Today Chris and I enjoyed our second game in our slow grow 'Dark Shadows' campaign. The first game was a scenario of our own design that was fight for possession of a map teling of the whereabouts of Albion. Today my 'old school' dwarves took to their ships to try and force a landing against Chris's 'old school' undead.
The original campaign booklet was for Warhammer Fantasy but we have opted to use the 'Warlords of Erehwon' (WoE) rules. We had to convert the points values from Warhammer army lists to WoE ones and try to make sure it was a balanced game. Our discussions resulted in Chris have 200pts of undead plus 3 war machines. I had 750pts of dwarves placed in ships advancing upon Albion's shore. .
Here the dwarves can be seen advancing in their assorted boats. We had devised a simplified version of the weather chart more balanced to clear weather. I asked Chris to make the throw for weather and of course he threw very low resulting in the table being covered in mist. This completely took out his main advantage in that his artillery could not see the dwarf ships approaching. Also, the dwarf ships had to throw 2xd6 for movement in inches. However, if they threw a double they would make the move but end up stranded on a sandbank.
The undead cower behind the hedges and wait for the mist to clear. One stone thrower and two bolt throwers plus a unit of arches and an Undead Champion. The cliff was classed as a hill rather than anything tougher for the dwarves to get up onto.
Happily for me all my ships got to land their troops safely.
Brokkir and his dwarf guard were the first to land.
Dwarf Ranger, Gunnar Fundinnson and his fellow rangers disembark.
As the dwarves advance on the hill the mist cleared enough for the undead artillery to open fire but the dwarf rangers and archers returned fire.
Undead skull crusher with their champion just behind. With a great shot the artillery kill 4 of Ulf's dwarf rangers.
The dwarves slowly surround the hill and start to target the crew of the war machines and also the undead archers. The stone thrower lost all it's crew and one of the bolt throwers suffer casualties too. The mist rolled back in but we were all just within visual range of each other. The skeleton archers were talso destroyed.
Over on the dwarf right flank, Dwarf Lord Amlodi Forkbeard charges up the hill with his bodyguard and kill the crew around the second bolt thrower. This led to a prolonged fight with the Undead Champion who proved to be a very tough opponent.
By now there was just the undead champion left but even when a unit of dwarf rangers came to help we found him difficult to kill(destroy?). Sadly, at this point we ran out of time. With the undead champion down to his last wound but being surrounded by dwarves so Chris graciously conceded the game.
This was a fun game and certainly did not run as I expected. The mist played a huge part in the game as the undead could not harm the dwarves whilst still in their boats. Once the dwarves landed their superior numbers helped secure the victory.
Our next encounter will be 'the Fens' scenario with a smaller dwarven force attacking the undead and trying to break through their ranks. We have also created an 'After game progression' chart. The dwarves got one throw of the dice on the chart resulting in them being able to cause 'confusion' on one enemy unit next game.
That looked like a real fun game, the weather certainly helped the Dwarves, look forward to the next instalment.
ReplyDeleteThanks Donnie, my dwarves are planning some new recruits already.
DeleteWow, that was an amazing game. As we said at the time, it played out very differently than we expected, though I always thought the dwarves would win.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what happened to my Undead Champion?
We offered him a pint of dwarf beer but he couldn't hold his beer.
DeleteExcellent game, the mists very much helped the dwarves, we used to play that war machines could fire through mist, but made it random, you needed a pure six, but still had to roll the scatter dice, to show it was pure luck, didn't happen very often, but got an occasional lucky hit ! LOL
ReplyDeleteWe did think about doing something similar once the mist appeared but it took us a bit by surprise. I will work it out ready for future games.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy seeing the Old School figures and that very impressive fleet. The game sounded like a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteThanks Wek 3, it was good fun partly due to how the mist affected the game.
DeleteThe fleet was a mix of Dave Graffam card models and an XPS model I built years ago, plus a resin model of Boðvoc's
DeleteLooked a fun game
ReplyDeleteIt was great fun, the mist descending in turn 1 and blocking the undead from using their artillery was totally unpredicted by either of us.
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