Fantasy Crusade - first battle report

When we posted on some hobby groups on Facebook our first post about the Fantasy Crusade campaign system, some good folks were really interested (and that flattered us a lot). They ask for some clarifications, which I still have to provide through a specific rules post, and I first need to translate to English all our notes and campaign sheets: however, Grimbeorn and I already (so to speak) played the first game!

We choose our armies from respectively his Ogre Kingdom Crusade and my Empire Crusade. However we played full strength, so 1000 pts on the battlefield.

We picked the sixth battle from the WHFB core rulebook, The Watchtower.

Ogres win the throw for the tower, so they start with a core unit inside it. Grimbeorn puts on the battlefield a Bruiser with two hand weapons (General), another Bruiser as BSB, 6 Ogres, 6 Ironguts and 5 Leadbelchers. BSB and core Ogres are currently garrisoning the tower.

My Imperial forces attack with a more various army (even compared to Grimbeorn's Empire Crusade I preferred to mix more diverse units: maybe less effective but I love the background effect). I field 5 Knightly Orders, 10 Greatswords, 15 Swordsmen, Helblaster Volley Gun, 15 Halberdiers with a 8 Crossbowmen as Detachment, 5 Pistoliers. My Heroes are a General on warhorse and a BSB.

Ogres move forward, but I try to start aggressively to avoid their charges, so I try to charge first. I succeed with every attempt (woah), but I lose two knights against the dreadful shooting of the Leadbelchers

Even without two men, my charge is devastating: my General unit obliterate the Ogres by successfully scaring off and destroying them in their attempt to flee

On the other side of the tower, my Halberdiers have a bad time against the Ironguts: they're really strong! We kill just one of them but we lose the combat...

... and the only survivor is the BSB, who holds the line for Sigmar and the Empire!

Its a brief heroic moment: the Ironguts literally eat him and turn to charge 😱 my poor Swordsmen. In just a combat phase this entire unit will be totally wiped out

Grimbeorn and his usual reaction to my double sixes

Turn of the events! With a charge, my knights leaded by my General successfully destroy all the remaining Ogres by pursuing them after winning the Combat phase. Second mark for them today

With just the Ogres on the tower remaining, weakened by my constant shooting, now the Empire just need to wait. Sigmar blessed my Helblaster Volley Gun which suffered just one misfire in the entire game!

My Greatswords charge the tower with the last Ogre still maintaining possession

The end of the game!

So, the first game of our campaign ended with a suffered victory for me. I lost both my core units, but Grimbeorn lost his entire army in battle. Our Crusade rules state that a unit destroyed in battle is automatically restored at its full strength before the subsequent game; however, we had to roll on the death chart for our characters.

I totalize 4 Glory Points with this game (1 for playing the game, 3 for winning) and Grimbeorn 2 Glory Points (1 for playing, 1 for losing). Some of our units gained an enemy standard, which will grant some experience and, maybe, some upgrades for our units. 

It was a nice, fun game, and we liked the Crusade-like army composition. With this game we beta-tested the post-battle sequence and we wrote something more accurate in our rules. More on that later. We decided to ignore, just for this game, the Saga system inside our rules, so we could just try the base rules: for the next game we're already writing down some ideas for this key feature of our Crusade Campaign.

I'm looking forward to fight the Ogres with my other armies: it's a fascinating enemy, and I really want to explore their potential and find their weak spots. I have an entire Crusade to do so...

A new era for the Lair 🍾

I’ve been far from the blog for something like three months, but boy have they been some dense months! I got married in September, we went to live together and the only thing I built in this couple months is been IKEA furniture. Kinda hoped that some skills transferred from the hobby to this manly task…

Here we are, obviously in Sigmar's Temple

Ready to go to Paris on our honeymoon

Casually spotted a French Warhammer store down the road: always on guard!

So, kinda a new life for me and therefore for the Lair. My Orctober passed between moving in together and rearranging our new home, and honestly I couldn't be happier. With me, my hobby life is starting anew with some old and new projects, but mainly focused on get down on my pile of shame. More on that later.

Goodbye from the new Lair!

Amarok... and Elisa! 💚

PS: we're about to play our biggest WHFB game ever. Stay tuned.

PPS: obviously, the one and only Grimbeorn was my best man 😉 🐻

A nice DBA Sunday morning

Today Michele and I played a DBA game before he left for holidays in Southern Italy. Just to stay on the topic, we had on board Nikephorian Byzantines vs East Frankish, so probably our battle could have taken place in Southern Italy too.

He chose to deploy 4 elements of 8 Bw and the double element 6 Kn. My only choice was about 7 Hd and Ps, and I mixed deploying one of each.

