Realms of Chaos, some thoughts...

After our first game of Realms of Chaos in a good many years what are the main things that I have either remembered or thanks to the experience of age been able to see about the game.

1. The system is unfair. By its very nature random tables are unfair, it only take two pieces of luck to really place leagues between two champions. Being a level 20 wizard averaged out with a level 5 vampire really does place my champion in a different league to my brothers level 15 hero. This perhaps is obvious, we certainly knew it in our youth but perhaps here with only two warbands the difference is more marked, on a big table with many warbands things will average out a bit more.
2. Slaaneshi warbands will find it harder to grow than Khornate ones, particularly if the champion is not capable of throwing offensive spells around. A Khorne champion picks up reward points just for killing in hand to hand, a Slaanesh champion needs to use magic.
3. Variety is the spice of life. Now it was a fun game, I hope even for my brother who did find himself in a position to cause damage but unable to win but the same two warbands fighting each other are going to need something more than just a pitched battle to retain the fun.
4. Missile fire is not decisive, perhaps because of the board size and the way we both got stuck in quickly missile fire played a minor roll in the battle. It could also be that beastmen are just great troops to face missile fire with. 
5. It would be good to have a little more flexibility to arm the troops with basic weapons within reason. The addition of just a double handed weapon to the champion would have improved my brothers lot. Though the option to give Beastmen double handed weapons is always there, something to consider. 

Thoughts and lessons specifically for my warband:

1. Being half-vampire rocks. Normally the stats for a giant wolf are a little worse than a level 5 vampire in most ways except for movement. However they are as good or better than a half level 5 vampire so turning into a wolf is a no brainer.
2. The need to summon the numbers that make up my warband and to transform into a wolf does give an opponent at least a turns grace to exploit.
3. Skeletons are very fragile.
4. Level 15 Skeleton champions are not very fragile and do kick butt.

How to improve:

1. Mix things up with some secondary warbands to be played (within the confines of the game)  to be as mean as possible to the other player rather than to build and grow and play on the day.
2. Scenarios with different win conditions and even given scenarios specific rewards to win. This would have to be judged fairly to ensure you weren’t just going for the good stuff. 
3. Consider using some of the improvements to the campaign system, in L&D.

Realms of Chaos Warbands, first blood.

So over the weekend my brother and I played through our first couple of warband games. I've just put together a little battle report and though I have some musings on how the game went, its late and I'll post them another day.

For now here is the report hope you enjoy:

The Realm of Chaos (well my bit).

My brother is over tomorrow for one of our now and then games and we have decided to test out our Realms of Chaos warbands to hopefully gain some much needed experience and who knows an advancement or two.

Now I usually ply on at least a 6' by 4' table but we have decided to go smaller, 4' by 3'. I have such a board painted a good grass green, not so good for the chaos wastes, what I really wanted was barren terrain and quick. With not enough time for sand and glue and paint I chose what has become my go to cheat solution for the busy Oldhammer Dad (Dadhammer?).

Textured PDF files can when used in the right places look great and last night I made what I hope is a rather fetching board for our game tomorrow With the off cuts of the textured sticky paper there was enough to cover some depron for some simple scatter terrain. Anyhow here is the board:

The field, er, board of battle.

The other end, not bad for an evenings work and less than a fiver for pdfs.

A close up.

A Champions eye view looking out across the Valley of K'chin.

Oldhammer weekend and Oldhammer blog resurrected.

I figure anyone coming here already knows about the Oldhammer weekend we (I say we but I mainly mean Gaj) have been arranging. However on the off chance of catching interested people I figured it was worth posting up here as well.

So  the dates to remember are 31/8/13 to 1/9/13, the place to go is the spiritual home of citadel and the actual home of Foundry at the er.. Foundry, Nottingham, England.  Our hosts are the Ansells who need no introduction. The guests, Oldhammerers one and all.

There is lots planned but the main thing is to get involved and plan something yourself. Join the forum and get talking.

