We’ve introduced a new segment called Campaign Corner, where we are tracking our Mighty Empires campaign that we’re playing locally. Here’s the map if you want to follow along!
This is the state of the game after month 4 (turn 4 of 6, for the first in-game year), and we’ve got four battles to be fought. The yellow flags are independent settlements, the Blue is for Order, Red for Destruction and Black for Chaos. As you can see, Chaos has razed a lot of settlements in the south–this is how they subsist from turn to turn. The dark brown buildings represent villages, the light brown ones are cities and they grey square ones are fortresses. You can also see some beige circular baggage tokens with certain banners–those are supplies that can be consumed if the banner is in a tile with no settlements.
Chaos has a 250pt banner (they look like black squares in this image) attacking a village in the south west. They had attacked it last turn also, but were rebuffed. Two adjacent battles are to the west of the Inner Sea, where Chaos has two banners (950pt) attacking a village that is part of the Order empire. Meanwhile two of Order’s banners are once again attacking the independent city of Findaglen (named last week when we fought the first battle of Findaglen using Old World armies on the battlefield). Our final battle is at the north end of the Inner Sea where a Destruction banner and an Order banner each of 500pts will fight for control of the coast.
How It Works
The goal for this campaign is to encourage as many of our local gamers to participate in games as possible. We created three grand Alliances, to cover all the factions in the game including Legacy armies. The three podcast hosts control one of each of the Alliances on the board, and will make moves with banners to explore the board and create battle opportunities–we’re also acting as GMs. Each battle is then fought out at our weekly meetup. Anyone with an army from the right Alliance can fight a battle on behalf of that Alliance (most have just one army and have picked sides!), or they can act as the Independent in any of the battles over Independent Settlements.
Points
The points in the banners are only used for representing proportions. E.g. if two banners of 500pts are fighting in Mighty Empires, the two players can choose to fight a 2,000pt game against each other, based on their preference. However, if one banner was 500pts and the other was 380, then one player would play with just (380*4=) 1520pts if they chose a 2,000 point game.
Casualties
We’re using a mix of rules from Mighty Empires and Blood in the Badlands for this. For each rank and file troop that were destroyed in the battle, roll a d6 and on a 4+ the model survived the battle. Dead Characters auto-survive (plot save!), and there are rules for post-battle damage to characters from Blood in the Badlands that we’re experimenting with, to help bring a feeling of continuity to the battles.
Scenarios
We choose scenarios based on what makes sense on the map. Our first round of battles were invasions of Independent Cities, so we played a scenario very similar to Occupy from the Clash of Kings pack for KoW, as that made sense flavourwise. Each time we fight in a location, they players get to name that location on the map. We’re currently working on a 3d printed version of the map that we’ll have in the game area where we play.
Objectives
The objective for each Alliance is to take control of the tiles bordering the Inner Sea. At the end of the campaign (probably around May/June) we are aiming to have some big final battles as everyone will have their armies ready for much bigger games. Every now and again, the Inner Sea drains away and reveals ancient ruins that we’re all anxious to plunder (or protect, if you’re a boring goody-two-shoes), and mysterious portents are predicting this event to be coming soon! Each faction will get bonuses in the final battles proportional to how much of the Inner Sea Coast they control.
Prizes
In addtion to a year of bragging rights, the winning faction will get to choose a name for the Inner Sea, and thus naming the campaign as a whole. There should also be some giveaway goodies for everyone involved along the way!
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