SkaForHire

Chapter 2: Drunken fireballs of glorious retribution. In the hand of, Pollock Drover, Sergeant in the Fallen Dragon Mercenary Corps. Father, I apologize for the amount of blood on that last sheet of paper. Not all of it was mine. I was telling you of the strange look Gleambeam gave us when Heisen told him to stop drinking. Well little did I know, he was teleporting us to the enemy’s front line. We were instantly transported in front of the bog, with an army of berserkers to our right and an angry Lord Horssen to our left. Link to animated gif of Gleambeam's Teleport DSC_1344 by skaforhire, on Flickr We were quickly rushed By Alvis Mandertake and his kinsmen , but Gleambeam right after finishing the teleport muttered something, and a blast of fire enveloped 9 or Alvis’s men. fireballgleam by skaforhire, on Flickr Those men were pretty tough though. The last thing I saw on the battlefield outside of the fight we were about to partake in inside the bog was Petera’s next row of solders – Crown Knights, and one of them wearing the armor of the old king! I did not have time to think about that though. The first casualty of our side came when one of those boys from Carn got their head cut clean off by some overzealous, drooling, insanely frenzied Mitgardian by the name of Gold Horn came charging into our ranks. I found out later that he was their war chief. DSC_3374 by skaforhire, on Flickr The second man from Carn was killed within seconds, but my mercs held up to the initial onslaught. Gleam beam continued to try to throw fireballs at the enemy, but his magic was unable to penetrate their now aware mage’s defenses. He did kill two of Horssen’s Mercs though. [Gleambeam had very good luck, not only did he make a successful drunken teleport (he had the chance to drop all of his passengers into the void and never be heard from again), but he pulled off a fireball before I remember I could counter his attacks with the mages on my side. So, right off the bat Petera’s side was missing one of their hard hitting squads.] For our group the battle was not long though. Soon Costa Ortega, Working for Lord Horssen made his way to Gleambeam and pounded him with his mighty hammer. The mage fell… but in his last dying moments he through his bottle up into the air and it exploded in one last fireball killing two of Horssen’s axemen, although the lord himself shrugged off the fire blast. DSC_3383 by skaforhire, on Flickr One of my men fell after that, along with one of Heisen’s sand elf friends. Unfortunately, Heisen and his two generals also fell quickly. The Warchief Goldhord knocked Heisen unconscious with one blow [it was a massive blow, a critical hit and max damage on the dice], he would be retrieved later and is alive, thank goodness. The same goes for his Werewolf General Kyle, who was unable to transform in time to help turn the tide. DSC_3426 by skaforhire, on Flickr However, his General Ramona was not so lucky. She took a few Berserkers with her, but one of Horssen’s Mercs with a giant mace removed her sprit for her flesh. DSC_3427 by skaforhire, on Flickr At this point, seeing that our little advance party was quickly becoming a singles engagement, I ran over to the other wizard, killed the man attacking him and screamed for him to teleport us out of there. In shock he stated that he didn’t know the spell. So we had to fight our way back to the lines, that is when the Cavalry started to arrive… TO BE CONTINUED. DSC_3428 by skaforhire, on Flickr

Coming soon dug by skaforhire, on Flickr

Yes.

Yep... After I get done with the battle, and get back from a long research trip, I will start doing some of the intro builds. We will then see some sort of mini challenge to help establish the leaders for the two sides (this is how the last two challenges started). I think I have a good one in mind.

Each challenge of this book (the sequence of events around one storyline, we are currently in book 2) revolves around a civil war or internal conflict in each guild. Nocturnus went first with a full fledged civil war, Avalonia went second with a minor disagreement of what should be done about the Drow, Mitgardia will be next, then something will happen in Kaliphlin that will result in side v. side, then we will end again with another Nocturnus conflict. I have only been leaving hints to what will happen in Kaliphlin, but expect once the Mitgardian conflict begins to happen more leadup to our own challenge.

