The Dark Ages Campaign

 Its been few weeks since I did any updates on the Dark Ages campaign.  My focus has been elsewhere mostly on painting figures and for the last week or so on pushing on with the ECW rules.  I'm hoping to be able to post a rules update in the next couple of days as I have made some substantial progress on that project.

Meanwhile back in Dark Ages.  I have decided not to fight the small unbalanced campaign actions in every case.  So the Devet v Seisyllwch battle will be solved by the simple expedient of Devet accepting it's new status as a client or sub princedom of it's larger neighbour.  I have rather a lot of time to cover within the campaign and if I want to get to the end I'm going to need to speed things up.  Plus it lets me get to the more interesting table top encounters.  So Devet falls without a fight and the game rolls onwards.

Looking back at the list of events for this turn, we now move on to the last event of 799AD.  Northumbria attacking Strathclyde by striking into Rheged.  

By 799AD Northumbria's power was concentrated to the east of the Pennines and that is how the game is set up.  The North West was contested ground under Strathclyde Welsh influence (if not outright control) in Cumbria and loosely Northumbrian in the areas south of that.  The nature of government in Northumbria at this point was such that central authority was often lacking and control ceded to local leaders who made their own way without much thought, or care, for who the king was.  It was only where a strong king arose that this changed and historically that didn't happen very often.  

In modern terms Northumbria was a failed state.  There had been a generation of in fighting between rival branches of the royal line over which line should sit on the throne and this continued right into the mid 9th century, when one claimant allied himself with the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok.  Lets just say that it didn't end well. If you have read the Last Kingdom books or watched the TV series based upon the same you will have come across them as leaders of the first wave of Viking invasions.

Looking at the available forces in the game The Strathclyde Welsh can assemble the men of Galloway, Strath Clut and Rheged itself.  While Northumbria can count on Lothene, Berneich and possibly Cumbre.  I say possibly for Cumbre, as I have designated that region as disputed but occupied by Northumbria so the Cumbrians will act as allies and may be unreliable.

The available forces will be maximised as both kings are present so the line ups look like this:

Strathclyde

Strat Clut: King (Cv), 3 x Sp (reduced by battle losses)

Rheghed: 1 x Gen (Cv), 3 x Sp (reduced by battle losses)

Galloway: 1 x Gen (Cv), 1 x Cv, 3 x Sp

Strathclyde is carrying losses from the clash with the Picts earlier in the turn so are only able to turn out 13 elements.  They cannot deploy in two bodies as they don't meet the minimum element count  I set in the rules to do so.

Northumbria

Lothene: 1 x Gen (4Bd), 3 x Sp, 1 x Ps

Berneich: King (4Bd), 3 x 4Bd, 7 x Sp, 3 x Hd, 1 x Ps

Cumbre: Gen (Sp), 1 x Ps

Northumbria has maximised the available troops so as to be able to have two commands and is fielding 22 elements.  They will field The men of Berneich as a single command and merge Cumbre and Lothene into a second.  As a disputed territory Cumbre will count as allied and may not be reliable on the battle field. 

A sheepish painting admission

 Yes I'm painting some sheep and not in 6mm either.  Lurking in the furthest reaches of my lead pile were some 25mm sheep from Irregular Miniatures.  These must have been gathering dust for the best part of thirty years as I got them when I visited the workshop when they were based in Norton.  In fact I was discussing Dark Ages figures and Ian gave me some sheep as a freebie with the comment that it would give the armies something to fight over!

I suppose I should flock these?

They are actually rather nice models similar to the Herdwick and Cheviot breeds seen on the Pennine uplands.  I have a solo gaming scenario in mind that they will feature in.  To that end I have rooted around and found a handful of Dark Age figures in  (gulp) 25-28mm.  There I said it, I'm straying from the smaller scales for once.  I'm thinking of a scenario where a couple of Norse farmers go hunting and have to cross the table top encountering various animals or humans.  The objective is to bag a few rabbits or Ptarmigan etc for the pot and get back unscathed.

