The Fate of Alt Clut – Parts 2–4

A long overdue report on how things stand in our Dux Britanniarum campaign "The Fate of Alt Clut".

We managed to play four games, before taking a break for the summer way back in June. And now, here in November, we're still on that break and I don't think we'll be able to continue with the campaign until some time next year.

Anyway, rather than a detailed account of each game, I'll just do a quick summary and then finish off the post with some thoughts on Dux Britanniarum and the campaign.

The first game was a Pict raid on an Angles village, which ended in a marginal victory for the raiders. You can read more about that game here.

In the second game, it was time for the Picts to test their might against of the Britons of Alt Clut proper. And what an interesting game this turned out to be – it became very clear that playing in a campaign poses and imposes certain challenges on it's own, which is exactly the thing I'm after!

The battlefield, with the church in the middle,
surrounded by fields and a garden.
The Picts arrive from the top edge, and the Britons
from the right edge.

The Picts had their eyes set on a newly erected church just outside Mygedawc, where the holy relics were said to be of much value and the church's roof clad in gold.

I took command of the raiding Picts while my good mate Dalauppror commanded the staunch Britons – suitably reinforced with some heavy cavalry to hunt down the fast raiders.

Things didn't start too well for the Picts when I rolled two ones in a row: one for my morale roll and one for how many rounds headstart I would get. It seemed I would have to press forward as much as possible to try and get to the church before the Britons could form up a solid defense with their pesky shield walls.

The Britons making a swift advance with their levy,
trying to intercept the slow moving Picts screened by
their skirmishers and horsemen.

Unfortunately, my skirmishers got a little too enthusiastic while the other troops advanced far too cautiously. This meant the skirmishers got neutralised pretty quickly, even though they managed to tie up the Briton's cavalry for a while, buying me much needed time. As I found out, the skirmishers were badly needed as a way to soften up the Britons in shield walls before going in with the regular raiders.

The Britons cavalry arrive and immediately get locked in a lengthy
chase of the Picts' skirmishers.

After a couple of rounds of slogging towards the church, with some truly abysmal rolls for movement, it was clear this was not the Picts' day and I decided to withdraw to fight another time. But not before trying one last desperate attempt to get the upper hand: the Pictish Lord lead a mad attack against the British levy in shield wall. However, the only result of this attack was an honorable wound for the Lord and, predictably, some more fleeing Picts. The Britons tried to hunt down the fleeing raiders but only managed to inflict some minor losses after all. Result: a slight win for the Britons.

The Pictish Lord leads a suicide attack on the British levy in shield wall.
With predictable result ...

The Britons closing in on the raiders.

The Britons' cavalry, finally having destroyed the last skirmishers,
makes short work of the Pictish Lord's unit.

In face of the staunch British defense, the Pictish raiders
decide to call it a day.

And once again peace is restored.
Maybe even with a little help from The Man himself?

The month after the Picts were at it again, raiding a Romano-British farm. This time we switched sides, with me commanding the Britons and Dalauppror the Picts. Once again the raiders came up short as the British cavalry proved just as effective this time – a couple of well-placed charges saw the Pictish morale crumble and they were once again forced to withdraw in humiliating defeat.

Below are some pictures from this game:

An overview of the battlefield: Picts to the north
and Britons to the south.

Pictish cavalry rushing ahead of the main force.
"Daddyyyyyyy!!!"

The Picts arrive first and start to swarm all over the farm,
looking for things to knick.

Eventually the Romano-Britons arrive and everything degenerates
into that familiar mosh-pit of Dark Ages fighting.

Choo! Choo! You're about to get charged by some very angry cavalry.
What do you do?

With the Picts slightly weakened, the Angles (who were now up to full strength) saw an opportunity for an easy victory. They made a quick raid into the Picts' lands and stole some cattle. On their way back they were attacked by the returning Picts, who were eager to prove themselves after the failed raid against the Briton farm. However, the slightly under-strength force – no cavalry – proved no match for the aggressive Angles and another Pictish defeat was a fact. Sadly we didn't take any pictures of this game.

And so after 4 games and 3 months "in-game time" we have 2 victories for the Romano-Britons and 1 victory each for the Angles and the Picts. As is my general experience the attackers/raiders really need a good plan and some lucky dice rolls to win. It's also obviously of importance where the objective is placed – if it's placed far from the entry point of the attacker, it's going to be a tough match for them to win even with a couple of rounds of head start.