It is and it isn't... but it is. So, many of the characters in my story are dedicated to people who once played characters by those names in a game a long time ago... But he definitely named his character after WoT. Good eye! He would brood around and talk about the mighty past of a fallen kingdom that he was the ancient decedent of. Since this is the first time I have introduced him, I haven't decided where he will go. He will survive the battle, and there will be more stories with him later.

We usually state that they are "on another flank" However, there are reinforcements for this battle. For example, we have an assassin rule, where assassin models can sit off the table and "appear" in the midst of battle (every turn they sit out, they get another 6" from the deployment zone.) Scarst (who is controlling Dugal's side) will probably drop your assassins in when my troops get closer. Beyond these special troops, I have a lot of NPCs sitting in reinforcements, Scarst has less NPCs, but still has access to Lord Zach and other builder's partial units. I am a bit torn, if I open another battle of Ahmet, we can field Zaid Parsel, but I have a huge pile of unsorted pieces, and not sure I want to drop another large set into that pile. However, I promised Scarst that if he is desperate for troops by the end that we would break it open and bring your unit (amongst others that were not fielded) in. I still have two large companies of infantry in reserve beyond the ones mentioned, he only has one. The last picture of my last report is all of your troops, I just found a green helmet that I forgot I had, so I will be switching that on your sigfig. He is kind of covered up there, but you can see his two werewolf friends, and your mages behind them. Your mercs are up front, and they are flanked by the Carn troops. I am sure you will get to see a few more of them as the rest of the battle goes up. :) My brother is convinced that those gnomes are going to eat the heavy Cavalry for dinner. Luckily your characters are standing behind the gnomes... hahaha