The sheep are mounted on UK1p coins and just need basing materials adding to be fully completed.  I will be using flock, thank you for asking.

  

First past the post - Ironclads completed

I mentioned in my reply to Nundunket's comment on my 2021 targets that some objectives were nearer completion than others so were less challenging.  This was particularly true of the 19th Century Ironclads objective where there were eight ships still to finish. I bought these when I bought the ACW ironclads last summer for refighting the naval actions of the  The War of the Pacific between Chile on one side and Peru and Bolivia on the other.  Also known as the Saltpetre War it was fought over control of the coastal area in what is now northern Chile which at the time was Bolivian and Peruvian territory an the nitrate deposits in the area.

The castings are all 1/2400th from Tumbling Dice.  I can't say that the painting is great but it is good enough and these are tiny castings so detail is hard to pick out.  I have to apologise for the quality of the photos as they were taken on my phone and have colour shifted so that there is more brown and less blue in the image compared to reality.

The first off the desk or should that be slipway is the Huascar an ironclad turret monitor.  Built at Birkenhead in 1865 for Peru, she fought on both sides during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) first for Peru and then after capture in 1879 at the Battle of Angemos for Chile.  There is a good article about her on Wikipedia.  This is the old version of TD's representation of the ship.  Since I bought this last year TD have re-sculpted the model, the new version is in fighting trim without sails set.  I don't have one (yet?) but from  the photos I have seen it looks very nice and is an improvement on this version.

Huascar.  The circular thing amidships is the turret battery

Next come two sister ships the Blanco Encalada and the Almirante Cochrane a pair of central battery armoured frigates in Chilean service.  They were built in Hull and launched in 1874 and 75.  The Blanco Encalado holds the dubious distinction of being the first warship sunk by a self-propelled torpedo.  Both ships fought at the Battle of Angemos against the Huascar.  These are reasonable castings although again I think newer sculpts may be available now.  Last to be completed were the Independencia for Peru and Esmeralda for Chile.

Blanca Encalada and Almirante Cochrane.  They are the same casting

The Esmeralda, actually a generic steam sloop casting

The Independencia, I think this is actually HMS Shah a steam frigate

I don't know much about naval warfare in this period but since buying these models I realised that sails were struck before going into combat.  The colour schemes are based on period paintings of the battle as found on Wikipedia so may not be fully accurate.  Still this is only a side project for me so close enough is good enough to pass muster.

The entire Ironclad fleet.  Colours are better in this shot

That's the first objective ticked off the list.

Rules for the ECW have almost reached completion.

Its taken a while, at least a decade in fact, mulling over rules, researching tactics, formations, weapon effects and doing the basic statistics and math to get things balanced but I'm on the finishing straight.  To be honest the core mechanisms have been there almost from day one and have needed almost no amending.  I have been able to play games solo without too many issues for around half of the time I have been working on the rules so the core of the system was something I was happy with.

What delayed matters was getting from the concept in my head to a written document that some body other than me could play the game from.  There were lots of things that I hadn't put down in writing and lets face it the whole point of rules is meant to be that that anyone can pick them up and after a couple of games understand how everything hangs together.  on top of which i wanted them to be laid out in a specific way with section and subsections clearly numbered to aid finding the answers to rule queries quickly and easily.  That took me a while to get to grips with as Words system while straight forward once you get your head around it doesn't work exactly as I want.  Which meant a certain amount of heart ache trying to get it to do things my way.  I failed, repeatedly and often to get the heading numbering system to do what I wanted and in the end I had to create a manual numbering system but that doesn't benefit from the automatic renumbering function when new text is added or old text removed!

So as of today I have all of the play sheets completed, 95% of the rules are done and I'm on to the final editing to ensure internal consistency.  I'm hoping that will take a week or possibly two and then I will have a complete first draft ready to go out to for proof reading/play testing.  I will probably need to add a few more examples and some more illustrations of play but the proof reading should flag those issues up.