As for the rules themselves, they work fine for the most part but suffer somewhat from under-explanation. The added/adjusted rules for cavalry in the Raiders book, and the following confusion, really highlighted this I think.

I won't blame all the problems on the text though, as some of it is us, the players, coming to the game with a pre-conception of how things should be. When things aren't very clearly spelled out, we tend to fall back on how things usually work in our interpretations, which with rules such as these – with hidden depths, and elegant interactions between the different parts – makes for a somewhat confusing experience. It's easy to miss the smaller nuances, glossing them over in a quick read-through, when you think you already know how things work.

To be fair, the author has tried very hard to try and answer any questions but I really think there should be an updated version, with better explanations, or maybe simply a compiled FAQ-document like the one for Chain of Command.

I must confess that personally, my initial excitement for Dux Britanniarum has begun to wane a bit. Maybe this break was a good thing after all, giving us time to let the excitement build again. Because eventually, I really do want to continue with this campaign. The fate of Alt Clut still hangs in the balance ...

Thank you very much for reading!

And finally a big thank you to Michael/Dalauppror for supplying me with all the pictures for this post!

Update: Hey everyone, I didn't mean for this to turn into "let's bash Dux Britanniarum" and scare anyone away from this most excellent game. We've played close to 20 games of it by now – more than any other game I've ever played! – and it's really been tremendously fun.

My comments on its shortcomings were just to say that I think a great game could be even better. I would be very happy with an updated version with some tidying up of the text, together with some more and better explanations/clarifications and examples. Failing this, I'd be satisfied with a regularly updated FAQ-document.

Pigs!

It's been very quiet around here lately due to several factors including enjoying the very nice Swedish summer but mainly because I've prioritized painting over blogging. Here are the first results of these painting sessions – some prime Dark Age bacon, with a serious attitude!

These are iron age pigs, closely resembling wild boars (they even have the imposing tusks).

Once more these are from the boys at Gripping Beast, my regular suppliers of Dark Age goodies.

With these finished I should have plenty of choice of what livestock to steal when raiding.

Thanks for reading! Coming up are some more landsknechts/reisläufers.

Cattle and Cane

Taking a short break from my Italian Wars French (don't worry, I'll get back to them soon) with a quick Dark Ages diversion: The next game in our Dux Britanniarum campaign will be a cattle raid and for this we naturally needed some cattle – and sheep too it seems. I've had these Gripping Beast models in the lead pile for a while and now was the perfect time to finally paint them up.

This was a quick job, mostly using drybrushing and washes and for such limited amount of work they turned out pretty good I think. I have no idea if the colours are correct though, but they look fine to my untrained eyes. The sculpts are perhaps a bit rough but perfectly serviceable.

I must apologize for the bad pictures. Lately I've had some real trouble taking good pictures. They just look washed out with most of the the highlights killed, and I can't quite figure out why. I think I need to experiment some more with my setup.

Anyway, speaking of our Dux Brit campaign, I have started on an AAR from our second game (we have played three so far) but work, family obligations and computer trouble have kept me from working on it. Hopefully I'll get some time during this coming week to finish the report.

Thanks for looking! Have a great week everyone!

The Fate of Alt Clut – Part 1: Introduction

After lots of talking – and lots of painting and terrain building on my part – we finally kicked off our new Dux Britanniarum campaign last Monday.

I choose to base the campaign in Alt Clut, the northernmost kingdom of the Britons. Here they are trapped between the raiding Picts in the north, primarily from the Pictish kingdom of Fib, and the aggressively expanding Angles in the east, primarily raiding from the former British kingdom of Bernaccia.

As you can see, this is a three faction campaign and we will use the simple rules from the Raiders book to determine who has the initiative in each month, and gets first say as to what they want to do. This will be a pretty loose campaign, with whoever showing up commanding one of the forces – but in theory I suspect it will just be Michael/Dalauppror and me for the most part.

As I'm keen to try out all the factions (this being is our first campaign in Dux Britanniarum proper, rather than some sort of tweaking for another period) we'll be alternating between them, so that no one will play eg the Picts for the whole campaign.