Well, work schedules and figs crashing to the ground and stuff have put us a little behind schedule or this already late endeavor. However, the battle has started. Here is the first chapter in the battle. Spoiler: if you are looking for action, this isn’t the post – by the end of the pictures we have taken, the armies are still about a foot away from each other. Let’s just call this a teaser. Throughout these reports, we will use brackets when we want to make slight game mechanics notes to justify why something happened. For example, [The battlefield was set up to have specific terrain advantages. There were penalties to move through the desert and the bog, where units received more movement on the road. As you will see, this dictated Petera’s side’s strategy from the beginning. ] Chapter 1, The Rush of Battle In the hand of, Pollock Drover, Sergeant in the Fallen Dragon Mercenary Corps. Dear Father, I fear that this is the last you will hear from me, as I barely have the strength to write this letter. I thank you for those reading lessons when I was a child, I could not rest peacefully without you knowing what happened to your son. I also right this, so that someone may chronicle the events that have unfolded. Our company’s board of generals, offering up a squad for the Eastgate Conflict, chose me to lead a squad to be auctioned off a week back. The contract we struck with Heinsen of Carn carried a handsome payment. We soon met up with the man, and we found ourselves in strange company. Heinsen and his closest compatriots are werewolves, and I felt a bit uneasy about this at first. However, it was the mages that we came to feel uneasy around. I should say, one mage, Gleambeam, who always had his hand on a bottle. There was a weird fire in his eyes, and we never felt comfortable leaving our back exposed to him. Still, we made our way this morning to our deployment spot, Heinsen leading our group of men to the center of the field. I got a good look at all our troops and our positioning. DSC_1313 by skaforhire, on Flickr On the right, and in the sands that crawled into the Wither Woods, the majority of PGTC troops took their place. Also with them were Lord Vladius’s troops and another group of Orcs that came to seek revenge on one of Petera’s allies. At the head of this flank was a group of Leander troops. I did not catch who was in charge over there. DSC_1312 by skaforhire, on Flickr On our far left, along the river, a group of soldiers that had fought together at the Battle of Khordeem covered the flank. Jakon the Invincible and Garret Hailfist were two of the most famous names in this army, and they commanded that flank. DSC_1317 by skaforhire, on Flickr To their right the mighty Dugal MacLean formed up. He had some of the Blue Guard with him, along with the Amazons, or Angels of Death as they like to be called – Both GEAR Co.’s elite units. However, his real body guard was five Aleenridders from Mpya Stedor and the great siege engineer Sergio. DSC_1316 by skaforhire, on Flickr In the middle, along the oil road, the rest of the heavy cavalry was placed. A squad of the GEAR Co. 1st Heavy Cavalry, the titans were supplemented by the Order of the Golden Mask [unfortunately totally misrepresented because of my piece availability, sorry Mike!] Some more Blue Guard, along with a few of the Immortals and an insane group of gnomes helped make up this part of the line. Oddly enough, it was Paulos who rode out in front of the army to give a speech, not Dugal. I was too far away to hear him, but the middle of the line really cheered hard before they began their advance. DSC_1315 by skaforhire, on Flickr Dugal kept a few men in reserve, a war chariot, a squad of Titans, and two squads of Blue Guard, although their commander Al’Leden Mantherin was on the field with us. Is Petera going to personally show up was the question of the night before, and so far the answer is no. Our spies have found that Elden Logan, current second in command to Petera is leading the enemy army. We seem to outnumber them, but everyone fears their mages, and preys that we have enough on our side. The enemy has lined up with what seems to be much the same plan as us – get down the road with cavalry and sever the enemy’s line. The first units we saw were the GEAR Co. 3rd Heavy Cavalry, the Dreadfists, their purple lacquered armor shining in the morning sun. With them came a group of Centaurs and the general Logan. DSC_1323 by skaforhire, on Flickr On the far left of their line, and opposing the PGTC forces was an Avalonian Lord Baldwin and his men, along with Beleg of Mitgardia. Our rival company, the Blue Spears were formed up behind them. This side looked particularly weak, and as we began to advance, we could tell Paulos wanted to crush this side first. DSC_1325 by skaforhire, on Flickr On the far right, they had a necromancer and his brood, a band of Cyclops, the famed Arkbi Falcolns, and at least one squad of the Red Guard. DSC_1321 by skaforhire, on Flickr We began to advance quickly, but so did the enemy, it did not seem that anyone had held back in the defensive, and as an infantry man on the attack, you gotta love that. Their whole right side moved quickly, with Captain Anton Wyldes, Lord Horssten, and Hataman the Yukar’s troops all moving up along the bog. Way in the front, a squad of Red Guard appeared, teleported there by some mage, that we later found out was Lord Ravencroft, returned from 100 years of death. DSC_1336 by skaforhire, on Flickr Our left side thrust forward to meet their advance. DSC_1332 by skaforhire, on Flickr But it was the push right in the middle, along the road that signaled that this would be a very bloody battle in deed. Paulos became cautious and brought spearmen to brace for a cavalry charge along the road, holding the Titans in reserve. However, General Logan sent the Dreadfists crashing down the road… unfortunately I would not see the immediate result of this meeting. DSC_1342 by skaforhire, on Flickr At this point I heard Heisen comment loudly, “put that bottle down, we are in battle man!” I turned around in time to see an odd glimmer in Gleambeam’s body, as I felt my own existence waver… DSC_1334 by skaforhire, on Flickr [We were not sure which one Gleambeam was, by TUB’s description, so we picked the one with the hat. He also presented us with an odd plot mechanism. At the beginning of every turn we rolled a dice to see when Gleambeam would go crazy and try to win the battle himself (being a drunk, we thought he was the perfect candidate to try out a new mage type that is ultra-powerful, but every spell they take a risk of very bad things happening). He passed his first sobriety check, but we also added a -1 modifier each turn, since we assumed he was throwing back another bottle each round. Well, this only lasted to round two… when he failed the check… and away he went. ] TO BE CONTINUED….

But we can announce that Kaliphlin and Nocturnus won their respective contests, but good job to all the guilds! After we get the last judging results we will announce the individual winners.

Since it is a civil war, the colors will at least be accented by blue and red, but as with all things historica, we are pretty open to anything.

