I love collecting, painting, converting and scratch building terrain. I even get to play a game once in a while. I'm a big fan of gamification as part of teaching - I'm an elementary school teacher.
This blog covers my hobby work and 'teaching through gaming'.
In Guilders: A Life In Shadows the guards will get better and more dangerous as the criminal guilds cause Alarm during the game. First is the Town Watch, simple local militia armed with batons and staffs.
When the Overall Alertness (the stacked Alarm from during the game) reaches 10, better guards will start to spawn onto the playing area. These are City Guard, actual trained soldiers from the barracks. These are armed with real weapons and good armor.
With stats as good as most Guilders and better armor, they are a bad thing to fight. And if a guilder is taken out of action, from a City Guard they roll on the injury table after the game. That adds a risk of stat decreases, long times bedridden or even death.
Fighting Town Watch will only leave them in jail and fined.
The miniatures
While waiting on the excellent city guard from Dungeons and Lasers, I've kit bashed my own. Making them distinct from town watch I've used bodies with metal armor. Perry Miniatures and some old Warhammer bits.
For their bracers I've gone with metal instead of leather colors. And for helmets I've been using Perry and Bretonnian bits, for a cooler look (compared to the simply skull caps of the townwatch).
Half the city guard have been armed with swords and Oathmark shields. The other half I've armed with halberds, for that classic guard look.
The plan is (in time) to add even more guards, enough for actual Oathmark regiments.
Time to share some of the kings men. This is the Town Watch the first type of soldiers the guilders will face in any Heist, these are the troops starting on the board at setup. There's two two tiers of soldiers above these.
The Guards in Guilders are controlled by an 'AI' written in the rules. They react to Guilders and the Alarm they cause. There's a flow chart to go through for each guard to see how they react. We've been spending a lot of time in playtesting with this.
Figuring out if it worked and if specific scenarios broke the AI. Currently the guard rules have not seen any tweaking for the last couple of games - so they work pretty well now. No situations have come up, where it wasn't clear what they should do.
The full rules for guard behavior is on p.13 of the rules - or check out this QRS for guard activation.
Town Watch
Little more than poorly armed commoners. The town watch is only paid a few coin, their real pay is the benefits: Meals when on watch, a decent coat and a pair of boots. The Town Watch patrol the street, talk to people, tend the streetlamps at night. Neighbors with clubs really, looking out for their neighborhood.
Many Town Watch have dogs, good companions when walking the streets at night. Someone to talk too and they have a good nose for finding anything hiding the shadows.
The bits: My first town watch models have been build mostly with a mix of Perry Miniatures European Mercenaries and Oathmark Humans. The quaterstaff clubs have been made with either Perry halberds or Oathmark spears. The club heads are from all manner of different kits. The torches are from various frostgrave kits. Some might be from the folk rabble from Fireforge.
For the heads I've been deliberately going for open helmets and homely faces. I want a clear difference between these and the City Guard.
Painting: I've gone blue and white for uniforms. I already have a bunch of guys like this for Oathmark and Lorenthia in RoSD. So slowly it'll gain numbers for full Oathmark regiments.
I've added some large brown areas on torsos and bracers, to clearly mark these guys as lightly armored.
The dogs are from the stash. Two of these are plastic board game miniatures from Reichbusters by Mythic Games. One is a metal dog from Offensive Miniatures, part of a police set. Got those for Last Days.
While doing a stream on the Oathmark - Battlesworn book, I also filmed my orc and goblin army. I spend a few minutes showing off the units and talking about them. I also go over in which way I plan to expand the army.
A quick little video, I'm very happy with the current state of the army.
Remember you can check out all my Oathmark stuff in more detail here.
First little regiment of archers have been added to my army. Goblin archers are really terrible, so as long as it's only a 10 man unit I think it'll be orcs. As with all regiments in this army it's a mix of whatever various models I had around and have bought for cheap. So mostly LotR and North Star models for this one here.
I'm unsure of the best size for archer regiments. I've build 30 archer models, for 3 regiements of 10 or 2 regiments of 15.