I'm aiming to play a few solo games over the next few weeks to test the changes I have made.  So expect some after action reports.  Not quite the first 2021 project done but tantalisingly close!

Writing rules- its educational!

 I have said it before and I will no doubt say it again, writing rules shows up weaknesses in my knowledge!  Even if all that I intend is to amend existing sets by adding a few house rules I find that what I thought I knew is either slightly wrong or more often really badly wrong.  To get a proper feel for a period means diving deep into the nitty gritty details of the time, place and tactics and weapon technology.  I don't use everything I learn, as to me part of the rule writing process is to decide what to leave out as much as it is to decide what to include.

Its partly about the the level the rules are pitched at.  Grand tactical level is not the place to detail all the steps of loading a musket, rather its about the overall impact of a battalia of foot shooting, while a skirmish set will be interested in how long it takes to reload but still isn't that interested in all of the steps required.  But in both cases knowing that detail can help  make the relevant rules feel right.

Another issue is deciding which command decisions you want the players to focus on.  No set of rules will ever focus on every decision because every man in the fight is making decisions of some sort at some point in the fight.  Some of these we can merge into a sort of herd mentality test, although we call it a morale or a reaction test, others are the individual decisions of key men.  When does the battalia use salvee fire rather than firing by ranks, when does it move to close combat, does it pursue afterwards.  These are the decisions of single officers.  Further up the chain of command the decisions change again to when do I withdraw a battered battalia or brigade and replace with fresh troops.  Understanding who takes these decisions helps focus a player on a specific level in the command structure.  

Ultimately a decision has to be made on which aspect of command the game is going to focus upon and which are going to be abstracted or left out entirely.  An example is that in most wars logistics are vital and take up a huge part of a General's high level decision making.  Yet this rarely features in table top rules, not just because the key decisions are made before the armies clash, but mainly because it's boring!  I have never seen any rules which consider if the troops had a decent breakfast on the morning of battle or a good slug of rum before going forward into combat.  We just assume that some one somewhere is dealing with this stuff.  It's part of the playability to accuracy to fun trade off that has to be considered.

On top of all of that there is the actual discipline, or possibly in my case lack of discipline, in writing up the rules.  How do they flow, are they in a logical order, will people be able to find the key information easily.  There is the worry that what I will actually achieve will be a good, workable set that are hidden behind poor layout and phrasing or poor explanations.  Oh and learning all the techie stuff needed to format a 'Word' document so the version on the page looks like the one in my head.

Not how I want my rules to read

 Rules creation and writing forces me to challenge what I know, to check it against reality and to change my views.  This is an additional bonus beyond getting a final set that cover the things I think are important in the game.  Like I said, it's educational.  

  

Project Naseby - 4 - an update

I have made some more progress on one of my projects for 2021; my ECW rules 'Project Naseby'.  Originally I wanted to use them for a refight of that battle but things moved on and now they are aimed at covering the entire British Civil Wars plus I'm looking at adding enough extra material to cover the Thirty Years War as well.  Talk about scope drift!.  I haven't posted about these for a couple of years (I just checked make that five years!) but all I really need to do is to complete the section numbering and to tidy up some explanations after which I will do some more play testing.  So to give you a flavour of what I have been creating here is a slightly edited version of the introduction to the rules.

It's taken so long to write these rules it feels like I started with this technology!

The rules are intended for use with 2mm figures using a one figure to one man ratio and a ground scale of 1mm to the yard, so there is a near 1:1 relationship between figure size, ground scale and terrain height. 

One issue which seems to come up a lot in rule reviews for this period is what the combat formations should be called; are they regiments or something else? The answer is that the standard combat units were given different names in the various armies of the period.  Regiments were administrative organisations and could be merged with other Regiments or split into smaller battlefield combat formations.  Within my rules rules I have used “Battalia” to describe the basic infantry combat unit and “Squadron” for those of cavalry or I use the term ‘units’ if talking about both together.  These will be formations of roughly 500 – 1,000 men for the infantry and of about 150 – 500 for cavalry.  Artillery is deployed as single guns and their train, as was the practice at the time.