The initial situation. Terrain features are an hamlet near the centre of the board, a plough (which we eventually took of because we throw 2 on the first PIP) and a wood

The main battle begun on my right side, because Michele chose to advance with his Cv elements and I went on confronting them with my Kn. On the centre we carefully moved on ready to fight (my men feared the dreadful arrows of Byz 8 Bw

The two cavalry fronts made contact and started a long fight which went on for a couple of turns. Even if Kn are stronger than Cv vs mounted elements, Byz fought very well, using the Ps element in the hamlet to close the door on the enemy. Eventually I two Kn and Michele two Cv

The end of the match! Throwing away every caution (by his own admission) Michele charged with the 6 Kn, exposing himself to my Gen closing the door on him. I just wiped out his Ps on my right flank with an element of Kn in GG. The game ends 5-2 for me.

Hobby musings about Fantasy Crusade campaign

The Crusade has begun!

We're gathering the armies and the models we need, and we're starting to plan our hobby schedule for the months to come. For me, the Crusade is the opportunity to inventory my collection and decide what to build and paint by setting some affordable goals for the near future. Actually I already have an ongoing inventory file which I update with all my purchases, my thoughts and my plans. In addition, I'm a hoarder, and so I constantly (and with pleasure) buy new minis. However, given the fact that I paint very little, and most of my collection is unpainted (when not unbuilt!), I find myself with loads of miniatures still in boxes or anyhow not painted, and we always play with lots of proxy models or directly dies or empty bases on the battlefield.

Golden Demon, help us!

This isn't really a tragedy for us: we've always been more gamers than painters, and only in recent years we started enjoying more the hobby side of Warhammer. These days we want to bring our hobby a step up, and we already gave it a try by starting a little escalation league between us during 2020 (you can find my last deed about that here). We followed the rules for WHFB 7th Ed. Warbands, wanting to build and paint an entire 500 pts force of Dwarves (for Grimbeorn) and Skaven (for me), plus some scenery each. It went... well, quite bad, actually, or rather we played very little and only him managed to paint everything on the list. I'm still stuck on my damned Warp Lightning Cannon and its crew. Bloody rat-things...

After this experiment, we never tried anything new of the kind until now. We didn't paint almost anything from our Warhammer range (however I painted other things, such as DBA or my beloved Mordheim tokens), and we had in mind this Crusade idea since last Christmas. It's now time to give it a go.

***

So, I know I'm not a fast or constant painter. Even so, I want to build a Crusade army (or various Crusade armies) which gives me the will and the motivation of being painted, a little at a time, with no rush and a lot of fun. I decided to concentrate of this three upon my WHFB armies:

• Orcs & Goblins
• The Empire
• Warriors of Chaos

I built a 1000 pts list each, and gather all the models I need in a specific box.

As you can see, most of it is unpainted, and something still needs to be built. There will be a lot of work behind the Crusade, and I'm ready for it. Just some general thoughts about my selections:

• My collection is absolutely not bad (at least for my goals). For The Empire and Orcs & Goblins I have at least up to 3000 pts of stuff each, whilst for Warriors of Chaos I can reach around 1600 pts in total. The Crusade starting list, with its 1000 pts, is just one third of my big armies, and I have a lot of miniatures still in storage. However, when choosing 1000 pts I still find myself with a very little portion painted, when none at all

• Related to this, all these years of hobby I bought loads of minis but I always play using the same old ones. Obviously, if I barely build and paint will be so. I honestly realized that during the arranging of my Crusader armies, and it was the most interesting thought about this project. So the first step of the Crusade will be the hobby phase in which I prepare my minis for battle, at least building it all
• In fact, in general, lots of my miniatures are still on sprue or in box. Even if unpainted, the Crusade is a nice chance to build and reorganize my miniatures for these three armies, create some useful trays and prepare to deploy everything on the battlefield ready when needed
• Anyway, I voluntarily chose for my Crusader armies some miniatures I still haven't got. Just few models each, but so I can buy something new I will use or need to complete my existing units. A leopard can't change its spots...

Just some random thoughts I realized while managing my Crusader armies, but I want them to become the ground rules in this new adventure.

So, for starter, I reorganized the Crusade box:

More about the specific armies in next posts!

Fantasy Crusade campaign - The beginning

The last edition of Warhammer 40.000 introduced the Crusade campaign system. Grimbeorn and I absolutely love it, even if we're not really big gamers in WH 40K... (but only because we have so much Fantasy to do).

We love it because it allows you to both expand an army a little at a time, thing that we adore especially since our firsts Warhammer campaigns when we were teenagers, and to pursue an affordable hobby goal. We are passionate hobbyists but not very fast ones, primarily in painting, and set little goals is the key to success.

Would be. I tried a lot but I lack in constancy. Sigh. However, here's what we created based on the WH 40K Crusade.

