Tony Bath Campaign Rules #1

Lets push some blocks around a map!

This is going to be long.

We take ourselves to Tony Bath’s How to Set Up a Wargames Campaign, from which he lays out his Hyboria Campaign and the rules behind it.

I am going to be testing variations of these rules in varying degrees of complexity to see how our group and my tastes adjust and perceive the outcomes.

This is the cataloging of our first test, hopefully the least complex of the iterations to come. I was not entirely sure how logistics and tracking and management would go, but I am happy to report that this was more than easily manageable and we will be adding significant complexity moving forward until we hit a comfortably full margin of book keeping.

All examples will be from the test game between myself and 1 other player, yes we are bad at naming things, no I am not sorry.

This will be an overview of what we DID do, I will be adding a list of changes we will make at the end.

Setup

We begin by creating our Baronies, using the tables from a secret early look at Lords of Wonder, which you should also pick up if you have any interest in actually playing Chainmail at the table, and not just collecting a disgustingly difficult to read booklet to acquire dust on your shelf… This is the only time we will be using this book, everything after barony creation will be influenced primarily by Mr. Bath…

Barony of Riften

• Saxon-based People

• Live primarily in the Forests

• Primarily influenced by their Industrial Guilds

Baroness : DS 34 32 52¹ (You obviously need a baron for your barony!)

Bishop : CD 13 65 53² (Each settlement needs at least one leader)

The Settlement of Riften

• Class F - 2,000 people³

• Forest Hex

• Controls 8 Hexes around it

• 2 Companies of Light Foot

Barony of Windsor

• Saxon-based People

• Live primarily by Rivers

• Primarily influenced by their Counsel of Elders

Baron : DD 43 35 13 [Wants Wealth: Mostly Average, quite popular, very dumb]

Bishop : CH 23 23 63 [Wants War/Religion: A little shady, extremely intelligent.]

The Settlement of Windsor

• Class F - 2,000 people

• River Hex

• Controls 8 Hexes around it

• 2 Companies of Light Foot

The map at the outset, the pictures are from my perspective, the Barony of Windsor on the bottom. The terrain was randomly generated on the fly as we grew.

The Initial setup concluded with adding up all of the hexes in each domain, and adding up their resource and income values.

Hexes and their income value per turn:

1. Farm Plot - 1 Food

2. River - 1 Food

3. Plains - 1 Horse

4. Forest - 1 Lumber

5. Hills - 1 Stone

6. Mountains - 1 Metal

This will give the Barony of Windsor: (Per turn)
+5 Food, +1 Lumber, +1 Stone, +2 Metal, +1 Horse

This was best suited to be broken into a series of small charts:

1. Income Chart - This lists all income totals per resource.

2. Settlement Upkeep - This lists all upkeep paid to cities per turn.⁴

3. Army Upkeep - List all upkeep paid to armies.⁵

4. Current City Stockpile

The rest of the game was moving through each turn as a procedure. We think that we wanted each square to be 20 miles a side, but that feels too big, maybe 12 is a little more reasonable… Turns were probably seasons in length, but again this is not something I was super worried about right now… The movement of armies was more like Diplomacy in speed, so I am not really sure what to make of scale right now…

Turn Procedure

Turns are broken into three phases: Income, Admin, Army.

Income Phase

1. Add your income, subtract your upkeep, push it to your stockpile. ⁶

   1. Any income from trade in the previous turn is added at this point.

2. Update the map

   1. If any armies are on new territory, capture it, update income chart.

   2. If you have increased in size, add a new settlement⁷

Admin Phase

1. Receive any scouting information from last turn.⁸

2. Deal with your Event for the turn.⁹

3. Spend any resources you have stockpiled.¹⁰

   1. Upgrade settlements

   2. Any trade offers can be offered here to other domains.

      1. Resources are removed from stockpile at this point.

Army Phase

1. Place scout blocks in a city you own.

   1. Give scout blocks a destination.

2. Place army blocks in a square in your territory.¹¹

   1. On an edge ready in conquer

   2. On a city to train.

3. Train any troops, spend the resources

4. Move scouts to their destinations

   1. Checking when they move through things:

      1. They are caught

      2. They find out info

      3. They keep going

5. Troops move into their new squares

   1. If any collisions, do a battle.

   2. If land on a scout, check to capture.

6. The troops are left ON their squares until the income phase of next turn.

Troop Training

Was handled in a very simple way. Every settlement uses 10% of its population as a standing army. (This should be changed to a muster of 10%, not an automatic standing 10%)

Each company was 200 men. They were trained as a company at a town. So placing Company A on a town and spending 1 metal would turn them from Light Foot to Heavy Foot. (Yes I know that is awkward for specific costs, it will be more complicated next test) Training in a settlement for 1 turn and spending a horse would turn company A into Medium Horse, etc…

Leaders

Leaders are named people, that have their stats rolled up like the barons.

