In Her Majesty's Name II: Getting a game on!

Summer is finished, and with it, thoughts return back indoors of an evening, towards gaming and painting. As can be seen from my *cough* frequent posts over the summer, I have painted a grand total of zero miniatures over the last four months. I have built half of one warjack for Khador, and mostly put together the new warcaster unit for the same faction. An impressive tally, you must admit. I have also gamed twice in that time. Give or take a match that I've forgotten, as it has been a very long summer.

Do not feel sorry for me though, my time away from the gaming tables has been mostly due to travels, spending time with the family and other fun ways to experience life (with a bit of work some evenings, but I don't mind that so much now and again). So, I hear you all ask, what have I done that is worthy of posting here? The short answer is In Her Majesty's Name. I posted on this game recently here, so if you don't know what it is, go on over and look.


The long answer is a little more detailed. One of my oldest, and dearest friends was over in Montreal a week ago. S and I go way back to High School, and have been gaming together, on and off since then. Unfortunately, I now live in Montreal, and he in Brussels. However, we were in the same city as he was over here for work. I think he is having trouble finding gaming close to where he is, so he was keen to make sure we got a game in while he was in town, We had a quick look through what I had ready to go, and settled on IHMN. I of course have the almost a fully painted set of the Society of Thule, and S has a soft spot for Prussians, so it was an easy fit. For my part, I put together a British Rifle Company, pulling together my Dystopian Legions Britannians for the occasion.

The lay of the land

Neither of us had really read through the rules before, but we boh had a copy, and they really are quite simple (roll 1d10, add skill, take off mods, beat target number). We got together, set up the table, and rolled a scenario from those available in the book, as this is a game that really benefits from playing though a scenario. The rules are super simple, but the complexity and variation comes from the depth of personalisation and characterisation you give the members of your company. Wether its through straight forward character traits, super science of indeed magical abilities. All this makes it a game that borders closely on and benefits greatly from role-playing, hence, the scenario was required. We rolled the 'Bad Jack' scenario, but more on that later.


The game was rather slow to start, as we jockeyed for position on the table. We were both rather concentrated on the left flank of the board, with one or two models each on the right flank. Bad Jack, the mutated laboratory experiment stalking both sides that we had to hunt down, started in the centre of the table. One thing we noticed straight away, was that, as both sides were armed with military rifles fo the most part, we were shooting each other from turn one. We could have had more scenery on the table to make this less of an issue. The second thing was that we had both thought from reading the rules that we would be dropping like flies, as after each shot, everyone makes a Pluck roll. One fail and you're out of the game. In reality, it could be relatively easy to hit someone, but we also seemed to be making an inordinate amount of Pluck rolls, which led us to evolve our game play from one of being in cover and hiding, to getting out there and getting on with it. It did mean that what we thought would be a very quick game, took longer that we anticipated.


The making of the Pluck rolls brings me back to Bad Jack. In the rules, he is given a pluck of 2+, this means on an unmodified roll of 1d10, he is only failing on a 1. Indeed, he has talents that increase this even more, and this brings me to the issue that we had with this scenario in particular, and maybe the game in general. It was almost nigh on impossible to bring down Jack, and other minis in general.

Another slight issue we had was the interaction os S's flamethrower, and my armoured walker. However, this has been fixed in the errata, so no need to go on about it here.

One modification  would make to the rules would be with the volley fire rule. This states that models can club together their shooting to bring down heavily armoured targets, which it does. They give bonuses to hit, however, I could have had all my riflemen concentrate fire on Jack, and yes, they would have hit him every time, but they would have no greater chance of actually putting him down than one alone, as they do not actually modify his pluck roll by any more than one rifle would by itself. This goes for more than just the high Pluck models, anyone facing a volley fire, or for that matter an gang in hand-to-hand, should not only be easier to hit, but have a higher chance of taking more damage. Fortunately, this is a set of rules that encourages fiddling to make it work on your own gaming table, so that is what I will do.

