Reikland versus reality - some conclusions

Ages ago I rambled on about older and later incarnations of the Reikland, specifically about how far there are between the "points of light".

At the time my view was that Andy Law's map was probably a more realistic view of the Principality - but less interesting than the Death on the Reik version in terms of adventure. Now I'm not so sure...

I finally sat down to work out some demographics, drawing on figures from Wikipedia, and S. John Ross's Medieval Demographics Made Easy, and here's what I've come up with. There's some pretty extreme hand-waving involved here, so probably any other conclusion is equally if not more valid, but with a couple of tweaks it seems that the Reikland Gazetteer is at least plausable.

In Demographics Made Easy terms Reikland has 2 cities (Altdorf and Nuln), although it shares them both with neighbouring provinces. Despite the Renaissance setting, given how surrounded and riven with enemies (orcs, beastmen, etc.) the Empire is I'll stick with just 9x the number of towns compared to cities, and not the 14x the number. So we have 18 towns.

With the random 10% to 40% drop in size from town to town, here are my 18 towns compared to the Gazetteer -

Generated town	Pop	Reikland town	Pop (adjusted)
Town A	7200	Carroburg	8000
Town B	5040	Bogenhafen	4500
Town C	3024	Kemperbad	3750
Town D	2722	Ubersreik	3500
Town E	2177	Dunkelburg	3000
Town F	1306	Auerswald	2500
Town G	1176	Schoppendorf	2500
Town H	1058	Delberz	2000
Town I	952	Stimmigen	1750
Town J	857	Grissenwald	1500
Town K	686	Grunburg	1200
Town L	411	Rottefach (nr Altdorf)	720 (was 88)
Town M	370	Autler (nr Altdorf)	648 (was 81)
Town N	296	Segeldorf (nr Nuln)	518 (was 48)
Town O	237	Geldrecht (nr Altdorf)	414 (was 49)
Town P	213	Koch (nr Auerswald)	373 (was 95)
Town Q	128	Wurstheim (nr Nuln)	223 (was 78)
Town R	102	Kleindorf (nr Grunburg)	179 (was 35)

Of course this is very arbitrary, but the exercise did highlight what seemed odd about the Gazetteer listing, being the complete lack of any settlement in the 101 to 999 population range. So selecting some villages at random (but concentrating near Altdorf and Nuln for obvious reasons) I've upgraded a few to towns.

Equally there's no reason why lots of more villages can't exist, but since the Gazetteer goes down to such small populations I'm happy assuming it lists them all. And a small number suits nicely the zone model described in the world guide section of the rulebook.

All of which is a very roundabout waying of saying I can justify to myself using the Death on the Reik version.

I'll check through the major coaching routes and make sure there's at least a coaching inn (perhaps heavily fortified) for each reasonable days travel. But prepare yourself for a much lonelier journey than would be the case with the later map.

Or at least, you hope you're alone...

One other thing

The reason I mentioned the Wikipedia demographics - the top 3 cities in the Holy Roman Empire in 1500 accounted for around 1% of the empire's population. So taking Altdorf, Nuln and Middenheim (total population 40,224) and allowing a much higher (3%) proportion of the population - allowing for how dangerous the rural areas are - that gives us a very rough population for the Old World Empire of around 1.3 million.

The Old World is a lot less densely populated than early 16th Century Europe.

Still searching for new old hobgoblins

I've been dithering excessively over my new hobgoblins - 7 months and counting  :(  - after having second thoughts over a few of them, and hence broadening my search for other options.

A big part of the problem is that I have two Fantasy Tribe and two C36 hobgoblins that I want to include in the mix, and singles or pairs from four other ranges, while hopefully ending up with a fairly coherent (but not uniform) unit.

In parallel to that, it's quite hard to say what defines a Citadel hobgoblin. The Fantasy Tribe figures are very much in fantasy armour - it's hard to identify any real world parallels. In fact the closest I can come for a match is imperial Roman armour, with distinctly non-Roman helms. See for example this Roman general -

Warlord Games' Roman general - image from Bob's Miniature Wargaming Blog

- whose armour bears a passing resemblance to the Fantasy Tribe chieftain seen here on the right, or so I feel -

Eastern hobgoblin from Mirliton, Armalion Red Moon orc, FT hobgoblin

The later C36 hobgoblins and especially the DL2 Hobgoblin Warriors move to somewhat more of an eastern vibe, but rather than full on samurai armour the C36 miniatures are more like full mail with patches of samurai armour, and the DL2s have samurai armour over flesh, whereas most samurai miniatures seem to be armour over clothing (sort of like the eastern hobgoblin in the picture above, although it's hard to tell much with the undercoating, sorry...).