Each settlement has at least one leader. And every class that the settlement goes up, it will acquire a new one. So every Class E settlement has 2 leaders. Their relationships and actions during the resolution of Event Cards and the roleplay will be exclusively up to the players.

Example Flavorful Leaders:

Guru - SD 31 36 21 [Ambition/Wealth, no loyalties, extremely popular, very lazy]
Knight - SS 32 62 53 [Extreme Ambition, low loyalty, very handsome, disliked, smart]

Stuff we will add/change next time.

1. Hexes will be more complex than a single resource.

   1. Example: Rivers will grant foot and gold from trade

2. Resources will be more complex

   1. Metal will be raw or made into tools/weapons ?

      1. This will also require settlements to have workshops to convert.

      2. This will require some finetuning of abstraction

3. Each settlement will have its own land ownership and stockpile.

4. Each settlement will have some kind of morale system

5. Addition of Event cards EVERY turn

6. We will add Gold as a resource. (gained from Hexes per turn, spent as upkeep)

7. Gold will be taxed to the baron.

8. The map will have more interactive elements, ie goblins in woods

9. Armies will be mustered, not automatic, and cost gold/resource upkeep.

   1. Armies will stay in their square and have set movement rates

   2. Armies will require lumber/food/gold baggage to be assembled

      1. They will incur food/gold costs to move around

   3. Scouts will have costs

   4. 5 Companies can combine into a regiment(1,000men, 50/100 figures in battle)

      1. A leader, named figure with stats, will lead a regiment

   5. Training will be more complex and require multi turn timelines

10. The full Map will be set from the start

This was a lot to type… I am very unsure of the organization of this to a reader other than myself, but I hope it is moderately readable.

I will be posting again when we can get another game in, I hope to add quite a bit of complexity, as we both felt that each turn had plenty of room to grow.

The tests shall continue!

1. The First two letters are from playing Cards: Diamonds and Spades represent Wealth and Ambition, these are her primary desires. The rest of the numbers are 1-6, 1 being ‘bad’, 6 being ‘good’, they are paired together for 'like’ traits:

Morals/Loyalty Appearance/Popularity Intelligence/Activity.

2. Primary focus: Clubs/Diamonds = War/Wealth
No moral compass, very handsome, very popular, very intelligent. A dangerous man.

3. Settlement Sizes are A-F,
A. 30,000
B. 20,000
C. 10,000
D. 8,000
E. 4,000
F. 2,000

(Settlements will add +1 per tier to the base income of the hex. An E settlement on a farm hex will bring in +3 food total.)

4. Settlements cost upkeep based on population size:

1 Food per 2,000 population

1 Lumber per 3,000 population

1 Stone per 4,000 population

1 Metal per 5,000 population

5. We didn’t do this for this game, we just kept in in mind, I wasn’t sure how the resources would scale. We will be adding it in the future.

6. For THIS game, we had a single ‘stockpile’ for every city, this will be changed in the future so each settlement has its own resources.

7. Settlements were added in this scenario at every interval of 5 squares captured. In a ‘fleshed out’ map I don’t think settlements will be added this way.

8. We used a primitive scouting game this time, as we could both see the whole map. A scout was placed and given a target location, it would move there in the movement phase, then report back in the admin phase of the next turn. It seemed to work OK, hard to tell without actual fog of war.

9. This is where assassinations, plagues, bandits, and whatever will go. We again didn’t do this for this playtest, but there are many sources of event cards online that we will pull from to pool. We did discuss the ways different ones would work and how the leader attributes would come into play.

10. For THIS game, the only thing you could do is spend resources to upgrade a settlement in size, or spend resources to upgrade troops through training.

11. The entire logistics of this was handwaved for this game, we didn’t use lumber and food to make baggage trains, we didn’t pay troops with money, and we didn’t worry about movement or movement speeds, blocks could just go 1 square. This will all be added in the next playtest, as their was ample mental space to seemingly do all of it.