Good luck with the sort! I can't find the time to do mine...As for the Greek Lego -- Roman will work too. What I have in mind involves some of those pieces, but there will be ways to depict without those pieces.

We are actually 4th, Mitgardia is next.

That is perfectly acceptable, and I believe (but I am GL, so I may be biased) that Kaliphlin would be the best build for such a type of society. ::Spoiler alert::, we will be seeing some ancient Greek like baddies in a few months.

Yes, there are actually is a pretty thorough points system for evening battles without having special abilities, we found that playing the Roleplaying battles with Historica have allowed us to add new abilities and see how powerful they are in order to give a good point value, but as I said we are still playtesting

18 studs should be 6 inches (the movement and range are both in inches), we played around with 4 and 5 inches, but since we often played on a bigger table, it made the game too slow just to get into hand to hand combat. I suppose when we look into eras that have more shooting than melee, we may have to adjust.

S is strength, it is added to the weapon's damage -- multiplied by 1.5 if it is a two handed weapon. Ranged weapons do not add anything unless they are strength based, such as throwing a spear. An bow and arrow have high damage output without a modifier. a short Bow is 2d8, crossbow is 2d10, a long bow is 2d12.

you have to switch over to BBCode in order to get the link... also, you never said which side you were joining, Petera or Dugal?

What, no Kai or DM with stats on who posted the most? What kind of anniversary is this!!!

Which side did you pledge to? And, I do want to say that your men will probably be reinforcements in the third or fourth turn, as the armies are pretty much set up and have moved by this point. What are the parts for Captain? and which head are you using on your sig fig (not sure if I can rep any of this accurately), also oddly enough, I really don't have many camels, so I did not give anyone camels -- is it OK that he is on a horse? Finally, you need to copy the whole link from the flickr share button in order for it to show up in the post.

3 studs = 1 inch roughly, so our measuring sticks are usually lego for movement, but the stat is in inches. Sorry, the A is actions -- it takes one action to walk your full movement, all of your actions to doublemove / run / charge. You must have 2 actions in order to make those special movements. It also costs one action for a basic attack. For example, Jakon has 3 Actions. He moves 6 inches with his first action, then attacks twice with the second and third action. Whirlwind, an ability that allows him to attack every unit around him in range, costs 2 actions. So essentially, Jakon could step up to a mob of soldiers and then Whirlwind, where a basic soldier could only step up and attack (even if they had the ability whirlwind, they would have to stay still to do it) Intelligence is not used that often other than on fear tests. If a unit takes 50%, all figs/models in that unit must take a fear test --- if they do not roll under their intelligence on a D10 roll, then they begin to flee the battlefield. Essentially, it is a leadership skill. However it is also used for damage when casting a spell, or when countering a spell. And again, it is used for "special situations" For example, when asking if a model can see an invisible unit, find a trap, etc...

On another note, Jakon's soldiers are the basic human stat line. So we can compare average to better than average here.

Upon request. Sure, Although I guess that I should not have posted one of the biggest characters as the template. LOL. If it was a sigfig sent, they got comparable stats.jakon stats by skaforhire, on Flickr Jakon actually leveled up since he was in a battle before this. So did Gideon's Ediz Falconi and Niku's Lord Tiven as there were also former soldiers in a battle we have run.

for the to hit roll, 2d6 would not work, stats would have to be adjusted for defense. As it is, the average minifigure human hits 60% of the time against another average minifigure human (the to hit stat is usually 3, and the defense is usually 8. Also, critical hit chance would be much lower if 2d6 were used, and the same with critical failure (rolling a 1 sometimes results in bad things happening -- like with Jakon's rocket artillery from the LDD challenge associated with this battle would have ill-effects, perhaps exploding ) On the other hand with weapons, you could always only use d6 or 2d6 weapons, I will throw in there that tere are d8 and d12 weapons in the list. If you have the money, a big bag of dice costs about 20 dollars, and if you are doing larger battles it is nice to have one -- and if you play D&D, it is a relatively cheap way to get dice.

