Demonslayer

Just in time for Halloween, Ganesha Games has released a fantasy game about hunting down and destroying demons.

Synopsis

Ganesha Games describes Demonslayer as "a retro-fueled, sword and sorcery hex-map game for a single player. All you need is the rulebook, the map, and two six-sided dice. Will you be the one to slay the demons, or will you fall victim to the shadows?"

As described, this is a hex crawl game, reminiscent of the classic Barbarian Prince. Here is a sample of the board. The numbers represent encounters. You can also run into random encounters in the unmarked hexes.

This is a rules light game. Your character has 5 abilities. They start at 4 and you have 15 additional points to allocate among them. Your Might and Will score determine your hit points. You start with a hand weapon and off you go. Task resolution, including combat, is simple - roll under the relevant ability.

Your goal is to track down and destroy one of the demon lords plaguing the land. To do it, you wander around the map visiting encounter sites. You can gain experience, gold, luck, equipment, and clues from your encounters. But you can also take wounds - ouch!

Your character starts with a lot of HP but gets whittled down slowly over time. You need to find the demon or find healing before you run out.

My Thoughts

I started a game and have played out a dozen encounters so far. I enjoy playing out a few encounters at a time, then setting it aside for a later time. I put the map, rules, and character sheet on the computer so I don't have to fiddle with physical components other than dice (which I keep on my desk). This makes it a great filler game. Have a few spare moments for gaming? Play out a few encounters of Demonslayer.

If I were to go physical, I would mark my progress on the map using a pen or pencil. That way, I could quickly pull it out or put it away.

I'm not sure how long it will take to finish a game. I'll let you know when I get there. I'm curious how much replay value there is. Ultimately, you'll learn where the encounters are located and can cherry pick your way around them.

Nevertheless, I think this is definitely worth the $5 price. I've been wanting a quick game for spare moments. Demonslayer fills that need.

Now What? (Skirmish Edition)

So Far

What have I completed?

1. I decided to make counters to use for arena battles.
2. I designed and printed counters for 13 different factions.
3. I stuck the labels onto bases, giving me completed counters for 2 factions - dwarves and goblins.
4. These two factions met in my first arena battle.

Now What? A Skirmish Campaign?

t would make sense to complete the counters for the other 11 factions. But I find myself getting distracted by other possibilities, specifically the idea of a dwarf-goblin war campaign. I would follow the exploits of a band of dwarves as they fight to clear a goblin infestation from their mine.

Considerations

First, what rules should I use for the campaign itself?

• I'd like something that will generate diverse missions and will allow my dwarf warband to improve over time.
• I don't want something that requires me to track a lot of resources. That was the issue I had with Five Clicks, a post-apocalyptic game by Nordic Weasel.
• I will probably write my own campaign rules. In the meantime, I'm perusing various wargames for scenario and campaign ideas.

What additional resources do I need?

• I feel like I need more grunts for both sides. Also, I envision running into some monsters, like trolls. Now I need monster counters.
• Terrain? I could just use the terrain from my MicroBattles Big Battles set. But I'd like to put something together that is more skirmish-y

Sky Skirmish

I played this scenario a little while ago. I am just getting around to posting it.

At the time I played this, I did not have figures for a land skirmish. However, I could do an aerial skirmish.

Set Up

A squadron of the good guys (green) encounter 2 squadrons of the enemy.

The planes with rounded wing tips (such as the bottom green plane) are older, less effective fighters.

The Dogfight

Amongst the swirling dogfight, an older fighter damages his enemy counterpart (bottom)

Green team in trouble as the enemy gets on their tails! One plane is damaged.

The damaged green fighter gets double-teamed and shot down.

The older green fighter damages another enemy. But his comrade (middle) takes damage.

Another green plane goes down.

Despite his success on the day, the older green fighter realizes he is no match for the remaining enemy. Time to flee!

Notes

I was just killing some time before the day's LARP event. I decided to do a quick scenario. I chose an aerial skirmish because it is much easier and quicker to set up.

Dwarves vs. Goblins in the Arena of Heroes

I completed my skirmish counter designs and started adhering labels to bases.

When I started Arena of Heroes as a miniatures project, I posted a poll on Lead Adventure Forum about which factions to start with. The result was dwarves and goblins. So without further ado, I present the first fight in my Arena of Heroes project!

Set Up

Dwarves are on top and goblins on bottom.