Nihon orc, Grenadier goblin, FT again for size

The Mirliton Nihon orc shown above seems to me to fit well with the more eastern of the Citadel miniatures, or the N17 Chronicle hobgoblins, however he is unfortunately the only one of the range I particularly like. The others all seem a bit chunky and crude and, as can be seen by the amount of crouching in the picture above, they're also a fair bit bigger than the other hobgoblins I've assembled. The goblin on the other hand is too short, but looks so great I had to include him!

I next looked to the Wargames Factory orc warband, which I rather like, however as shown below they're a bit on the skinny / realistic proportion side, in comparison to these other figures -

Wargames Factory warband orc, FT for comparison

They do however have a good-enough match for the Fantasy Tribes armour, I feel. I'm thinking of heroic-ing them by chopping the body in half vertically and puttying it back together with broader shoulders, and then adding bigger heads - perhaps the Hasslefree goblin ones. Rather more work than I was planning on originally!

I've one further plan up my sleeve - the ronin from Black Hat's samurai range seem a good source for samurai armour over flesh, so again I'm thinking of giving these some head swaps.

I do realise this is all slightly silly - given the amout of work involved I'd be much better off just holding my nose and paying over the odds on Ebay for actual Citadel hobgoblins, but this way is so much more interesting!

Next project - Gulgan's Raiders

The first half of this month was hectic on the real life front, meaning I barely had time to pick up a paint brush. I did though have time to keep up with what's going on elsewhere in the Oldhammer community, and think about the next project that I could fail to find time to paint...

With hobgoblins being very much a current theme - mine should even make it to the front of the paint queue next month, just in time for Orctober - Gaj's chaos thurauder post sparked my imagination. A lightweight chaos force would be a good substitute for the human side of the Dolgan Raiders scenario from the second Citadel Journal and tick a couple of boxes for me. Not only could I use the first Warhammer scenario I ever played for my Newhammer project, but I'd also have some extra options for my combined orcs and chaos force.

I'll concede that this isn't exactly original, but to me using lots of chaos thugs - as my ally Leromides did in our chaos and orcs versus undead game at BOYL - is a bit of a revelation. To me the whole point of a chaos force is getting to field these chaps -

The models are cool, and they're excellent fighters, but as an embittered orc commander the best thing about them is the lack of animosity, and rock-solid personal characteristics (in wargame terms, at least...). I also have to admit the high points cost is quite attractive when you're trying to assemble an army in the quickest possible time!

But, before I talk myself out of it, may I present ... Gulgan's Raiders.

Guldan - chaos warrior (double handed weapon, protection rune)*

12 beastmen (light armour, shield)†
Steffen - beastmen champion (light armour, shield)

18 thugs (light armour, bow)
Jurgen - chaos marauder (light armour, shield)

Chaos centaur

3 chaos hounds
Tarak - beastman minor hero (light armour)

Nikolai - human level 2 wizard (5 spells)

As near as I can make out these come within a point or two of the original forces.

* I'm curious why rune weapons were removed between 2nd and 3rd editions (although you could see the case for ditching the Greater Death Rune!). In 3rd edition terms think of this as a cool but expensive way of equipping Guldan in light armour...

† Perhaps these should be thugs as well, but having played lots of WFRP I just can't have a chaos raiders force without beastmen. Plus I've some that I'm itching to paint...

I'm not sure tactically how good the beastmen will be in a fight, given the loss of Static Combat Resolution so beloved by the theorycrafters in moving from a 20 strong unit to only 12. It's also interesting to me to note that none of the units in the Dolgan Raiders scenario nor the later Blood on the Snow have standards - it makes sense in the context of the scenario especially for the former, but I'd not realised until now how much they only became ubiquitous in 3rd edition.

To represent these chaps on the table I nearly have enough beastmen, but only a couple of genuine thug miniatures plus a couple more good proxies for the archers. Instead I plan a mixture of Foundry's Men at Arms and Viking archers, plus some of Warlord Games' Germanic archers for the slightly wilder look.