As with all the monoposers I've made sure to mix up the colors. Different skin tones, hair colors. Using grey, brown and red in different locations.
Anoterh example of trying to add variation through color. Also made sure to use different tufts on the bases.
A couple of North Star goblins as well.
For the banner I've gone with the regular theme. Skull, orange and symbols. I've added mountains as it's a theme throughout the army. Because this is an archer regiment, I've paid a small bow and arrows on the banner.
Wolf rider scouts
I really like the wolf rider models. Only iffy thing about them is the design of the wolves. The wolfs are two sides and don't mix. Three wolf models on each sprues. I would have liked a design, that hide the seam better. Especially the one on the head.
Unlike most regiments in the army, this is pure North Star miniatures. But I've upgraded with some 'better' bits from the box. Quivers from other miniature lines have much more detail. The banner is from the old Empire GW flagellants kit. Perfect for cavalry, as the scout can still fire his bow.
1000+ pts army
The first little real army of just over 1000 points. Lovely to have an army done, wanting it to grow even more over time.
New units for my slowly growing Oathmark orc and goblin army. This is one of the units I decided to make for getting to a 1000 pts playable list.
Orc warriors
Plain, simple orc warriors with hand weapons and shields. This is the first 10 models done for the unit, I have another 10 models lined up for painting. As with all the regiments in this army, it's a nice mix of miniatures from all other the place.
As with the other units I've switched between different brown, grey and reds - for a varied look. I've picked out as different shields as possible, for variation in the look as well.
A metal LotR hero and a plastic orc. I've added a shield to the hero model.
The unit officer (the standardbearter) and another orc. The banner is from A games workshop skaven banner. I've gone for a Tower of Sauron look on this. Huge tower with a burning eye. The other orc has a beastmen shield, I like those more than the northstar ones.
Here's an example of getting different looks at the same monopose models. There's a lot of cheap LotR plastics in my army. So I've made sure to use different hair colors, shield designs, green skins tones, warpaint. The clothing colors red, brown and grey have been mixed as well. Also make sure that the tuft on the bases are different.
I've spend no time converting, cutting of weapons or heads. This works well enough.
Orcs, orcs - more orcs. Some of these are converted, as they came second hand with broken weapons. So I've added some from the North Star goblin kit.
A better look of the the Tower of Sauron banner design for this unit. Using these symbols across units and always adding orange to the banners.
Cave Troll
You need trolls in a evil overlord army. I've taken a troll from my Dungeon Saga: Warlord of Galahir expansion. I have two of these, so I'm gonna do a bit of conversion work on the second one.
He's rather big and I like the model. But I need to find a good third troll for the unit. But in the 1000 pts army, this monster is running solo.
1000+ points
Here's a photo of the first army. 1000 pts and just a bit over that. I didn't think I would ever make a mass battle army again, but I'm really happy with the look of the project. The army looks good and It'll be fun to expand it even further with even more models.
And a quick attempt at shooting a small video of the army.
Oathbreakers is out, the second expansion for Osprey Games fantasy battle game Oathmark. After reading the expansion a couple of times, here's my initial thoughts on it - it's a review.
This expansion has a lots of goods in it, real heavy matter. We get
Undead Armies
Ledendary Heroes
Military Expeditions - campaigns
Setup and artwork
The book is setup as we know it from the core book and the first expansion, so we're not gonna spend time on that. One of the things I was missing in the first expansion was new photos of all the units North Star has been bringing out - and more original artwork.
We've probably all seen the amazing North Star skeletons and metal miniatures released. These models are not in the book. But as we've learned from talking to multible Osprey authors, there's almost a 2 year release time on these book. So as the series go we'll see more and more different miniatures in them.
So no skeletons in the book, but light elves, heavy dwarf and goblin wolf riders. All in all that makes for a much more interesting book.
And then there's the art! Woop! A ton of new pieces of original artwork - many centered around the undead theme. I think the art is amazing. It shows a kind of undead fitting for the dark ages fantasy, not too evil or doomy. It sends a good old school fantasy vibe. Take your time and really look at the art,
there's lots of stories told in those pieces.
