no posts for a month, and a broken promise of pictures. I am a failure at this whole blog thing. Real life has been interfering a bit. I was trying to buy a spare house, and we had a death in the family, and such, but, I still could have put up pictures.
On the other hand, I do have some news. My shopping impulse got the best of me and I bought a pile of Mage knight figs. 800. I have been sorting and classifying for HOTT purposes. I should have taken a pic of the table overflowing..
I have also been working on the Dwarf army. Trying to decide on unit types, really. I have Dwarven Fusers, and a couple thunder gunners who will be shooters. I had originally planned on putting mixed melee weapons together for Warband, but, the Orcs are currently warband, and the trolls are leaning towards warband. And, dammit, do I really need more warband? I considered redoing the orcs as Hordes, but I would need more of them. That might be a long term option.
I am also trying to keep enough figs free to base for Song of Blades and Heroes or TFT. I know that I am building my HOTT armies way too large, but the impulse to have spare units for the kind of game I would like to run is strong.
Let me talk, then, a little about my ideas for a HOTT campaign. The rule book has a system, but it is very formal, and kinda dull. First it assumes that all armies deployed are the same size (24 points). But in reality, Commanders deploy forces in variable sizes, so I would like to let the commanders in my campaign do this. Of course, concentrating too many forces in one spot leaves you hinterlands exposed, but that is a risk one might take, if the reward were right.
I was also thinking of adding rules for spying on other armies. A commander could deploy certain units - Heroes, Magicians, Paladins, and Sneakers, into enemy controlled areas for recon missions. If there were enemy units in the area, they would dice to see if they could learn anything. I haven't determined the odds yet, but sneakers and magicians would excel at this, and Paladins and Heroes would we be the weakest. It might also work to use SOBH to play out these encounters, if the spies were discovered.
Another tweak might be to add in supply lines and scavenging. Each area might have a maximum capacity for "living off the land". This is all very nebulous so far. I should probably take pencil to paper and sort it out. I still sort best with pencil and paper.. Old school
I always thought the old Mighty Empires would be a great campaign system for HOTT (if you ignore their stupid race specific rules...). I think banners were 500-1500 warhammer points, so banners could be 10-30 HOTT AP. so you could have a couple of smaller forces of 10 AP or so that could scoot about doing reconnaissance and scooping up unclaimed lands or big formations of up to 30 AP for laying the smack down.
ReplyDeleteI think during the winter one gold in taxes bought you 100 warhammer points so for HOTT it could be 2AP...
I seem to recall it had a lot of things you're thinking about - spies, saboteurs, different types of terrain allowed only a certain number of banners to be present or you had to start burning supplies...
I don't know how the new edition has changed but GW has the rules for the old ones as a free pdf download - worth taking a look at to get some ideas! (it's HERE )
That being said I just ran a HOTT campaign using a system based on that presented in the book, but with simultaneous movement of forces to speed things up. I thought it worked out quite well. I guess it depends on what you want out of the campaign - our focused mostly on diplomacy between the players and as a scenario generator for tabletop battles. The guys I was playing with couldn't give a toss about the minutiae of campaigning. They wanted to get on with forming alliances, stabbing each other in the back and then having it out on the tabletop.
If you or the folks you play with dig all the little details of campaigning well that's totally cool - so go for it!