Campaign 2011 - month 2

I sent round the Omens for month 2 in the form of an email, embellished with a prosaic sentence or two to summarise the previous month's events:

THE OMENS:
The forces of destruction have drawn first blood. The brave men of Ironhelm were suddenly overrun with swarms of foul rats from the east. The peaceful high elves of Silverlake were butchered by invading Beastmen. After a bloody clash with chaos invaders, the elves of Evermere forest have readied the fae spirits of the wood for war.

At a time of war, people look first to their gods and a rash of temples, towers and totems rise up to the skies across the valley. The families of Mortendorf and the surrounding lands can only wonder what dark machinations are afoot, while they batten their shutters, man the watchtowers and pray to their gods to protect them.

All well and good, but not as lavish as I'd hoped. In following months I'd write the Omens in a separate Word document.

I updated the rules (the first few months saw quite a few changes as the rules bedded in). For historical purposes, the rules looked like this in Month 2:

Campaign rules v3

Incidentally, the current version of the rules is here:

Campaign rules 2011

Month 2 took a while to get off the ground because the players really hadn't got to grips with the campaign rules. I was still getting orders based on Mighty Empires. I think I must have written 20 - 30 emails explaining to everyone what they could or couldn't do.

For the battle itself, we had everyone turn up, and the four games seemed to go well. I was trounced, but then I usually am.

Again, after the game, I had to go through tons of emails to explain how they could spend their EPs. But we got there in the end. It was good to see the players were using some of the rules I'd invented - it was only month 2 but we had a rash of temples being built and even a sanctuary. I'd created enough empty tiles on the map at the start of the campaign to ensure that the first few months would offer players choices of how and where to expand their territories.

Gaz (Wood Elves) seemed to be building an inpenetrable woodland stronghold around his capital. Craig (Warriors of Chaos) was looking to build a mountain empire, and Pete (Beastmen) were inexplicably snaking round the edge of the map.

At the end of month 2, the map looked like this:

Map month 2

I was finding it really intriguing to see what the players would do next.