Undead Armies
This is a major expansion to the Oathmark game bringing in a full new faction. A pretty detailed faction as well. The army is primarily made up from two things: skeletons and revenants.
The skeletons is your classic fantasy minions, cheap, not too good a fighting. Then there's the revenants - making me thinks of Skyrims Daugr. Soldiers laid to rest, kind of mummified, raised to fight again. Skeleton are obviously raised by death magic and necromancers. Revenants are raised in part from still clinging to the oaths they've sworn in life. And that angle fits really well with the story of The Marches.
Revenants are good soldiers, hard hitting. A revenant cavalry miniatures is 70 points and a chariot is 150 points. So they're elite units.
Oathbreakers doesn't bring rules for using chariots in other armies. That is yet to come - perhaps in Bane of Kings. The undead faction is described as bronze age (vs Oathmark iron age) - so that also explains the lack of war chariots (from a historical perspective at least).
Leaders
An undead force will be lead either by a Revenant King (his army serving him in death through oaths sworn) or a high level Necromancer. A powerful necromancer will never follow a king, he'll raise and lead an army of his own. So there's two different leader types, and it's interesting to see a spell casting leader.
The necromancers know all the right tricks, classic death magic, leading my thoughts to old editions of Warhammer. He'll steal health and raise more troops for his units.
Mixing races and units is a key part of the Oathmark army system and anybody will be able to use undead units (if you build the new undead territories in your kingdom). Nothing stopping you there, but living races have penalties. It's not inspiring for morale to work under an undead king and along side dead things - so no morale or activation bonus.
Special rules
There's a bunch of special rules in place to make the undead unique. Undead and uncaring will make undead harder to kill with shooting attacks and prevent them from breaking due to morale. But they will take damage when failing morale. Classic undead.
For skeletons it further goes that they are harder to activate (rolling only one dice, unless close to a commander) and the only work with a spellcaster in the army. No friendly spellcaster on the table and all skeltons are removed as casualties.
Legendary Heroes
Battlesworn gave us simple rules for elite units. That's already been covered in a previous review and the rules were fairly simple. Keep the game running smooth. Oathbreakers make similar rules for heroes (commanders and champions), but with some more depth.
Any army can include 1 legendary hero at a time (unless you agree on more with the opponent). You create a legendary hero by paying regular point cost + 30 points. The hero get to choose 1 heroic ability (there's 24 to choose from). I really like this mechanic, as you can add some really good tricks to your army. Making deadlier warriors, better commanders, more effective spellcasters. For 30 points, some tricks can be pretty good. Like in Rangers of Shadow Deep all the heroic abilities can only be used once pr game - so choose and use them wisely.
Experience
This system is new, and I quite like it. A legendary hero will gain experience from each game they participate in and depending on how well they do. The XP needed to level up and gain a new heroic ability is the point cost of the model. So a king being really expensive (with 30 points already added) will need many XP to gain a second heroic trait. After that his point cost goes up by 30 again, and he needs to reach the limit again (starting from scratch in XP). So champions with multible abilities will be rare and super expensive.
Injury and death
Should a legendary hero die in battle or flee, you roll on an injury table. This can see the hero having to skip next battle (or battles) from wounds, die completely or be captured. The captured result is really funny, as the ransom will be adding extra points to the opponent next game.
The hero system adds a lot to Oathmark, without breaking anything. It's much more detailed and fleshed out than the battle honors system. And since heroes will only have one or two - one-use tricks, it's not gonna drag things down.
Military Expeditions
A great way to make an expansion worth it is by adding these mini campaign. Special connected scenarios, with a story and consequences for winning and losing battles. The book contains three missions, with three scenarios each. All centered around part of The Marches with lots of undead activity.
Even without the the campaign element, nine new scenarios is a good amount of game time to get through.
There's 13 new territories (not adding units, but having other effects on the Kingdom), some are unique and can only be acquired through playing the military expeditions.