Grimbeorn and Amarok's

Fantasy Crusade Campaign System

Est. 2022

We both start with a 1000 pts pool from which we create an army following the rules from 8th Ed. of WHFB. We have some rules for Characters mainly given from the Warbands rules (oh we love that and you know it). Each battle grants use Glory Points which may be converted in regulars pts to buy new troops or new equipment (1 Glory Point = 25 pts). With Glory Points we may also unblock siege equipment (from the supplement Blood in the Badlands) for siege battles around the specific Fortress of our Crusade.

Main goal of the Crusade is to gain Glory Points towards battles and a great narrative objective called the Crusade Saga. Every Saga is composed of various Deeds, in-game objectives (such as Kill the enemy General and so on) which grant the player Glory Points if accomplished. An entire Saga may consist in a series of Deeds through a given number of battles: in the end, and in that momento only, the player can spend Glory Points to buy magical artifacts.

We still need a narrative frame for our battles, maybe the Badlands or the Border Princes where various armies gather to fight. The idea is to play WHFB battles like we play Mordheim games: we freely the army we want to play that day to gain more experience and power, we decide a point limit based on the time we have, build a list from the units we already have in our Crusade and just play. In the subsequent battle we may vary our army as well as maintain the same, as we like. A more powerful army would have play more games, so we would want to spread the games around our different Crusades.

We manufactured a Crusade campaign sheet. I post it in Italian, in the original version.

As you can see, we stole from Mordheim the advance scheme for Troops. In the first page there are different boxes for everything useful for playing.

***

Well, from now on we only have to play! We're still beta testing the system, however we got pretty excited and we already have three Crusades each ready to rumble... I'll present mine in subsequent posts.

Crusade system is perfect for hobby purposes, and I really realized that I want to concentrate more on some aspects of hobby thanks to this new gaming idea we developed. More on that later. It's time to build and paint!

Waaagh!

A little hobby update #1

This is the first post entirely written and posted from my smartphone. Not exactly an exciting news, but definitely an update for me 😂

However, just a little update from the Lair’s workbench! In this days I finally picked up my brushes from lethargy and prepared from new stuff for various project. I’m planning on concentrate on something new very soon… maybe some Warbands for Warhammer Fantasy to smash Grimbeorn on the battlefield. In the meantime, here it goes.

I made some tokens for the national Mordheim campaign we’re attending. With these we can mark the dead models which return on the battlefield as Undead… we hope to use them the least possibile!

A couple models I built for my Empire Army and obviously for Mordheim purposes too. These are Luthor, a special miniature designed by Tuomas Pirinen, the author of Mordheim game, representing a lone mercenary from the ruins of the City of the Damned, and a Mage from the Lore of the Beasts, or alternatively a Priest of Taal, made from the bits of the Imperial Griffon kit.

My newest project is building my first ever 3D printed miniatures! I purchased an STL file from the manufacturer Reptilian Overlords, Priests and Penitents, and with the first batch printed I will have two Warriors Priests of Sigmar on foot and ten Flagellants. Perfect miniatures for my Empire Army (and for an upcoming Witch Hunters Mordheim Warband too…)

“I smell some hereeeeeetiiiiics!” 😈

Technical update: Blogger is not exactly optimised for smartphone, at least not for my iPhone. I’m currently using Google Chrome as browser (I though that with Safari would have been even worst, but I still have to try that out). Writing and pic posting went well, but all format options are hard to pick due to bad viewing on screen… not the best. I couldn’t modify the font of the captions under the photos. However, it worked and I can now post even without my computer.

A couple of dry months for the Lair

It's been almost four months since my last post. Italy is sadly suffering for a drought, so it's the Lair. We hope that both could be watered soon.

However, it didn't mean we had four months of absolute hobby stop. We played some games with our little club (mostly Mordheim), we tried some new games (more on that soon) and we're ready to dive deep into pur beloved world of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in the next few months. Only painting and modelling have been cast aside for me since Easter, due to some time issues, work and life related. I'm currently moving to a new apartment with my fiancée, so maybe I'll take on my brushes a little less during this Summer. Waiting for Autumn to retake my hobby job more seriously.

With this post, I just want to put my hands back on the blog and set some good habits for the future. 

***

So, speaking about Mordheim, we finally started Necromantic Storm, Tempesta Necromantica, the first national Italian campaign powered by the active Italian community. With more than 100 players, we're happy to contribute in this great adventure throughout our country! Every club is free in playing the six different scenarios that the national referees will send us from June to December. We count eight players in our group:

1. Paolo - Witch Hunters
2. Andrea - Undead
3. Alessandro - Skaven
4. Davide (Grimbeorn) - Middenheimers
5. Michele (Frontlineminiaturist) - Averlanders
6. Carlo - Horned Hunters
7. Mirco - Dark Elves Corsairs
8. Pietro (Amarok, me) - Ostlanders

Four of us already played the first scenario (The Cabin in the Woods), where some Zombies guard an isolated hut in the woods outside the Eastern Mordheim Gate. In the dark night of the Old World, the Undead rise from the graves, and even the brave heroes of Mordheim can descend into the dread of Necromancers...