I'm not sure what to do about the chaos hounds - at some point in the distant past I acquired some AD&D blink dogs for reasons that now escape me, but I'm a bit reluctant to use them as conversion fodder for some reason. So Warlord's mastiff pack might well be the answer there as well.

But first I must concentrate on my previous paint queue, before growing the lead pile!

Orc boar boyz - eventually

The one of my two "should have been ready for BOYL" units is finally done, only a month late...

The remaining unit, my much-delayed hobgoblins, have been jumped in the queue by some savage orcs, for reasons I'll go into in a future post.

It does though mean I've sort-of met the target I set myself in October last year of getting this warband painted -

Sort-of, because they're not quite as done as I'd like - the boar boyz don't have their shield designs done, and neither they or the main boyz unit have standards yet. And some of the bases still need work. However I've started time-boxing myself on each unit in order to get more table-ready, I'll come back to them for a final polish once I've got the fuller warband painted. In theory by the end of the year...

Stone thrower alternative house rules for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition

I got two good games of WFB in over the BOYL weekend, on Saturday participating in the staggeringly impressive siege game, and on Sunday a "smaller" 3000 point orcs and chaos versus undead battle.

As I start once more to get a feel for the game a few rules begin to stand out as off or a bit broken, one of these being the power of stone throwers - particularly in comparison to bolt throwers - to the point we partially house-ruled them during the siege game. Another aspect then reared its head during our Sunday game, and further thoughts since make me want to take this further.

I'm clearly not the first to notice the power of war machines in 3rd edition, it's quite a common theme over on the Oldhammer forum and in fact Dreamfish and Gaj have already introduced some house rules which attempt to tone them down somewhat.

I think those rules take the toning down a bit too far - while you don't want stone throwers to be the focus of a battle, having them being devastating but unpredictable is part of their charm! That said I've always stuck to 3- or 4-man throwers, the large template from a 6-man thrower adds another dimension.

With this in mind these rules attempt to make a couple of things less broken -

• The accuracy of speculative fire in the rules as written
• The attractiveness of stone throwers as a way of killing opposing characters

Speculative fire

Speculative fire as written seems far too powerful, since it's meant to represent the crew chucking rocks at a target which they don't actually know the location of - speculatively. They might have seen a unit move behind a wood or hill but they've no real idea of where it is, and certainly not the exact location of the unit leader (unlike their controlling general).

With this in mind in the siege game we doubled the "miss" chance, so that as well as deviating twice as far the missile also deviated on rolls in the range 1-16, rather than only 1-12. How to handle the direction of the additional deviations is up for debate, you could roll an extra d12 for these but I like the neatness of having everything resolved with a single dice roll, like this -

You could also ban the targeting of characters with speculative fire - or, in the words of Erny, just remind your opponent not to be an ass!

Survival of the fittest

In later additions of Warhammer there's apparently a rule called "Look out sir" where a character, if targeted by a war machine, is only hit 1 time in 6, with a normal trooper being the true target the rest of the time.

To be honest I mainly object to this rule on account of its name - it doesn't seem to belong in a Bretonnian or Empire army, never mind orcs and goblins! It also seems to give characters a bit too much immunity compared to the rules as written, so I'd suggest something like this instead -

Heroes are quicker, more ruthless and luckier than is typical of their kind. As a result, when associated with or leading a unit, not only do they not get hit by ordinary missile fire, they're rather less vulnerable to war machines as well. If a hero is a target in this situation then roll 1d6:

5-6: the hero spots the incoming projectile, or perhaps reacts quicker to a warning shout, and manages to move out of the way. They take no damage
3-4: the hero is slow to react and only manages to avoid harm by shoving past their fellows, inadvertently pushing one of the troopers into harm's way. If there is a "spare" trooper (i.e. one not originally within the target area) they take damage in place of the "hero", if not no additional damage is caused
1-2: the hero is hit as normal

Aside from the above two suggestions I'm also not sure about the points values of stone throwers, particularly in relation to bolt throwers. I've noticed that Warhammer Armies doubles the cost of both of them compared to the 3rd edition rules, but stone throwers still seem rather cheap for a couple of reasons -

1. For a target you can see the hit chance is always 40% with a stone thrower (13-20 on d20). By contrast for orcs or humans (BS of 3) the hit chance with a bolt thrower is 50% under optimal conditions but given any modifiers (long range, soft cover) this swiftly drops away
2. For stone throwers any target under the template is automatically hit and you then just need to cause a wound for each individual model. For bolt throwers second and subsequent casualties are subject to diminishing returns - not only do you have to wound the previous target in order to have a chance of wounding further targets, but also the strength of the missile is progressively reduced. Therefore bolt throwers just aren't the mass killers that stone throwers can be.