Foot units are made of several bases of 100 or 50 foot.  Each infantry base is either all shot or all pike.  Only shot bases may shoot but both shot and pike bases can fight in melee.  Infantry units with no pike bases will be at a disadvantage against horse in melee.  Cavalry units are made up of several bases of 50 horse which may shoot but are primarily melee troops.  Artillery units are made up of a single artillery piece along with a limber, team and a wagon all mounted on a single base.  All bases of a unit must maintain contact with each other, unless they are dragoon horse holders. As the commonest formation for the period was for a battalia to be drawn up with a pike centre and two sleeves of shot it is possible to mount all of the pike on one base and the shot on two bases which makes moving units faster.  However, that makes redeploying into other formations impossible although given the relative low cost of 2mm figures separate models could be deployed where required.

A random ECW re-enactment photo to keep you interested

Play follows an IGO-UGO pattern.  All units utilise action points (AP) to perform moves, manoeuvres, formation changes and combat in their turn.  Each unit has 3AP to use in each action phase.  It is a core concept of the rules that these can happen in any order during an action phase.  So a foot battalia is able to stand and use 3AP for shooting or use some AP to move and the balance to shoot or to shoot then move or any other combination.  The only limit is that the unit must have sufficient AP available to carry out the action.  Players will have to decide how to allocate each unit’s allocation of action points between activities each turn.  Units cannot move, manoeuvre, shoot and then launch a melee attack all in the same turn as they simply do not have the AP available to do this.  APs represent the time taken to carry out actions so cannot be saved or transferred to other units.  With one exception they cannot be carried over from turn to turn.  The exception is to allow the AP to be reserved to allow defensive fire as during the other player's move. 

Another core concept is that units will want to maintain formation to ensure that their command and control is not disrupted.  Disruption can occur as the result of combat or a reaction test.  Disrupted units will perform significantly worse than units who attempt to avoid becoming disrupted or who take the time to recover by rallying.  As with any wargame the mechanism for measuring a unit's willingness to continue to follow orders is critical.  There is no "Morale Phase" in the rules instead reaction tests are taken at the point where events occur or circumstances change and require the unit’s reaction to be reviewed. 

As 2mm figures are cast as blocks there is no scope for figure removal so the unit’s continuing ability to fight must be measured in a different way.  This is by using a “Combat Effectiveness” value (CE).  The starting CE derives from a small number of factors including the units training and experience and is calculated pre battle.  Casualties are not tracked in the game, instead the reduction in CE is tracked.  This reduction covers not just casualties but fatigue and the general erosion of willingness to fight. 

The rules are divided between standard and optional rules.  The optional rules add extra period flavour at the expense of slowing play a little.  Optional rules include chain of command, weather and tactical style (Dutch, Swedish or German) to the mix.  The rules provide detail and clarify issues which may arise in play but the core points of the rules are on 'play sheets' and a game can be played using these in isolation after a read through the main rules.  I hesitate to call these a quick reference sheet as they don’t boil down to a one-page summary but they should allow play without turning to the main rules every turn.

So there you have it Project Naseby is still moving forward.  It is playable in its present state but whether anyone but myself can understand the rules as written is open to debate until I throw them open to peer review.

In Other News - The First Time

 In other news will be where I post non wargaming stuff that doesn't fit in as a random thought.  

This post is an adapted version of something I wrote for the newsletter of my Sealed Knot re-enactment unit, Colonel Robert Hammond's Regiment of Foot.  As a bit of background no one is allowed to fire a musket (using black powder only I should stress, actual musket balls are frowned upon!) with the Sealed Knot without taking and passing a safety test to ensure they are competent.  It's an important part of what we do to ensure safety during displays and passing is not guaranteed.  The test happens after a musketeer has done a  couple of events as a non firer to gain some experience of the display environment but its usually pretty early in their Sealed Knot life, so the test is seen as a big deal and they have no idea what might be thrown at them by the tester!  Now that is clear what follows might make a little more sense.