Final thoughts
I really like Oathbreakers, it's a great expansion and it adds good solid chunks to the Oathmark game. I hope this is the level of material we'll see in the future expansion. Not only a few units here and there, but huge gameplay expansions.
It'll be really good to see which kits North Star brings out - especially how they plan to do revenant kits. And with even more kits, we'll see even better photos in the future books. Overall the artwork and miniature shots is much higher in quality and diversity now, than be the release of the core book.
If you need to get only one expansion for Oathmark, you should go with this one over Battlesworn. Oathbreakers is really good.
I'm still hoping to see some siege rules for the game. Let that be an expansion after Bane of Kings. And some fleshing out the campaign for multiplayer is needed, as it's worded towards a war between two kinggoms now (with occupying territories etc).
the first three expansions were written at the same time. Battlesworn, Oathbreakers and Bane of Kings.
the release order was messed up by Covid19, Oathbreakers should have been first.
From the text on the back of the book, this expansion should contain:
elite units, unit progression from battle to battle
rivers and boats
mini campaigns
In this review, I'll be getting a look at the three things promised. When I first flipped through the book, I turned on the camera. So you can see that here, before reading the actual review below.
Setup, editing, artwork
We're not going to spend a lot of time on this bit. The book is well edited, the table of contents shows everything in it and where to look. Super easy and done in the same style as the core rulebook.
There's a few new art pieces in this expansion, they look good. Same artist as the core book, so it's all familiar. Nice and old school looking stuff. Check the video above for a good look at it all.
Everything has been slowed down from Covid. North Star has multiple new plastic kits planned, metal miniatures for specialist units and monsters. There's a lot of Oathmark stuff coming. I think it'll be interesting to see future supplements containing photos of it all. Frostgrave 2nd edition has so many different photos and art work - collected over the years.
And this will be good for Oathmark as well, as the photos and art doesn't bring a lot of new stuff in this expansion. Goes to show the timeline for releases on these books. There's not a single shot of dwarf heavy infantry or elf light infantry in the book, and those kits have been out for some time now.
Anyway. .. if you want more words on layout and such, go check out the core book review. Same good work in this expansion.
1. Battle Honours
This is the part I was most excited about with this expansion. I had a very clear idea and expectation of what this should be like. Classic skirmish style XP, levels, skill gains and injuries - like in so many skirmish games. Play long enough and you'll hit a point going 'this dude has so many cool skills, but he's missing an eye, a toe and is shell shocked - do I keep him?'
This is what I expected from the text. This is not what we got.
Battle honours are a set of pretty simple rules. Standard units (not monsters, slaves or militia) can receive battle honors. At the end of each battle you fight, you can chose to award one surviving unit battle honours. Consider this unit an option for future battles (you don't have to include it in your army - it's just part of your kingdom).
This unit will have a single re-roll on a morale or activation test during the game, and the unit cost goes up 10%. I've not played Oathmark enough, but it seems pretty expensive for one reroll, especially if it's already an expensive linebreaker unit.
If the unit ever dies in battle, you roll to see if they lose the battle honours or can still be recruited. After each battle you can award a new unit battle honours or give even more rerolls to a veteran unit. You can only bring one battle honoured unit to the table, so consider having multiple units tools in your kingdom tool box.
I asked Joseph about this rule - and he said it's simple on purpose. Use it or don't, it won't break the game and add a ton of record keeping. And the 'normal character progression' thing I was hoping for, will be in Oathbreakers for heroes.
2a. Engineers
These are not mentioned on the back of the book. But all armies can now bring engineers onto the table. Engineers are small units, that can make or break battlefield cover during the game. Fairly simple. I'm not sure how it's gonna work, with moving around and activation. But for attacker / defender scenarios it might be fun, adding a few barricades during the game.
Perhaps engineers will get a bigger role in a future (crossing my fingers) siege expansion. But for now, they seem... not that useful. But they play a part in the mini campaign included, and it's a good reason to convert some cool miniatures.
2b. Rivers and Boats
Of all the things that could be brought out first, this seems a bit weird (again, give me siege rules) - but Joseph writes the rules he has ideas for and the release order was messed up.