In summary, we liked it. It was a lot of fun, and would benefit greatly from the players putting more effort into the scenario design. This time was just to get us to run through the rules, but if I planned another game (once I convince some of the locals to play) then I would sit down before hand and work through a scenario that fits the companies first. And if I were to replay Bad Jack, he would be very much nerfed!

As a final aside, S left me with a present in the form of the rules for Muskets and Tomahawks. A rules set  have been admiring from afar, but avoiding buying the minis for. Now, I really have no excuse not to. Do I? No, I didn't think so!

...off to buy Roger's Rangers and a bunch of Iroquois...

In Her Majesty's Name

One of the things I have always promised myself is that if I were to take a break from blogging, for whatever reason, I would not apologise and make an 'I ain't dead yet" type of post So this post is definitely not one of those. What it is, however, is a draft that has been sitting in my folder for almost a year, waiting to be posted. Well, recent events have conspired for me to finally have a game of In Her Majesty's Name, so I am putting this up here as a prelude, to the post match report of that game. This is not a review of IHMN, there are plenty of those about elsewhere, but it is some of the reasons why I bought the game system. So without further ado, I'll get back to blogging...

Ooh, look!  Shiny!

Whilst I have been very clearly in a steampunk phase of gaming over the last year and a half, what with all these Dystopian Legions models, I was taken by the newest set of rules from Osprey books, In Her Majesy's Name. One of the reasons I bought it was that it is available on amazon.ca, therefore, however much I like and support my FLGS, I don't have to wait any time at all before the book is delivered to my door. It does help that I was ordering another Osprey title, and the fact that this is published in the same size and format to Osprey's other titles was just the icing on the cake for me.

It is 1895, and the world is in turmoil. The Great Powers compete for resources and the latest technology, and an undeclared and secret war rages between them all. This is the battleground of the Adventuring Companies. These clandestine agents of the Great Powers operate in the shadows, matching skills and wits in pursuit of the newest scientific formulae or powerful occult artifacts.

In Her Majesty's Name sets these Adventuring Companies against each other in one-off encounters and in longer narrative campaigns. Companies are usually comprised of 4-15 figures, and two players could easily play three games in an evening. The rules have been designed to allow maximum versatility for the player – if you can imagine it, the system will help you build it. There is, however, a wealth of ready-prepared material covering weird science, mystical powers, and a range of pre-generated Adventuring Companies, including the British Explorers' Club, the Prussian Society of Thule, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Légion Étrangère, the revolutionaries of the Brick Lane Commune, ancient Egyptian cults, and the mysterious Black Dragon Tong.

There are a few things I like about this system. Firstly, it is a skirmish game. I like me some skirmish games me! One of the other things I like is that, although there are a wide range of pre-made factions and builds to choose from, all the points costs for building your own are included (indeed, there's a free pdf here to help with this). This makes it very easy to make new factions, or modify existing ones to match the models already in your collection. To which end, I think it will be relatively easy to make and Adventuring Company to work with my Dystopian legion models, and equally well with the other steampunk minis in my collection, who were, until now gathering dust on the shelf.  Additionally, since the level of steampunk detailing on the minis that are supplied for the game by North Star Minis is relatively low, there is also the opportunity to use historical minis with no problems at all. This opens the door to my Zulu band making the table.

The addition of the horror element to the game, through Prussian zombies, Egyptian mummies and great white apes, is also a fun way to go.

For more information, you can go to the author's blog, where there are pages with bonus material, and IHMN fiction.

In addition, if you are looking for miniature suppliers to go to for steampunk minis, you need go no further than this post on the Dulce et Decorum Est blog, where all the manufacturers are listed.

With the Night Mail, A Story of 2000AD

Not 2000AD, the comic, but a science fiction short story by Rudyard Kipling.

