Thursday, December 16, 2010

Another Free Holiday Gift: Medieval Miniature Battle Rules

Yesterday I released a free download version of my revised D&D/LL rules variants, today in honor of Festivus I'm putting up the second edition of my set of medieval mini rules, Swords & Shields (formerly the Dogs of War), as a free download here.

S&S should accommodate skirmishes or small-scale mass battles up to 100 figures and is intended to provide a quick, simple, and bloody tabletop game. For those familiar with historical medieval mini rules you are getting a rules set where, like, D&D's mom Chainmail got it on with Ral Partha's Rules According to Ral and had a doltish love child. Hey, you get what you pay for.

Currently, I'm also working on an old school D&D-friendly fantasy supplement that adopts and blends some more crazy love-beast influences from David Sutherland's Legions of the Petal Throne  and my old favorite Heritage rules set, Knights and Magick.

The complete, revised rules will be packaged with my quixotic domain-level rules supplement, Secret Project X. Shhh...

If you ever do find yourself letting the blood of little lead men flow with these rules kick me some feedback. Always appreciated.  

10 comments:

  1. Most generous. I've been in a wargame sort of mood lately - maybe I can try these out over the Christmas break.

    ReplyDelete
  2. it is about time some one put out an expedient skirmish system for fantasy armies
    WarHammer is way too cumbersome for my tastes ; - )

    ReplyDelete
  3. These look nice. I especially like duels.

    Now if you put out a fantasy supplement maybe I can work up a Nightwick Campaign army list :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Neat! Will give 'em a look. Does it allow me to integrate PCs into the battle?

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ChicagoWiz
    Not yet explicitly, this is still basically a product of my historical miniature days.

    But the scale is vague (I think it can reasonably be anywhere from 1:1 up to 1:10) and there is a place for special characters so it's not too much of a stretch to slot them as a high-ranked figure if they are of sufficient level (say mid-level for a "4" and higher-level for a "5"). You'd need special rules to deal with their mortality.

    I will be writing a detailed section that handles specifically how to fit these kinds of rules into D&D campaigns in the fantasy supplement. I am surprised that more of an effort hasn't been made in many of the published fantasy wargaming rules to do so.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I tried doing it with HOTT so that players could do things with their characters within the context of a mass combat.

    ReplyDelete
  7. How did that work out?

    I would like to put together a list of suggestions to interpret various events that can happen in a mini battle as moments where the PCs can (or must) intervene. The unit you're attached to routs, stop and roleplay the situation. Can you rally the troops? Do you have to fight your way ou? Etc.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Not so well because I couldn't find anyone to playtest it with? I was still learning HOTT at the time and when I got the motorcycle this spring, I uhhh... kinda lost track of it.

    I had some things worked out, but I put it all in Google Wave. Let me see if I can get the PDF export and send it to you, it was prototypical in nature. I'll email it to you.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thanks, I followed some of your attempts at doing this on your blog and am definitely interested in seeing which ways you were leaning.

    ReplyDelete