The main rule of the national campaign is called "Dead shall not rest": when a Hero or a Troop member of a warband falls in the fight, he immediately test on the Injury Chart as per the post-game sequence. If he results in definitely dead, he immediately returns in the game as a Zombie! He's no more part of his warband, but he will charge any alive member of any warband who comes near.

Very cool rule!

We look forward in playing all the first scenario and the subsequent one (we already received the files for the July scenario).

In the meantime, I'm getting ready with some new stuff for our games...

My Warhammer Chapel has a Watchtower to match with eventually!

Some 3D printed Hidden markers based on the original design from the rulebook

Multiplayer, multifighting, multikilling ⚔️ a Mordheim afteernoon report

Our newborn wargaming club (with which we played a little tournament during Spring 2021) reunited on Saturday afternoon to fight amongst the ruins of the City of the Damned. This would have been the first act of our Sword of the Herald campaign which we hope to start playing soon (but there's a big news, more at the end of this post).

There were eight players and warbands:

1. Gunnery School of Nuln (the winner of the former tournament!)
2. High Elves Shadow Warriors (the runner-up)
3. Witch Hunters
4. Blood Dragon Undead
5. another Blood Dragon Undead (this is a new warband, whilst the previous one fought in the tournament too)
6. Dwarf Treasure Hunters (Grimbeorn's warband)
7. Averlanders (Frontlineminiaturist's warband)
8. Orc Mob (my warband)

After a random assignment of the tables and the opponents, we were distributed between three battlefields.

Candle light fight for me and the more skilled Undead warband! This will not end well...

Two three-players battles for the others. Here in the first table there are the Dwarfs (on the right), the Elves in the centre and the other Undead on the left

Some prepping and the last sales before battle

Here you can see the Averlanders in the centre, the Witch Hunters down on the left and the Gunnery School on the right border. Randomly both multiplayer battles were using the scenario Ambush from Annual 2002 (which my pards and I already played the Saturday before)

All set even for us: my Greenskins on the right are ready to beat up the Undead for the control of the big house

We started the game! I took some pics of my table, but both my mates forgot to take any (a real reporter squadron eheh), so here's what we got.

"Ready to take it Bozz!"

"Hey Bozz doz wolves seem to me a little strange..."

The Undead move forward with their henchmen ready to taste Orc flesh...

Dire Wolf vs Goblin? Nasty!

My elite troops are waiting for the enemy, but in the wooden balcony something horrible lurks...

"Hey Bozz here comz the ugly onez!"

Argh! My Shaman is beaten up another time. I really need to cover more this guy...

Check on the other tables! Here the Undead and the Elves fight harshly in the edifice at the centre of the battlefield

And here the Averlanders are fleeing with the Wyrdstone while the other warbands try to stop them

"Goodbye nice Imperial folks! The Wyrdstone is ours!"

The Vampire is hungry for Elven blood

Nice afternoon of wargaming. We had a lot of fun, even cause for some of us this was the first Mordheim game since last June. But what was the outcome of our three battles?

1. Table 1, Orcs vs Undead: decisive Undead victory. I lost more than half of my warband, and even if I controlled one section of the building (almost two) the Necromancer cast a spell against my Goblin henchman and stunned him good at the very end of the game.
2. Table 2, Dwarves vs Elves vs Undead: another Undead victory! The players reached an agreement on the Wyrdstone counters on the table, but the Vampire's servants where winners on the field. Grimbeorn says: The Elves (who were the defender) deployed well but they played last in the first turn, so they were attacked by the Undead which had an easy time, the Dwarfs on the opposite side tried to stop the lightning-fast Elves with little success, managing only to extort a couple Wyrdstone counters in exchange of the life of one of the pointy-ears. Eventually, a draw between Undead and Elves, except that an humble Zombie came out in striking the final blow on the Shadow Warriors' Captain, making very proud (and a little jealous) his vampiric Master.
3. Table 3, Witch Hunters vs Averlanders vs Gunnery School: similar outcome than the previous, but with Frontlineminiaturist's Averlanders on the first place. They manage to flee with some counters: the others were divided amongst the players.

We run the post-battle sequence all together as always, and we had a nice talk about the games. Some of us have a lot of gold to spend before the next battle!

Lastly, we decided to join a great adventure: even if we like the idea of the Sword of the Herald campaign, and we can obviously keep it for the future, we agreed to join the first national Mordheim campaign set up planned by the Mordheim Italia Community from May onwards. The campaign is called Tempesta Necromantica (Necromantic Storm) and will be focused on some dark forces from beyond the grave which lurk in the cold streets of Mordheim...