Folly Number Two: Solo Wargaming?

Another "Folly" that has been rumbling along in the background for the past few months has been my attempt to organise solo wargaming. Mr Don Featherstone has been scribbled in and drawn upon for the past few months on and off.

I've produced a range of materials to help me play solo, from cards to maps and have been researching information from a variety of sources. Mighty Empires-GW, Solo Wargaming-Featherstone, Oathmark series- McCollough and of course old ideas I had of my own and things gleaned from the internet. 

So I have produced a map using my D&D map making cards and laminated that. Then using the Mighty Empires markers I drew some tokens for villages, cities, fortresses, armies and direction arrows.

I drew the tokens much larger and then shrank them once coloured on my printer.

As I was going to use these with 10mm Romans/Celts I created some unit cards, as Don would have done, to enable secret deployment.

Then tactical cards to aid in play once the game has started. Now these are the most problematic part of the process, basically they might well give silly orders to the AI army that follows them. Only time will tell. 

The illustration gives movement instructions and underneath are further combat suggestions.

Finally I added something I made a very long time ago. It is a set of terrain cards that creates a very wide number of possibilities. I did not design these I found them here , so thanks very much to Avian.

These cards by Avian I have used loads of times and they work really well in my opinion.

Finally Don Featherstone talks about having a system of rewards and fines for units that do well or poorly and also weather related tables etc. Well the Oathmark books have a wealth of material about this and other ideas, most notably battles that are linked together through scenarios. So I will be using Joe's rules to help create a more interesting battlefield development.

There you go, my latest folly, but not the last.

More to come next month.

Feywild Village/Town Designer Hexagons

These are a set of Hex tiles I designed to help me plan and create places in the Feywild. Map making only gets my pulse racing for the first couple and then it becomes a chore. With these I can make any number of towns, villages or even cities if I need them.

I drew out the originals and coloured them with pencils, then I photocopied them with my printer and cut a set out.

Those were then laminated and ready to use.

To create a place I blu tac them to a sheet of A4 hex paper, when I'm happy I photocopy them again and keep the copy.

Examples of the "tree" house set of tiles.

Below laid out to create a multilayered town up in the trees.

A mixture of the ground and tree hex's.

Three locations I have used in our games of D&D.

The Town of Adressin. I add notes to the map of prominent places and NPC homes/shops etc.

The Village of Aio.

The Village of Acron.

The Village of Rosasea, to which I added a little detail in the centre of the village for role play purposes.

The first colour rendition of the tiles.

Finally the original hand drawn tiles before colour was added. I always colour a copy, not the original just in case I screw it up.

Four Against Darkness: Tile Designs

I am away on holiday in France at the moment and have brought 4 V darkness with me, as it's an excellent holiday game. Easy to pack and play, but loads of fun to play. Andrea Sfiligoi, really produced a smashing set of rules which I can't recommend enough.

Anyway I have long wanted to play it with a handful of 10mm miniatures and some home made tiles. Well here are my initial scribblings/ideas.

Some I won't be using but I think I know where to go from here.
The "preferred design" reference refers to the second page.

These are all pencil drawings so very faint, sorry. The basic dungeon tiles are going to be the first set I'll make, but I may have a go at some others in the future.

My first set of sketches.

Caverns and castles.

I have drawn some to play in a cityscape too, but they were so faint were impossible to see.

Next time I will have some inked versions hopefully.

D&D: Initiative Markers

To start of with a couple of shots from my first game DMing this bunch of noodles in our West Marches Campaign, these are 5 of the 24 strong Outsider group working out of Luskan.

Here they were playing in the Icewind Dale, my area of responsibility. It was great fun, laughed all night long.

Anyway this post is mainly about the new Initiative cards I made for everyone to play with.

One for each of the basic classes in the original book.

The characters you saw above. On front just their name and pretty picture, laminated.

On the back their Ac and HP to help me see how they were doing at a glance- I also have a record sheet as well.

The dry wipe pen comes off dead easy. 

I also have one marker for NPC's in combat but I try very hard to avoid NPC's fighting.

More importantly are markers for the enemy the PC's may face.

So far they have worked really well with both my grps and I think it shows the players visually exactly when they are up next.