On a similar note with so much going on I’ve decided to re-launch the Oldhammerblog with what I hope is a cleaner cooler look. It was just a tool to get us all talking back last summer before Treps stepped up and hosted us a forum. There was a lot of great discussion but with the forum really taking off the poor little thing fell by the wayside.

However there is so much going on now a non personal news site that bangs the drum only for Oldhammer is perhaps a good idea, we have some great contributors already signed up form last summer. Now  I may be able to prod them into giving news worthy updates but even in their absence I’ll try to make myself useful updating with links to all significant happenings in the Oldhammersphere.

Fight for the pleasure.

Every self respecting 80’s Realms of Chaos Champion loves themselves a bit of Heavy Metal and when it comes to Oldhammer metal, well I’m afraid you can keep your Bolt thrower there is only one band that really reigns over the chaos wastes for me, Iron Maiden. To that end I’ve decided that my champion needs an anthem. From now on every appearance he  makes the following music will play just like with the entrance of a modern fighting champion. It may only be in my head but it will be playing.

Now I challenge the other champions out there, particularly those of the blood god to out awesome me with their anthem.

ADnD n DnD again!

Bit late in the day (like a month) as I've had my head in Warhammer and my DnDing has gone by the wayside but...

Wizards have re-released the pdfs of early DnD/ADnD modules and books. 


                                            

 

Great news, these haven't been available online from a legal source for some time,  ebay prices can vary and well I'm missing a few gems from the collection. I'll still happily be using LL to play, the rules are so much easier to use but nice to have these back in print.

Temple of elemental evil, you will be mine. You can't see it but I'm doing a happy dance now.

Goblins are green...

Ok here we have some nice 80's citadel sculpts, armed with spears, shields and javelins just as Warhammer armies would have us do. And why not with a BS 1 better than WS it doesn't hust to be able to chuck some javelins as you charge. Anyway I digress, these guys have arcane armorials fore their shield design which I copied over to their banner. Needing something to put in the centre where the boss goes on the shield I opted for the easy substitution of an eye. So here I present my new gobbo unit, THE EVIL EYE BOYZ!

I haven't got the champion done yet and another rank so it will be five complete ranks of six when finished. They will also sub for the pig stikkas in Forenrond's last stand. I have another unit of thirty citadel spears and thirty marauder goblins to add. Only now I've been distracted by RoC...

Slaves to Darkness, finishing off the champion.

So having had a quick look at some of the warbands forming across the oldhammersphere  for this summer's Oldhammer meet I thin I was a bit hasty saying no to the suggested extra reward of a chaos weapon.  These weapons are actually not that mega, I think i'd confused them with my memories of daemon weapons.

They can give a little, "edge" to a champion in battle and also add loads to the overall character of the champion. I do want more character for my champion but also want the randomness of chaos to determine how that character is applied. Therefore I will still forgo the chaos weapon in exchange for a random reward. If I roll a chaos weapon so be it otherwise I'll take what I'm given.

Back to the dice, you never know how many you'll need so I've rolled up a bunch of d100s as before:

So a 14 on the rewards table gives me an attribute. That's a risk, I could end up with a moronic pin head or extreme flatulence ruining the concept of the champion as I see him. I am allowed to refuse this reward for a roll on the Slaaneshi rewards table, but I have to accept that result. I do want character though and a Slaaneshi reward would give that character.

Looking on the table 68 gives me a familiar who may have up to three attributes. Now then, 91 gives me a storage familiar 4d6 magic points worth of spells can be stored in the familiar, these are any spells that could legitimately have been cast onto the familiar for storage before the battle, this could be long before the battle too so wizards MP are unaffected. This could be any of my two wizards' spells, even in a large battle any of the spells of an ally. All good.  I'll take at least one attribute for it and 298 gives me another cross breed! I'm going to need some more d100s, d6's and d12s.