To begin with, we plan to do one full campaign year and then we'll see about continuing. Alt Clut is a one-province kingdom, which means the total campaign shouldn't last too long. However, three forces still means quite a lot of games: 8 raiding months per year, with a possible 2 games per month makes it a maximum of 16 games for the year. Though in practice I think it'll be much fewer than that.

For the first game, rather than roll for initiative I simply decided that the Picts had the initiative and would raid an Angle village, as we were eager to test out the new Raiders' rules.

Dalauppror set up the table in his usual excellent way and away we went. We had another guy from the club, Jesper, joining us and he got to command the Picts while Dalauppror took the Angles and I acted as game master/referee. I got so caught up in the game, I forgot to take pictures, but luckily Dalauppror managed some snaps so a big thank you to him for letting me use these in this post!

The Picts had a whole four rounds headstart, but some not too great rolls for movement meant they had just reached the outskirts of the village before the Angles turned up and the fighting began.

The table at the start of the game: the Picts have arrived from the top-most edge
and made their way to the village, while the Angles have just arrived,
ready to drive the raiders away.

A group of Picts managed to enter one building and quickly found all the loot they wanted (the raider's special rules for looting paid off nicely), while their comrades outside managed to hold their ground against the on-coming Angles.

The Picts are getting ready to plunder the barn,
while the Angles are getting ready to attack the intruders.

The Angle's elites arrive, to try to even out the odds a bit.

The Picts proved to be tough fighters and drove some of the Angles off, much thanks to some well-placed flank charges (nice use of Carpe Diem cards). However, they were now pretty badly beaten up and hard pressed from the Angles who had managed to reform their forces before it was too late.

The battle seesawing: while the Angle's elites press forward
to the left in the picture, the Picts have pushed back the other
Angels (to the right) and set them up for a charge by the cavalry.

We had to call the game off early due to running out of time and looking at the situation, we decided the Picts dropped the loot and made a hasty retreat while the Angles stood their ground not really being in any shape to pursue them. Counting up the casualties, we were a little surprised to see the Picts coming out on top with just 6 men lost while the Angles had lost a total of 13 men. A slight victory for the raiders then.

The Picts would replace their casualties and be ready to raid in the next month (April). The Angles in turn, would need to 2 months before they were up to full strength (May). As a result we decided that the Angles would not raid this month and as the Britons could not do anything (they can only initiate actions when they have lost lands) this meant the first month/round of the campaign was over.

In the next round the Angles will again not raid, preferring to wait until all their losses are replaced, and the Picts will therefore be free to act however they want. Rather than raid the now weakened Angles, we thought it would be more fun to pit them against the Britons. So the next game will be Picts against Britons.

It was great to finally start up the campaign, and to return to Dux Britanniarum – it's still by far my favourite game and campaign system, even though it's not without its faults (mainly in the presentation/text).

It's been a while since we last played the game, and I'm not sure Jesper had actually played it before, so we were a bit rusty. We spent some time flicking through the rules (which, let's face it, could be better presented and explained) which was only expected. We also made a couple of mistakes, but nothing too game changing I think. Overall, a great start to the campaign and I'm really looking forward to continuing.

Thanks for reading – have a nice weekend everyone!

Updated Casualty Markers

I've used my casualty markers from a couple of years back in a fair number of games now, but always found them a bit fiddly. When Warbases came out with their clever model I bought a bunch of them, with the plan to rebase the old casaulty miniatures on these. Well, more than a year later I've finally gotten around to it.

The old bases. Perfectly serviceable, but fiddly to use due to that tiny micro dice you first have to pick up, then find the right number on and then put back in the tiny hole.

And the new.

These are much easier to use and read in the heat of battle. An added bonus is that these go all the way up to 12 (even more than Spinal Tap!), whereas the old ones obviously only goes up to 6.

I took the time to add another highlight or two (not that it shows in these pictures though) when I already had them on the workbench. They were originally painted very quickly, and it felt nice to bring their standard up a notch or two.

Right, that's all the dark ages stuff for now. It's high time I turn my full attention to the codpieces, puffed sleeves and outrageous slashes of the Italian Wars.

Thanks for looking, have a great week everyone!

