 10 wolf riders = 88
• The Vengeance of the Lichemaster (2nd ed, 1986)
  • A skaven raiding party and the Lichemaster both want the McGuffin hidden at the monastary. The Master of the monastary is an insane Frankinstein-esque wizard
  • Players: GM and 3 players
  • Troops A: Master, 12 warrior monks, 5 wizard monks = 18
  • Troops B: 44 skaven, 4 firethrower crew = 48
  • Troops C: Lichemaster, 52 undead (plus any summoned) = 53
• Blood on the Snow (2nd ed, 1987)
  • A force of goblinoids have captured a dwarf outpost and occupied a nearby shrine to Sigmar. A force of dwarfs and humans aim to drive them out
  • Players: GM and 2+ players
  • Troops A: 54 dwarfs, 54 humans = 108
  • Troops B: 65 orcs, 86 goblins and 3-man stonethrower = 151
• Forenrond's Last Stand (3rd ed, 1987)
  • Famous but inept elven commander gets his troops drawn into an ambush and himself killed. His second in command tries to extracate the survivors
  • Players: GM and 2+ players
  • Troops A: 20 elven infantry, 32 cavalry = 52
  • Troops B: 50 orcs, 73 goblins, 20 wolf riders = 143
• The Valley of Death (3rd ed, 1988)†
  • A goblinoid raiding party looking for a fight is confronted by the armies of two dwarf holds, protecting their homeland
  • Players: GM and 2-4 players
  • Troops A: 128 dwarfs, 5-man stonethrower, organ gun
  • Troops B: 64 orcs, 2 trolls, 142 goblins, 2 chariots and 5 bases of snotlings = 215

* It's very hard to count the Slann troops in the Zapotec scenario - the player gets to pick 3 units out of 5, and 3 of those units are a random size, as are the number of defending villagers at points throughout the gauntlet
† When first seeing The Valley of Death my thought was "that's a lot of figures", I've never played it and have no real desire to

Graphing those troop numbers the picture is rather clearer - 

Troops for the listed scenarios, significant growth over 5 years but essentially the same ruleset

Other than the numbers there are a few things of note with the scenarios -

• In the first three there are significant numbers of "civilians" who are pressed into combat, the last three are much more traditional Warhammer forces
• The Magnificent Sven has the most "heroic" setup, but the characters' backstories are jaundiced rather than pompous
• Vengeance of the Lichemaster has three conflicting sides, for the first three scenarios and Blood on the Snow there's conflict (or at least competition) within one of the sides 

So coming back to Whiskey Priest's question of what I want in my game -

• Large skirmish - figures move as units, but individually (like SAGA or Age of Sigmar)
• Capacity for fine distinctions between troops, especially characters
• Variety between characters: not all leaders are strong fighters and vice versa; a skilled swordsman may be physically weak
• Guidelines for unbalanced sides and complex victory conditions (e.g. an outnumbered force needs to hold out for a certain period, or escape an ambush - how much smaller should they be?)
• Psychology reflecting the fantasy setting and stereotypes (especially fear, animosity and hatred) and other limits on the player's control of their troops

Unfortunately I don't think the exact ruleset exists, but it's there somewhere within the various versions of Warhammer.

The Legend of Kremlo

Back in March (life's been hectic!) an Oldhammer session that a number of us had arranged fell through, which left Paul and I looking for an alternative plan at short notice. Having long owned but never played The Legend of Kremlo the Slann from the first Citadel Compendium, and remembering that Paul was about the only person I know who owns any Slann, I suggested we give it a try.

Given the short timeframe, and faced with the hurdle that it's a Warhammer 1st edition scenario (but neither of us own those rules) we had to wing some bits of it (in hindsight not very successfully in places), but a good day's gaming was had which is what counts!

Part one - Skeggi

The scenario is in two parts, the first part concerns a Slann raid on Skeggi, a Norse coastal village somewhere in Lustria, which just happens to have the eponymous Kremlo as its chief.

Skeggi map for the Kremlo scenario. © Citadel Miniatures 1983

Our first challenge was setting up the table to match the scenario map as closely as we could. The map is pretty exact, and the table smaller than probably most Warhammer games at only 3 feet for the longest edge. I think we got it pretty close -

The Slann objective is to kill 12 villagers, and given there are 12 fishwives on the far side of the river from the village itself Paul quite sensibly attacked them. It then became a race to see if the other villagers and their local berserkers could get to the Slann before they could slay the fishwives.

As I mentioned in the intro we were winging the rules somewhat (or at least, playing a first edition scenario via second edition rules) and I'm not sure how much that impacted the outcome. As proper Warhammer geeks will know, in 1st edition strength and toughness are on a 1-6 scale (or more specifically, for toughness, an A - F scale). Recognising that the numbers for strength given in the scenario looked low we bumped these by 1 and used the 2nd edition charts - foolishly in hindsight as the combat resolution charts are given in the back of the Compendium!

This made both battles more lethal than they should have been, but this was offset in the first battle by an oddity of the scenario rules for the fishwives, or at least our application of them. These state that the fishwives become subject to frenzy if any of their number are killed - which in 2nd edition terms would seem a bit odd except in the case of missile fire (since you roll for frenzy when charging into combat, and it seems unlikely that the fishwives would lose one of their number to combat, leave combat and then charge back in). Anyway, we let them roll for frenzy while in combat, and suitably enraged they gave the Slann quite a hard time.

Not quite enough as it turned out to survive until the villagers came to their rescue, and with the fishwives dead the Slann made a tactical withdrawal fled into the jungle.

On to Zapotec

Enraged by this massacre, Kremlo leads the Norse in a revenge attack on Zapotec, his former home -

Zapotec map for the Kremlo scenario. © Citadel Miniatures 1983

Again Paul's scenery did rather good good job of recreating Lustria, but notably with much less river than in the scenario map -

The map and the scenario rules seem to hint heavily at how the Norse should approach this battle - except for one wooded hill the jungle is inpenetrable other than via narrow paths, and detailed rules are given for the speed of the Norse longship in different sections of the river and with varying numbers of crew.

So the obvious approach seems to be to have the berserkers man the oars, have the other clansmen (with throwing axes (or bows - but that doesn't seem very Norse!)) man the gunwales, and the scenario becomes a gauntlet run.

With our strength / toughness blunder the Norse had a difficult time of things, but conversely with a shorter river it probably worked out about right. Nonetheless, by the time they reached Zapotec there were only enough left standing for a doomed charge into their foes, although the Norse victory conditions are for Kremlo to poison the spawning pools which was still a possible outcome.

As the Norse player I wasn't too sad when Kremlo was shot down, and genocide was averted -

Conclusion

I'm glad to have finally played this scenario through. Given my lack of tactical acumen it's completely possible that I approached the battles entirely wrong, but they seemed to me to be much too linear with Skeggi being a race and Zapotec a gauntlet. The scenarios have plenty of narrative flavour but very little depth. There are options for up to six players, for example having different people play Kremlo's ambitious younger brothers, but while this would add tension it doesn't seem to change the tactical possibilities.

Also, much as I'm coming to enjoy the Lustria setting, I can't see myself adding to my handful of Amazons or my single not-Slann in order to visit very frequently.