Campaign 2011 - month 1

I sent out the call for orders and decided to make a special rule for month #1:

Rise - Only FoD make challenges this turn. All players will earn an additional +2 EPs regardless of results.

I figured this would help kick start the campaign and get some territories and buildings on the map.

As I expected, no one had had time to read and absorb my rules. A few years ago I wrote an abortive set of campaign rules that were so thorough and comprehensive, the whole lot came to fifty-something pages of text. Unsurprisingly, my friends at the time were utterly daunted by the prospect of even reading the stuff, let alone trying to start a campaign. From that experience, I wanted the rules to remain quite brief. But it's amazing how easily that page count can creep up.

In the event, 8th edition Warhammer had just been released and we all had enough on our plates trying to get to grips with those rules, so I didn't blame anyone for not reading another bunch of stuff. Unfortunately, it did mean that I spent quite a lot of time answering email queries. But in the end we got ourselves a set of orders.

Unfortunately...

The Brettonnian, sorry, I mean Skaven player told us at the last minute that he couldn't make it (grrrrr).
So in a hasty change of plan I teamed up with Beastmen and we invaded a High Elf territory together. I'd covered the eventuality of this happening in the rules, so I counted as being a mercenary army. I stood to win the same number of EPs as the beastmen if our attack was successful, though I wouldn't own the new territory.

The game wasn't that great because trying to play a combined force of 2000pts using two separate1000pt armies sucks. We couldn't field our best, most expensive units because of army list restrictions. Even so, we managed to win. It just wasn't great to play.

After the game, I revised the rules on combining armies so that with a bit of forward planning, two players could put together a force that wasn't limited by 1000pt army restrictions. Again, for historical purposes only, here is a copy of the rules showing the changes I made after the first game...

Campaign rules v.2

The other two games seemed to go ok. Remember also that many of us were trying out new armies, so the whole game had a kind of "getting to know you" feel.

Afterwards, with a lot of email coaxing, I got orders from the players regarding claiming new land and building shiny new buildings. On the map, I was able to use icons to show what had recently been built, conquered or claimed (something I wouldn't have been able to do on a plastic 3D map), and this proved very useful.

Here's the updated map:

campaign map at the end of month 1

Incidentally, the current version of the rules is here:

Campaign rules 2011

So that was our first month. We were all learning and the rules were yet to be properly tested out, but the main thing was that everyone was going along with it (I was dreading everyone chipping in with alternative rules demanding changes) and that everyone seemed to be having some fun.

We'd started quite late in the month, so it wasn't long before we got to Month #2....