Each side has a leader, bannerman, caster, archer, and two grunts.

They're fighting in a cardboard arena. I rolled randomly and got 1 item of terrain. I'm using a wooden disk to represent a column.

The Rules

This will be a 6 turn fight. A team wins by inflicting the most damage on its opponent.

I am using a skirmish variant of my MicroBattle rules. 

Note to self: I need to post the most recent version.

The Fight

A swirling melee erupts around the column. The dwarf captain drives away a goblin grunt.

And the goblin bannerman. The goblin chief and henchman kill the dwarven bannerman and wound a soldier.

Another note to self: I need to get some kill markers.

The dwarf captain presses forward but the dwarves lose another soldier.

The dwarf captain kills another goblin while the goblin chief charges the archer,

Throughout all this, the archers and casters traded ineffectual attacks.

The horn sounds game end. Here is the butcher's bill - 2 KO'd goblins vs. 3 KO'd dwarves.

But the goblins have 2 wounded men still up while the dwarves have 1.

OK, coming up with a quick scoring methodology.

Dwarves: Kill 1 grunt (3 pts) and 1 specialist (4 pts) + wound a grunt (1 pt) and a specialist (2 pts) = 10

Goblins: Kill 2 grunts (6 pts) and 1 specialist (4 pts) + wound a specialist (2 pts) = 12 pts.

Victory for the goblins!

The Final Batch

Here are the last of the Arena of Heroes counters.

African-like warriors, orcs, and naked barbarian types.

• That's supposed to be a lion with the African-like shaman.
• I made quirky orcs. I hate the green orc vibe so mine are orange with a pig snout.
• The naked barbarians have a flayed human-skin flag. Brutal.

I then went back and fixed the archers. Here is a sample.

Finally, I added one more team to the mix. This is an homage to my original Arena of Heroes team.

This team was notoriously incompetent so I gave them names to reflect their ineptitude.

• The middle 4 are (L to R) Nocan the Barbarian, Gimlet the dwarf, Armoless the elf, and Blandalf the wizard.
• I added two more figures to the team - Sir Lancealittle (L end) and Bruce Banner (R end)
• I have dubbed this team The Stupors.

More Arena of Heroes Counters

I'm really enjoying making these counters. Here are some more.

Knights (top) and dwarves.

The dwarves were fun. I wanted them in gray to represent armor but I wanted to distinguish them from the knights. I decided to forego helmets and then gave them red hair. I also wanted to give them beards. While looking for a shape to use as a beard I stumbled across a handlebar moustache icon. I decided to give the dwarves a crazy moustache (I assume that the beard is hidden below the moustache).

Gnolls, elves, skeletons, and goblins.

• The gnolls came from an aborted project set in my LARP's fantasy world.
• I like the elves' blonde ponytails.
• I decided to make the skeletons look, well skeletal, by keeping the head the same size and making the body thinner front to back. There is also a death knight and a necromancer.
• I tried something different for the goblins - the head is multiple colors. This represents their faces showing from under a hood. I also added a long, pointy nose.

Arena of Heroes Counters

Since I got the idea for resurrecting the Arena of Heroes skirmishes with counters, I've been playing around with different designs.

I've given each faction 6 different figures - a commander, two foot soldiers, an archer, a magic user, and a bannerman. I think the bannerman will get a bonus in melee. I need to work on the archer. The pictured archer figures are just placeholders.

So far, I've created 3 human factions (above). They are (from top to bottom) the paladins in their gold armor, the Imperials, and the desert nomads.

I really like the magic users. I show each using a different type of magic. In game, however, they will likely have access to more spells than pictured.

Another Skirmish Idea

I recently played an aerial dogfight game (battle report coming soon). I realized that aerial dogfights are great for quick games when I am pressed for time.

This got me thinking about quick land skirmishes, and a crazy idea popped into my head.

Arena of Heroes

Arena of Heroes is one of my failed miniature projects from a few years ago.

It began when I discovered a free set of rules on Lead Adventure Forum called Age of Heroes. I liked them a lot (so much that they became the basis for MicroBattle, but that is a story for another day). 

I decided to use them for arena battles so I ordered a number of 10mm figures to form teams. I planned to have 6 matching pairs:

• Imperials vs Barbarians (i.e. Romans vs Gauls)
• Knights vs Desert Raiders (i.e. Crusaders vs Turks)
• Paladins (using the Crusaders) vs Skeletons
• Elves vs Orcs
• Dwarves vs Goblins
• Halflings vs Lizardmen

I never got around to painting the figures. I eventually gave them away.

