So this past Sunday, I met up with a work mate, and we had a crack at playing a throw-down game of Song of Arthur & Merlin. The system was recommended by someone on the Lead Adventure Forum, and as it only cost me about eight bucks to download - cheap as chips really - I thought I'd invest the time learning it. The game lasted almost two hours and we had a good time, chatting away and adding to the story with our own stupid banter.
The game attracted a bit of attention from the D&D, 40K, and Star Wars people as we went along. We always seem to have a good chat with everyone, especially those curious about the games we're playing. It helped that we don't really take things too seriously, and being a light game, we're not head-in-the-rule-book gamers.
Song of Blades / Arthur & Merlin is a very simple system that is great for the kind of DIY games that I like to put on. I'd already played a few spotty games with my kids, so I was familiar with the mechanisms of the game.
M - my work mate - has a photogenic memory for games and managed to pick it up within 10 mins. We decided that we weren't going to over-load the units with special abilities, just so we could get the game humming along.
The other advantage of this system, is that I could use the 'Sheriff of Nottingham' figures I've been painting. Whilst I may not have enough figures from that set to create a large force, I've painted enough to get a decent force together for this system. By adding a few old D&D figures, and the odd Heroscape figures, we had enough for a decent battle.
Darwin Tabletop Gamers is a club that not only has a small library of boardgames for casual play, but as I discovered, a couple of tubs of really good terrain pieces they're happy to lend out for a few hours. Good people all round. This session, I only brought my trusty green couch-cloth material, a few trees, my river pieces & bridge, and a farm house I made. The rest of the pieces were lent out by the club. Pretty light on for a change, and much easier than bringing tubs and tubs of terrain.
It was a fairly simple scenario. I set up a small 'pagan shrine' at the rear of the village. and the monsters had to get there. The humans had to die to defend the village & the shrine. There was a lot of back & forward, and the game did manage to hum along quite nicely in fact.
The monsters - a mountain troll, a ghoul, three giant wolves, four goblins - started on the East side of the table, on the far side of the river. The lightly armed village militia, deployed to the bridge and the ford, in an attempt to block the way.
My mate M. deployed his wolves first, leaping them into action. There was some fairly evenly matched close quarter slashing & hacking from my militia at first, and they were aided in part by one group of archers deployed behind the grave-yard walls.
My archers managed to beat back M's giant wolves, as they were fairly easy to hit, but not to kill. M used his wolves cunningly to strike long and hard, all the while inching his Ghoul & Mountain Troll along.
It was a pretty cool & gruesome end to my archers, however, as they were very brittle in close quarter fighting. This wolf managed to triple its attack roll, essentially tearing each figure to pieces in such a colossal and epic fashion that my village militia had to take a morale check. Thankfully, even though the militia had seen this horror, they held their nerve, and fought back against the ghoul.
My lancers on the bridge didn't quite die as spectacularly, it was just an attritional grind that eventually tilted in the monster's favour. My archers on the hill over-looking the bridge, while slowing the advance, were no match for the troll when he eventually arrived to stomp on their faces & lustily eat their entrails.
Meanwhile M's ghoul had managed to break through the line held by my light militia, and he lurched his way towards the shrine. The strongest element of my force - my black knight - came to the fore, caught up with the ghoul and slayed him convincingly. It was to be the only saving grace he could take from the game. He was later knocked from his steed and mauled to death by a giant wolf.
My heavy infantry - so slow and ponderous - barely made a contribution. They were the only unit alive at game's end, blocking the passage to shrine, but soon to be overwhelmed by goblins, wolves and a very angry troll.
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