Border Defence

In the Kingdom's phase of the same turn that saw the Knights fend off an attack, one of my cavalry units made contact with the goblin raiders they had been tracking last turn.

Eight Rep 4, mounted men-at-arms, armed with lances, entered a clearing only to find two Possible Enemy Forces not one foot away.

The two forces resolved into some 15 greenskins including a massive orc leader and a troll.

A seemingly formidable foe.

They charged.

We counter-charged.

There was a dreadful din as the two forces met.

"There's something wrong with our bloody Gobbos today!"

Although outnumbered my lads won all of their combats save one, that against the troll.

The disparity in losses was apparently too much for the Gobbos and they fled.

Only to be mercilessly ridden down.

One of the lads held back to pick up the banner of our fallen comrade.

A quick regrouping and it was off to seek out the final Possible Enemy Force, that had been making a racket in a thick cluster of woods.

Twas nae a Gobbo.

And so the end of another successful fight.

Mind you the Gobbos can't roll well to (literally) save their lives today.

Two games in the space of a few hours with breaks to take photos and edit them. Swordplay 2015 is certainly fast playing. Makes it ideal to resolve actions in a campaign game.

A Frontier Skirmish

The season was off to a slow start. Only a few raiding parties made for the Green River, just as only a few parties of settlers set out for the frontier.

The goblins that had crossed the river were being held at bay by pursuing detachments of troops. It was a shame that they could not be run down, but at least they weren't roaming the countryside at will.

When a goblin camp moved closer to the fort, the garrison commander attempted a raid of his own. An elite battle composed of knights and woodsmen set out across the bridge and into goblin country.

The trail of the village was easy enough to find. As expected it fell back before the raiders. Trying to catch goblins unaware in their homeland was near impossible.

While there was no sight of the village the same can not be said of the goblins. Signs pointed to a warband ahead and the commander deployed accordingly...

The expeditionary force consists of a detachment of 8 Rep 5 knights and 8 Rep 5 woodsmen, the latter although unarmoured are equipped with bows and hand weapons.

Given that any troops engaged today would need to refit, I elected to only use half of each detachment.

Despite the look of the table, this engagement took place entirely in woods. This limited LOS to 12" at best. Consider the entire table to be tree covered with the exception of the two oval bits of ground without trees on the Kingdom's base line. These are clearings.

The oval area in the center of the table, covered with trees is a patch of particularly heavy wood. 

The enemy PEF's were deployed and the humans advanced, woodsmen strung out in a skirmish line with the knights behind ready to charge through the intervals.

With a great rukus of snapping trees and blood curdling yells, a bunch of green skins burst out of the dense wood. Two trolls, three goblins, and three orcs all told.

The archers let fly and those not brought down by the volley were charged.

Only the trolls and a particularly brave or fool hearty orc met the charge.

 All three were soon trampled under hoof.

A second group appeared from the thickets. 

 They were beyond the reach of the woodsmen so the knights put spur to their mounts and charged.

Again the foe were ridden down.

And that sufficiently took the fight out of the green skins and ended the proceedings.

An easy victory perhaps but then the troll were decidedly having an off day. Each was a match for a knight and each rolled appalling scores in combat.

Back on the campaign map, the goblins are being pursued in the west, are absent from the center, and are massing in the east.

This skirmish will give me a slight bump in morale should prove largely inconsequential in the long run.

Never Let a Coincidence Go to Waste!

The pub incident may prove useful to some of you who may find the idea of  running a narrative campaign* daunting.

Accidents will happen

By that I mean it can be difficult to try and come up with a story with which to link your games. So here is one way to go about it.

Just lay on your first game. Any pretext will do for that one. Boris the Slovenly covets Ragnar the Repugnant's Golden Stool for example.

Often, and this applies to solo, co-op and traditional gaming,you can forge a connection between events that happened during the game and run with them.

In the Battle of Naughty Rhyme there were two actually unconnected events that can be connected to give some back story to future games.

1. The Pub caught fire (random event).

2. The Wee Folk rolled over the 21st. without breaking a sweat. (luck of the dice).

Putting those two unrelated events together we now have a narrative: The Wee Folk, believing the pub fire to have been a deliberate act of orc barbarity, were berserk with rage and nothing could stand before them.

Now here is fodder for any number of future scenarios. If the rules being used cater for such one could say that the wee folk now "hate" the orcs, or that the orcs now "fear" the wee folk. Or to make it even for those so inclined the "hate" can be mutual.

In short, never let a coincidence go to waste when playing a narrative campaign!

* A "narrative campaign" is a series of games related to one another simply by a storyline as opposed to, for example, a "map campaign" where games result from movement on a strategic map. "The 98", from which the pub incident spawned, is actually a map campaign. In contrast the adventures of Giglamps are strung together only by the narrative of his actions. As followers of Giggers will already know, a narrative campaign can even weave map campaigns and one off games into the same thread.