The game Oathmark takes place in The Marches, so it makes sense that there's a lot of water around. In the book are simple rules for small and large boats. I like that the rules are simple. Boats themselves are free, but you must pay a cost for some crew. Players are encouraged to agree upon using boats, when setting up a scenario with enough water.
The rules are super simple and that's good. River move the boats automatically because the river has a current. Then a boat can move as normal with activation. Archers can shoot from and at boats, which provides cover. If boats ram each other the units in the boats have to fight. A small boat can have 1 unit and a large boat can have 2. No model count, no need to place then on the boat. One or two units - done. That keeps things simple.
The rules for boats and rivers are nice to have, to spice up a scenario. And should be considered as such, another tool for the sandbox of Oathmark.
There's new water based spells for each army as well.
3. Military Expeditions
This part is really what makes the book worth getting. Just like I've come to expect from Frostgrave expansions. In Oathbreakers you get three small mini campaign military expeditions to play out. Connected scenarios, that carries small consequence from one game to the next.
So there's 10 new scenario in the book (four, two and four). And they're all centered around the rules for engineers and boats. All the military expeditions have the possibility of adding new special territories (in the outer ring) to you kingdom. Unique ones being an abandoned temple, island of flowers or gold mine.
For me at least, that's a lot of extra gameplay for a few buck. And the scenarios can probably be played fine as one offs as well.
Should you get the book - is it worth it?
Battlesworn is a neat little expansion and it's not that expensive. Is it a must have for Oathmark? No - it isn't. Battlesworn is a small expansion of the sandbox. If you're in a group and want to build cool ships - then get yourself battlesworn. Make a hobby project to all build some ships for the campaign.
The battle honours thing might be fun for some, it adds options. Nothing game breaking or must have. I would still have liked more comprehensive 'battle honours' and tracking of progress for units. Never mind the extra bookkeeping if you're not playing competitive gaming. It could have added a lot to the story of an army.
But nothing that fundamentally change the core rules or gameplay. I like that about an expansion. It doesn't break the core game, it doesn't add anything in terms of unfair advantage.
Any last words ... punk?!
Yes, please. If you enjoy reviews like this or the book flipping above, please consider helping out the blog. I enjoy the hobby immensely, also this entire 'news' angle to it. You can help this be dropping some follows on the below social media.
It's not like I'm ever gonna make money of the bloggeverse, and I'm not aiming for it. But exposure is cool and it drops of a few extra books for me. Cheers,
We've had the immense pleasure of having Joseph A. McCullough over on Bloodbeard's Garage Discord for a hobby talk about his games. So that make our second Garage Talk.
For two full hours we were allowed to ask about anything related to his works and upcoming releases. I think we even have some breaking news. That's awesome!
Frostgrave: 2nd edition, launch in covid times and the upcoming expansion The Red King
Oathmark: Not the launch it deserved, new kits, new expansions. Bane of Kings and Oathbreakers.
I got this model to work as a goblin leader for Vanguard (planning to use the Dungeon Saga goblins and trolls). I've never gotten around to Vanguard, but I decided to paint him as a champion for my Oathmark army of greenskins.
The miniature is actually sculpted to have a bare stomach and a smaller round plate. I didn't like that look, so decided to paint him as wearing a bigger full torso armor plate. Doesn't look as comical that way.
Goblin spearmen
When getting in to Oathmark I decided to do the army on as low a budget as possible. So after looking in a sale group I got a huge lot of LoTR orcs. Terrible painted and some with missing heads and weapons.
When building the models I've made sure to use as many different spears and shields as possible. Each model has a different shield.
When painting I've made sure that each model had some red (the army color), and different brown and grey areas as well. These are not as elite as the Linebreakers, who had full red uniforms.
When painting mono pose miniatures this is also a good way to break up the monolook. I used different browns, greys and red on different areas. Also made sure to use different hair colors and 6 different skin tones.
In the end the regiment is a mix of GW LotR, dungeon saga and Oathmark miniatures.