I downloaded a bunch of Rudyard Kipling novels, shorts and poetry after his story The Mark of the Beast was covered on the H.P.Podcraft literary podcast. I've been sifting through it slowly. I was familiar with Kipling, of course, due to The Jungle Book, and the associated Disney film, which was a favourite of mine as a kid, and i was aware of his colonial and military inspired fiction. What took me completely by surprise however, was this little trip into science fiction.

What's more, classic Victorian Sci-fi, complete with an alternative future and Zeppelins! It may not be rip-roaring adventure, but it's certainly worth a look.

For those looking for Victoriana, horror shorts, colonial military adventure and now, it seems sci-fi with zeppelins, and all for the grand price of $0, then you could do worse than heading over to your local amazon site and downloading Kipling's back-catalogue. He really was quite prolific!

Amazon.ca Kindle free eBook

Project Gutenberg eBook.

Text online, with Illustrations.


Whilst I'm posting about short stories, here's a link to a short story by published author, and good friend of mine, Michael Logan. Warlord of Aisle Nine.

Zulus, Fasands of 'em!

Source

Well, 3 of them at least, but every horde has to start somewhere. These guys were a blister from Reaper miniatures, and are a little larger than 28mm, so are therefore the perfect scale for Dystopian Legions. I bought them at the same time as this guy who you may have seen popping in this blog up as a re purposed DL sergeant, but they were wasting away in the bits box till recently, when they were pulled out, re based and painted up. They made a great little break from the redcoats of my KoB army, whilst still being relatively 'on theme'.

I don't know if Spartan Games have any plans to provide rules for use of this type of warrior in DL, but I'm sure it wouldn't take much to Home-Brew some rules to match the minis. Getting piles of Zulus is not an issue these days, with there being plenty of plastic boxed sets on the market. Just the odd tweak the one of two of the recovered rifles these guys hold and we're good to go. I must say, there's a gap in the market for Steampunk Zulus that I'm surprised has yet to be filled!

How would these hordes fair against the steampunk fuelled forces of the world? Sturginium powered rifles can only do so much, when the wielders are outnumbered by thousands of Zulus. I feel a scenario coming on.

There are some touch ups to do, since I've seen the pics of these guys, but they're otherwise good to go!

Amazon Order

I had some Amazon vouchers stacking up on my account, so I decided to order a couple of books. I thought to treat myself with some Osprey titles, so went for The Zulu War, by Angus McBride and The British Army on Campaign (3) by Michael Barthorp and Pierre Turner. I really wanted to get my hands on a copy of Canadian Campaigns 1860-70, but it seems to be rather hard to get a hold of, at least on Amazon or even directly from the Osprey site.

I'm quite looking forward to the McBride book, as I have been a fan of his work for a very long time (since I bought pretty much every book going for the MERP system back in the 80s and 90s), but this will be the first of historical books I own. I am rather surprised to see that he's down as the author of the book as well as the illustrator, I didn't think this was something he had done. It will be interesting to see how well the great man writes.

Why these ones in particular I hear you all ask, well really if you're asking that you haven't been paying attention at all recently, have you! It's all towards inspiration for my Britannian army for Dystopian Legions. Although, my steady rate of painting has meant I don't have much left to finish off, but the miniatures and the game itself have got me into looking up more on the era, which I must admit is one I know little about.

Another reason I went on to Amazon, was to look at the range of Osprey wargaming titles they have available there. In particular, and of special interest to this post, In Her Majesty's Name steampunk skirmish wargaming rules, which are available for pre-order. I did not pre-order them, but I think I'll most certainly be ordering them once they are released. It makes great sense to have another set of rules to use with minis I already have.

Steampunk War Movie: Arms Race, Escalation

I was made aware of this little movie by way of the Wargame News and Terrain blog. A fun collection of steampunk videos on You Tube. Very well made, and I think the steampunk aspect, at least in the costumes, is perfectly underplayed. I just sat and watched all 6 of them, whilst painting my second Rifleman section for Dystopian Legions.

I'm aware that steampunk can be a bit of an acquired taste, it's certainly not always for me, but I think they're worth a look!