The First Time

The first time I put on a musketeer’s clothing and equipment was in my back garden, God alone knows what the neighbours must gave thought! I was being lent a full set of kit ready for my first event and I was checking that it fitted. A few years earlier I had done a short stint of American Civil War re-enactment and a friend, who had also involved with that, had gone on to join the Sealed Knot and was musket officer with the Tower Hamlets Trained Bands. He suggested I give it a go as a musketeer. Of course this was before I saw the light and joined Hammond’s. 

Previously at his invite Mrs E, myself and the children had gone to an event to see what we thought of the Sealed Knot. We had enjoyed it so much that we joined on the spot. So my friend had visited a couple of times before the first event I was going to take part in to teach me musket drill and safety so that by the time I turned up at that first event I was supposed to have a vague idea of what I was meant to be doing. 

This was back in 1989 so there was no SK website, no Facebook and no mobile phones. All contact was either in writing, by old school landline telephone or face to face, with no way to view images of SK events unless given photographs. So my expectation of what an SK muster would be like was based on my previous experience of ACW events. It didn’t prepare me for what I was about to take part in at all!

So it came to pass that bright and early on a Saturday morning I jumped into my car and following hand written instructions drove to my first ever SK muster. Driving onto that first SK campsite was an eye opener as it was twice the size of anything from my ACW days, and this was only a Mini! (the smallest event that is open to all members). I had no idea how to find my regiment amongst what seemed like hundreds of tents. With no way to contact my regiment or my friend I was reduced to asking for directions. Still that meant that I learned how friendly the average Knotter is towards fellow eccentrics. 

I eventually found the regiment after a couple of wrong turns. Well I say ‘regiment’, at this particular event we turned out something like five participants! To be honest I recall very little of the battle other than an hour long nagging feeling of panic, as I had no idea of what was going around me, or what I was expected to do next, or what the hell introduction or extroduction were. As for counter marching, well let’s just say I might as well have been a sheep as I was simply dragged from place to place by the people around me with no idea of what I was meant to be doing. I was told to stay out of hand to hand and if anyone attacked me to just lie down and play dead, which suited me just fine as some of the opposition pikemen looked pretty damn scary. 

Despite all of this I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and turned up to do it all over again on the second day. This was when things became ‘interesting’!  I was told to get ‘kitted up’ including all the musket equipment, grab the musket I had been loaned and was promptly taken off to do a musket test. I was about to be tested by the fearsome head of the musket inspectorate ‘Tig’ Wright. I was told that she would be tough and that she would try to find any weakness in my understanding of the safety rules. To say that I was nervous would be a huge understatement. 

Now the first thing to be checked on a musket test is that all of your licences are in order, so I dutifully handed them across for checking. Tig took a long time scrutinising them and then asked a question I hadn’t been primed about! ‘Is this really your date of birth?’. It took a moment for it to sink in, then I had a moment when I wondered if she was thinking I was an imposter or something? Well you read about people doing that for driving tests, maybe it was a thing with musket tests too. It’s funny what races through your mind at moments like this. I must have managed to confirm that it really was my actual date of birth because the next question thrown at me was ‘what time were you born?’ Another question not on the expected script! This was trickier than expected. ‘er….. about 9.30 in the morning as far as I know, why, is it important?’. At which point Tig grinned at me and said ‘Oh yes, I need to know if you are older than me ….we share exactly the same birthday.’ 

As it turns out I am actually younger by about three hours, but we agreed that for all reasonable purposes I was going to be the older of the two of us. She still refers to me as ‘old person’ thirty years later! Oh and after all that I still had to take the rest of the test, but I did pass it.