A d6 of 5 followed by d12 of 8 gives me the result of swarm. My familiar is half swarm. But what type of swarm? The main rule book lists the types of swarm as a list of 10. I have a d10 result of 3 left over from the original rolls giving me a result of scorpion. Darn I was excited when I got this familiar because I have that cute little daemonet familiar. Guess she is out the window now. I also realise i don't have enough d6s. I need 5 more but the way I'm goign through them I'll generate 10 more.

The familiars head is more swarm like, upper torso even split, lower torso and arms less swarm like and legs swarm like. This is going to take some imagination for the modeling.

Next reward 668 gives me an extra head using thea d6 I find out it is indeed just the one. I'm not sure how this head is affected by the half breed mutation so on a 50% or less roll on a d100 (glad I rolled all them d100s now) we'll say it is affected.  A 65 means it isn't. However my next reward of a bestial face 131, could affect it. A d6 result of 3 shows it only affects one head of my choice so I'll give it to the half breed head, this will make modeling easier (chicken I know). A result of 9 on a d10 shows me this is a goat head.

Finally on a 5+ the familiar can fly, I have a 6 as my next d6 roll so I now have a diminutive daemon with two heads, one of a goat, it is positivly crawling with scorpions, indeed its upper torso and legs appear to be made of scorpions. It can fly and will be able to release stored spells put in it by its master or its master's allies.

Very characterful, very fun.

Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness mustering the Warband.

So now my mighty warriors and warlocks have answered the call its time to fish them out of the Northern Wastes I call my garage and my wife calls my man cave. It’s actually quite organised at the moment, if you can see a box it’s got miniatures or plastic kits in it. A few experimental rummages brought up the correct boxes.

Fishing around in one of the Chaos shoe boxes of waiting brought out the following two miscreants.

 

The dark elves were a harder prospect. Not for lack of choice, quite the opposite. I wanted to go old citadel over marauder so that ruled out some lovely sculpts from my collection. Being just that little bit bigger in size I thought the marauder sculpts would sit poorly with the slighter wizards I’d just fished out. Also I’d be a fool to take shields over crossbows for this unit, so that ruled out the otherwise perfect Manflayers unit. I’m not grinding the shield bosses off these lovely old sculpts. This really only left the warhammer regiments dark elves whose shields are easily left off in construction. But this is RoC the miniatures shouldn’t be carbon copies of each other if I could help it. I did have some warriors without shields in great dynamic poses. In my head  I have yet to assign these into a future unit in my dark elf army, so far so perfect. Unfortunately the best of these have no crossbow either. A flash of inspiration later and I began my quest for the hidden figures and enough warhammer regiments crossbows to strap on their backs.

Another box and another rummage (oo-er misses) and the following recruits were dug up.

Perfect.

I’ll fish out some skellies to summon at a later date.

Slaves to darkness Slaaneshi warband: rolling up the spells.

So now I've selected a figure for him I, "figured", I ought to roll up Dragan Dhampir's spells and those of his apprentice (no name yet, lets see what spells he/she gets and what figure I use).

Dragan is a champion of Slaneesh a level 20 wizard and due to being a half breed level 5 vampire has only an average magic level of 2 rather than 3.

This means he gets 6 level 1 spells and 3 level 2 spells but at each level the first is the relevant Slaaneshi spell. So without rolling he gets Acquiescence at level 1 and Pavane of Slaanesh at 2nd level.
All spell types are rolled for randomly in RoC no chosing which table to roll on from your racial lists. Dragan got 2 Illusionist, 2 daemonic and 1elemental at level 1 and 1 battle and 1 necromantic at level 2. So much for summoning hordes of additional help I can't get summon undead or lesser daemons with this selection.

On to roll and we get:
Clone image (Illusion), Camouflage (Illusion), Zone of Daemonic Protection (Daemonic), Dispel lesser Daemon (Daemonic) and Walk on water (Elemental) at level 1.

Flight (Battle) and summon Undead hero, lvl15 (Necromantic) at level 2.

OK some pretty week spells there, particularly for facing Khorne, where are my fire balls! Having said that the pick for me is the undead hero summoning a pre-battle auto cast is a must for this guy I think and I should probably include him in my painting plan. Often the most useless looking spells can really do some good so I guess there is hope for them all.