Countering this is that bolt throwers don't present a threat to their own side in the event of a miss, and also have no minimum range, but taken overall still seem much worse value than stone throwers. I feel then that stone throwers should cost twice the points of the equivalent bolt thrower (as in fact was the case in 2nd edition).

Comments? Thoughts?

A year's worth of painting

I'm in retrospective mode at the moment. To be more honest I was planning to be in 6-month retrospective mode in July, although as with so many other things it's been pushed back to "after BOYL".

I'm not sure I have enough stuff painted yet to qualify for the Army Shots thread on the Oldhammer forum, and my output (and quality) pale in comparison to Orlygg's three years' worth of output, but in the last year I've gone from this -

to this -

Not an army yet, especially as I wouldn't be cheesy enough to field two war machines in a force that size, but a decent allied force for a battle or siege.

At my current rate I'll be at my BOYL target (24 more figures!) by about the end of the year, and my year target by who knows when...? But progress is being made!

Looking for Newhammer

Some posts on the Oldhammer forum and around the wider internet (Old Fogey, Lee Brady) have got me thinking. Oldhammer (assuming by that you mean to be playing in a certain narrative style with old rule sets - 2nd / 3rd edition in the case of fantasy) is all very well, but it's by definition limited in scope because of those rule sets. The fact that they're out of print means you're reducing your number of potential players, within an already niche hobby.

So I thought it worth trying to understand what's appealing (at least to me) about those older rule sets other than their out-of-print-ness (and hence GW no longer making your army obsolete in favour of their current sales target). And then I want to discover what current rule sets - if any - reasonably support an Oldhammer style.

Here's what I came up with:

1. Character-driven (within reason) - characters shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, but should be important. You should know, and care, if they're injured or killed, without them sweeping all before them.

2. Characterful units - as well as being the crux of the fighting, units should have character and differentiation. Goblins should be cowardly and none too dangerous in a fight, dwarves should excel over men in a straight toe-to-toe fight.

3. Support 'large skirmish' games - this sort of follows from point 1, in that if characters sway the battle then we have large groups but not armies. Not to say that a character can't be significant in a meeting of armies, as the tale of Troy will tell you, but I want characters to be people not demi-gods. So 100-ish figures per side at a 1:1 ratio suits me nicely.

4. Complete and self-supporting - the rules should contain everything you need, including spells and a bestiary, and a method for creating and costing your own creatures.

Although not on the list, since as long as (2) and (4) are catered for you should be able to fit this in yourself, a strong game world and a balanced set of factions are also important to me.

Although Warhammer's Old World is often derided as being derivative (or, more to the point I suspect, derivative but lawyered-up), to me that's one of its great strengths. Its use of archetypes not only allows a wide range of figures, from dark ages to late medieval, to find a place, but also provides a good starting point for narratives. It's also interesting (to me at least) to find out more about the parallels it's drawing from, and the often even more fascinating stories to be found there. Thanks to the Empire and hobgoblins I now know a lot more about the Holy Roman Empire and the Mongol invasions than I did a few months back (more on the latter another day).

On the balance side of things 2nd edition is pretty good, since there's only one race-specific weapon (ball and chain) and very general war machines. On the war machine side of things 3rd edition started to lose the plot (in hindsight), although within the context of the rules themselves the race-specific side of things was reasonably muted. Over the next few years this became the norm (or so it seemed to me) with various additions via White Dwarf in support of new model releases, which coincided with my exiting from the hobby. I'm sure with appropriate discussion / house ruling all of this could be worked through in a mature manner, either agreeing on certain aspects being overpowered or working in ways for items to be used by the 'wrong' faction. However whether a rule set tends towards the 2nd or late-3rd edition model might well be a reasonable indication of where a rule set is heading and hence whether it's right for me.