For some reason d10s get lost the easiest... I think the weapons chart has lasers... I would have to pull it up to see.

My brother (scarst) said that we should probably post the rules to give people an idea what they are getting into. They are in a state of flux, with only parts fleshed out, but I am glad to send them out. Right now we have the basic rules and the beginning of the codexes for different races. The original idea was to have a table top war game that could take on Roleplaying elements easily. We liked Brikwars, but felt as if it was not detailed enough. Admittedly, our game (which has the running title Block Combat) is much harder to fight a large scale battle with, but we wanted to make sure that figs were different in their attributes and abilities, unlike Brikwars (although i have not been back to their site in quite a while, they may have changed things). We are not trying to build a better mousetrap than Brikwars or Evil Stevie's Pirate Game, we are just trying to build a different kind of mousetrap. Also, as with these two great games, our game will be open to everyone for free when completed. . One of the goals was to make the game scalable by era -- in fact, I started writing the rules for EXOForce era, but then got into castle again. So right now, we have the first era(s) mapped out, and that is where the majority of the playtesting happens -- medieval period. With all that being said, I can post the alpha rules somewhere (they are too long for a post) and you all can look at them. I do have a website still I think... I should put it there haha. Basically every figure has a set of stats and abilities, I can give you a short rundown to get an idea of how we play out fights between characters. Dugal stat by skaforhire, on Flickr The basic fig has much lesser stats than Dugal here, but he is a good example. He can move 6 (or use a full action to run 12), He has 7 wounds at 6 toughness (the amount of damage he has to take to receive a wound) His strength is above human average at 4, while his intelligence and ego are inflated to 9 :) This is also his command stat when units under him have to take a fear test, it is also sometimes used for special events like "would Dugal know that there was an evil groundhog burrowing towards him, roll a d20 and find out." He has above average ranged to hit and hand to hand to hit, and his defense (we sometimes call it "agility armor") is a little higher than normal because of his experience. Basically if someone would attack Dugal, they would roll a D10, add their hand to hand ability, and see if they tied or beat dugal's defense, if so, we have a hit. They would then role the dice corresponding with their weapon type (which, as you can imagine there is a long list of weapons due to the different types in Lego), Let's say his attacker was using a long sword, which is a d10 weapon. They would role a d10, they role a 9, add their strength of 3 and they would have done 12 damage -- well if we look at the very heavily armored Dugal, we can see that he has 12 armor, which is subtracted from the damage first. In this case, not one point of damage hits Dugal and he goes on about his merry way reaping souls. However, if that same player rolled a 10 on their to hit roll, a critical hit on a longsword would occur, then they would roll 2 d10s. and add twice their strength... Let's say the final result was 23 after all addition. Now, Dugal is hurting a bit -- he subtracts the first 12 points of damage, but he still takes 11 points more! Well Dugal is a pretty tough character, so we see that it takes 6 points of damage to wound him. With 11 points left over, that is one wound. The remainder points are discarded and do not stack against him on the next hit he takes. So now dugal is down to 6 wounds. So, Dugal is probably one of the tougher models out there to kill (there are a lot of reasons for this, mainly because of plot and being a sig fig), but the basic figure is much smaller, and usually dies with a good role. There are ways to kill Dugal easier, like gang attacks where multiple attackers combine their attack to do more damage, or high damage weapons and magic. Most people who signed up got at least one pretty strong character that their personal battle story will follow, but some people who signed up many will have some basic troops too. survivability in this game can be quite tactical, for example, even though Dugal has follow up attacks if he kills someone (the cleaves) he can't just go cleaving his way into the middle of the enemy army, or else he will get gang attacked and die. So their are smart ways to play characters and bad ways. However, the run of the mill troops are important too, as they are the ones that take the hits, deal many smaller hits, and sometimes win the day... after 20 of them get eaten by a T-Rex. Anyway, that is a little bit of explanation, there are a lot more rules... I will see if I can revive my site www.cutthroatgames.com and get an ALPHA copy up there on the web for you all.