Now the apprentice, he is a level 10 so six spells. Also he has not yet received the mark of Slaanesh, Dragan is still his master, so he gets no auto spell. I still went with total random determination to get 3 daemonic, 2 necromantic and 1 Illusion. I rolled for spells and duplicated my roll for the 2nd Necromantic spell and the 3rd daemonic so I get to choose yay! The spells are:

Zone of life (Necromantic), Summon Skeletons (Necromantic and chosen), Bewilder Foe (Illusion), Dispel lesser daemon (Daemonic), Bind lesser daemon (Daemonic), A daemonic spell of choice, summon stead or Familiar I think but yet to choose.

There is enough duplication/similarity of effect there to say the apprentice has learnt his craft from his master. The summon skeletons I got to choose will be another pre-battle auto cast most of the time.

Random Slaves to Darkness as Chaos intended.

OK I'll bite Orlygg, I'll design a warband for this summer but I'll leave it entirely to the whim of Chaos. I lie, you're doing Khorne so my  warband will be Slaanesh.

No I'm sitting at lunch at work so although I have access to SoD I don't have my dice but I do have a dice roller on line. It has options for d100's but not d1000's. So I'll roll up a bunch, say 40 d100s and if a d100 is needed I'll use the very next result, if a d1000 is needed I'll nick the first digit from the next d100 and bin the rest or use it as the first digit of a subsequent d1000 if needed next.

Here is what I rolled:

Starting character:
Race is 47 so human.
Profile is 99! so level 20 wizard.  Awesome, I'll try not to gloat, what the gods give they can take away on the next die roll.

Dedicating myself to Slaanesh I now take a +1 to WP as my gift. That level 20 is pretty powerful and I'm going the totally random route, I'll forgo the extra gift that orlygg suggests.

I also need a mutation so the next roll is a d1000, that's 438 from my table of dice rolls  adding the 8 from the 82 onto the end of the 43.  GM's choice...the temptation is there to abuse this and call myself the GM, equally I could throw it out to the oldhammer community but I want to know now! OK I'll take the next number That 2 from the 82 goes to the front of the 95 to give 295. Crossbreed, I need a d6 and a d12 now!  Back to the roller:

So we have a 5 followed by a 12, that makes my sorcerer half vampire. Awesome. There are five levels of vampire so either I randomize the level or decide to put the coolers on this rapidly over heating champion and just make him a level 5 vampire half breed.

I now need to combine his stats, add them together and divide by two rounding down to the nearest whole number or 0.5. Those 0.5s of a point are important as other rewards can add or remove 0.5 which can make a whole number. Until such a time the stats with a 0.5 in them are treated as rounded down to the nearest whole number. With Ld onwards the value can have a positive modifier, I've averaged that out too but always rounded down.

So  M4 WS5.5 BS5 S5 T5 W4 I5.5 A2.5 Ld 8+1 Cl 9+1 Int 8+1 WP 9+1

Magic level 2

So I've gained in my physical stats but dropped a little in my mental stats and lost a magic level. Overall neutral perhaps. Now I should roll to see how the half breed looks but vampires and wizards look close enough, I'll just sort of work it out later.

Now for my retinue, here I'll follow Orlygg's suggestion because otherwise if I rolled say a d4 for rolls on the follower table I could end up with a very powerful warband. So 43 gives me d6 dark elves (appropriate) and 94 gives me a wizard, hell yes, an apprentice. Now I just need 2 more d6s.

To give me six dark elves and a level 10 wizard apprentice.


So I have a sorcerer half vampire, with an apprentice and a body guard of six dark elves. I'm a bit lacking in troops here so I predict much summoning in my future, undead (well he is half vampire) and daemons!

He shall be called Dragan Dhampir, a murderous, "noble", from the boarder princes who found himself seeking ever darker secrets in a sensual lust for power over life itself. He's got his wish so far...