Arena Redux

I am now thinking of reviving this project, but using counters instead. 

I have some top-down figure designs from an aborted fantasy campaign that I can repurpose for this project. Here are some examples:

An Imperial commander, gnoll shaman, desert warrior, cleric, and a monster

I don't think it will be hard to create imaginative and distinct figures for the factions listed above (although I will likely drop the halflings and lizardmen).

Now I'm Thinking RPG

Distractions

Before I get into today's topic, let me just give a quick update. I have not been doing much gaming because my other hobby, LARP, is keeping me busy. My group got a bunch of new recruits lately and I have been prepping games for them. I am even running a small event today.

Skirmish Thoughts

In my last post, I mentioned that I lack tokens to use for skirmish gaming. I dabbled with creating some generic counters but got no further than this.

Generic skirmish counters

I'm also looking for rules to use to run a campaign. This has given me some reading material, but I'm not sold enough on any to try them out. Anyway, this has led me to ponder RPGs.

My Stalled RPG Campaign

For some time I've been running a solo RPG using my Micro rules and the Dragons of Icespire Peak  campaign. Ser Killian and his companions have completed several adventures (detailed on my old blog), but I have not run a session for him since March. 

So what happened? A couple of factors have stymied me.

• The latest adventure is just kind of boring. There isn't much variety in antagonists, which does not transfer well to my solo-style adventures.
• I ran into a problem with the rules. My level 4 characters were fighting level 1 orcs. Should be a pushover, right? Nope - the orcs were trashing them. The problem came with my armor rules. The orcs had medium armor, which deducts from the damage rolls. Combined with my bad dice rolls, my characters just could not damage them. I realized that this is a serious flaw with my rules.

As a result, I just have not played any RPG sessions.

Solutions

As I was pondering skirmish gaming lately, my mind turned to RPGs. I then had a couple of ideas.

• Fix the adventure - perhaps I'll change it from a haunted house to a haunted grove. Some of the encounters will make more sense.
• Add damage bonuses - Right now, I give an attack bonus for being a higher level than the enemy, I think I also should give some kind of damage bonus.

I hope to try out my solutions soon.

Skirmish Musings

My Current State of Gaming

Currently, I am well situated for land battle games.

My generic counters can handle pretty much any conflict from ancients to late 19th century.

Top: heavy and light infantry
Bottom: artillery and cavalry

I love the flexibility of my counters. I can use them to play any period that suddenly sparks my interest. I don't have to wait until I paint up a bunch of appropriate figures. Case in point - last month I got bitten by the Pyrrhic Wars bug. I posted about the project on September 4th and posted about a game on September 7th. I couldn't really do that with miniatures.

I also have generic modern counters that cover mechanized warfare.

This takes my gaming from the 20th century to the future!

What's Missing?

Recently I've been kicking around the idea of skirmish gaming. There have been a couple of inspirations.

• Shaun's Wargaming has a entertaining post with five skirmishes using Five Core Pulp.
• I've seen some posts (which I can't find now) about One-hour Ancient and Medieval Skirmish Wargames

These posts have stirred an interest in an occasional skirmish. My lack of individually based infantry counters kind of puts a damper on it though.

I could do squad based skirmishes. However, my generic counters are a bit bigger than a squad - the heavy infantry has 96 dots aka soldiers!

Thoughts about Counters

I've been toying with making some counters with individuals specifically for skirmish gaming. The question becomes: how should I go about it?

Meeples

I have meeples and used them before for RPG actions. I find them a bit gamey looking.

Standees

I also had an idea of creating standees using paper miniatures from Junior General or Wargame Vault. 

Junior General Romans

There are a couple of problems with this approach.

• How do I mount them? I'm thinking of wood blocks like Command & Colors. But I want them to be small (maybe 6-10mm in height) and finding blocks that size is problematic.
• They are not generic. I then get into the issue of having to make different blocks for each era and faction. Too much!

Top Down

I'm leaning toward top down counters, like these.

Some top downs from Two Hour Wargames's 5150

The biggest issue here is finding or creating counters that are generic enough but not so generic that they just look like dots. Dots are OK for mass formations but not skirmish.

Anyway, I need to play around with making counters. However, work and LARP have kept me very busy lately so I haven't had a chance.