Medieval Civilians

One thing I really like about my friend Dalauppror's lovely terrain set-ups, is his use of extras such as civilians. It really gives life to the scenes on the tabletop and helps transform the game into an exciting story.

I've always wanted to do something like this for my own games and now, with my dark age village finished, I've finally taken the time to actually do it.

The miniatures are from Black Tree Design's Feudal Range and perhaps more suited to the proper medieval period, rather than the dark ages, but why be picky?

Fifty shades of ... brown.

They will make their first appearance on the tabletop this coming Monday as villagers, in the first game of our new Dux Britanniarum campaign. More about this later.

Thanks for looking, have a great weekend everyone!

Holy Men

If you build it, they will come ...

Here are some pious monks for my newly built church.

The miniatures are from Black Tree Design.

"Go forth and spread the Word my brothers."

"Hello Goutodin!" Testing out the acoustics of the new place.

Next up are some peasants. The monks need some people to preach to.

On another note: The Raiders are up for preorder!

Thanks for looking, have a great week everyone!

Dark Age Church

And now for that little something extra I pomised last week: if you have a dark age village, you naturally need a big freaking church to raid or to defend (not to mention pray in). So here it is.

The design is more or less copied from the one seen on Lard Island News, but as I had to estimate the measurements from the pictures I think mine came out a little too big. The design posed a couple of interesting challenges – especially the apse with its semi-circle and semi-conical roof took some thinking before I came up with the solutions. Coming up with the solutions to problems like these is half the fun with these projects though!

I experimented a bit with some selected washing on the plaster to get a better "depth" on the model, and I really like the effect. I'm not sure how much it shows on the photos though. I think I will go back and do some washing on the other buildings as well.

The main roof lifts off, to get access to the inside of the building.

A simple dirt floor – this ain't no cathedral.

Unwelcome guests ...

The door is not scratch-built but a resin piece from Antenociti's Workshop. It may be a bit anachronistic, but there you go.

It's a fun coincidence that my good gaming buddy Dalauppror and I both started building our churches at roughly the same time, unaware of each other's projects. His is much more impressive though – go check it out if you haven't already!

Of course, when I'd just about finished this church I came upon another design which I think possibly may be a bit more historically correct – I don't know for sure. Maybe I need to build me another church some day just to be certain ...

Now, all that's left are some peasants to populate the village, and maybe a priest or some monks for the church.

Thanks for reading, have a great week everyone!

Dark Age Village

I have now finished the rest of the buildings for the dark age village. They are made in the same style as the barn I posted earlier. There are one large house and two smaller – although to be honest, the smallest one is really more of a shed than a house.

Some more pictures of the buildings below with some saxons for scale.

All the roofs are of course removable.

Where's the loot?!

Well, I said the village is finished but I think it needs a little something extra ...  Stay tuned for next week!

Pictish Raiders

From the north they came ...

A month or so back, I realized I hadn't put up any pictures of the Pict raiding force I finished last year, so when I got the time I arranged some terrain and took some photos. Then things got in the way, as they have a tendency to do, and it took me a good while to sort out the pictures – but this week I finally took the time to finish the last few of them.

The whole warband ready to raid (click for larger image).

The force consists of the following models: one Lord with a champion and standard-bearer (the last one is for decoration only and have no effect in the Dux Britanniarum rules), one minor Noble, one group of four bow-armed skirmishers (should be crossbows according to the rules apparently, but there you go), one group of four skirmishers armed with javelins, one group of four skirmish cavalry and four groups of six raiders each.

Here is the Lord Gartnait son of Girom with his champion Caltram son of Uoret to his right. Behind him stands the trusty standard-bearer Lutrin and to the left stands proud Erip son of Domelch, a minor Noble.

Skirmishing cavalry, armed with javelins.

Skirmishers with bows.

Skirmishers with javelins.

First group of raiders.

Second group of raiders.

Third group of raiders.

Fourth group of raiders.

The miniatures are an eclectic mix of Black Tree Design, Gripping Beast, Old Glory and West Wind. Shield transfers and banner from Little Big Men Studios.

With the long (looong!) awaited Raiders supplement for the excellent Dux Britanniarum from Too Fat Lardies finally being about to be released – "in the beginning of April" is that I'm hearing – I'm getting very excited to at last be able to field this force.

Thanks for looking, have a great weekend everyone!