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This is a small scale skirmish game (for those familiar with Games Workshop products think Warcry or Killteam in scale). The setting combines the Napoleonic Wars with gothic horror, so creatures from European mythology have emerged into the real world. Our heroes are members of teams of expert monster hunters who have been formed by each of the main Napoleonic armies to investigate the appearances of these creatures, and either defeat their schemes or try and gain benefits for their country (think Sharpe meets Call of Cthulhu).
Each player starts by building a team. First you pick a nationality, each of which gives you a list of soldier types you can pick from. Next, you create an officer, who will lead your unit and gets more options, including two attributes and extra equipment. Then you have a number of recruitment (team building) points to use to pick up to six more characters, with the book suggesting that you always fill the entire list. There is a wide range of character types to pick from, starting with the basic musket armed infantryman. Each type of soldier gets different stats and equipment and most get an attribute or two. The attribute system is commendably straightforward, with a single list of attributes to cover the heroes, monsters and weapon abilities.
Most of the soldiers are standard Napoleonic types – infantryman, rifleman, grenadier, artillerist etc, but there are also a number of special types – champion of faith, occultist, supernatural investigator, werebear (for Russia) and the half-Vampire Dhamphir for Austria. These tend to be more expensive but have interesting powers. The champion of faith can try to perform miracles, which let them heal or buff other characters, others can cast spells, heal or get extra resilience. There are 24 soldier types, with 10 available to all countries, and the rest limited to a specific group. Austria, Britain, France and Russia each have a unique type. This has the potential to give each army list a distinctive flavour.
The game uses D10, and suggests using specific colours to mark the different types of dice (skill, power and monster). Again, I don’t have D10 in those colours, but as long as you’ve got two different colours and agree which is which that isn’t an issue. There is a fate dice system which gives you a pool of five extra dice (in competitive games), but you don’t role these in advance so any coloured tokens or even just making written notes will also work.
The combat system is nice and simple. You roll two D10, one skill dice and one power dice, and add any relevant skill or modifier. If you equal or beat your target’s defence then you cause damage. If you are fighting in melee your opponent then has to either fight back or withdraw. If they fight back then you have to withdraw, so at no point do characters end up engaged in melee between rounds. You can end up being involved in multiple melees each round, but this gets you fatigue points, which lower your dice rolls. Combat is dangerous. Because damage is decided by the hit roll, a character with high defence is only likely to be hit by two high results – if you have defence 15 then the lowest damage you can take is 5 (10 + 5 on 2D10). Many of the standard troop types have 10 health, so can be killed by a single lucky shot. To mitigate that you can use a fate dice to reduce damage, and having someone taken to 0 health doesn’t automatically kill them if you are running a campaign. Instead you roll on an injury table, with a 1/10 chance of death, 2/10 change of permanent injury, 1/10 chance of starting the next battle still wounded and a 5/10 chance of nothing happening.
One nice feature of the game is that just about every scenario involves hostile monsters, equally willing to attack either team. These are controlled by a very simple set of rules – first, do they have an unloaded gun – if so load it. Second, if they have a loaded gun and a valid target, fire on it. Third, if they don’t have a gun at all move towards the nearest visible PC, and if none are in sight move towards the nearest clue market. As a result the monsters will either move towards the party or their objectives, so generally where you don’t want them.
The game can be played in three different ways – competitively, with the two PC teams fighting each other and the monsters, cooperatively, with the two players combining against the monsters, or solo, with one player against the monsters. There are several solo scenarios given in the book, which do provide an interesting challenge – in my first game I had a pretty easy victory, but in my second one character only survived because I had a medic in my team, and two more were badly wounded. The rules are slightly modified, so you activate half your team, then the monsters, then the rest of your team, and you get fewer fate dice. The same monster rules are used as in competitive games, and in my games they have been easy to follow and got the monsters into combat nice and quickly.
As you can see from the picture, I don’t have any Napoleonic figures, so have used substitutes to represent my squad. My collection of older figures has provided me with enough monsters to fill that side of the game more convincingly. I found that the range of character types in the game worked perfectly will with other figures – it was clear who the occultist and supernatural experts were, the shotgun stands in nicely for a musket etc. On the first game I was somewhat short of different types of tokens so used different coloured dice to indicate who had fired, wounds etc. On my second game I dug out other dice to mark wounds, coins for clue indicators and cotton wool to mark who had fired, which made things much clearer. Fatigue tokens are also needed. I’d go for slightly more extensive character sheets than given in the book, with space to note the key attribute of weapons, and what character attributes do.
There is a simple experience system. Every character gains one exp per fight. The team gains bonus exp, which can be distributed amongst them, again with a max of one per character. It is possible to gain another point in a scenario, but the normal maximum is 2 per fight. As a result it will take three games to Tier 1 on the experience table, and one hundred games to max out at tier 9! The rewards aren’t too unbalancing – tier one is +1 courage, handy against some of the horrors in the game. After that you often get to choose between a stat boost or a new attribute, while officers can gain extra recruitment points, letting them build a larger unit. There is a simple system for balancing games between teams of different experience levels – you add up all of the tiers in the two forces and compare the difference. The team with the lower result gets extra fate dice and bonus exp. The first will make them more competitive, without being too overwhelming, while the second should stop the lower rated team falling further behind,
I enjoyed this game. The system is less complex than other games at this scale that I’ve played, but without feeling too simplistic. This also makes it rather easier to get to grips with. The setting is fun, and with the right figures would make for unusual but visually quite distinctive looking games. Balance seems good, with the heart of most teams probably being made up of shared teams, and the extra recruitment costs for the more powerful units preventing them from dominating. The solo scenarios provided work nicely, and provide a good way to get to grips with the system. There is a sizable bestiary, and a good range of special abilities and attributes to provide flexibility to the system. There are already several expansion books covering particular areas, and figures sets designed to provide you with the right range of Napoleonic figures are on the market, so it’s well supported. This is a fun game, that doesn’t require a massive investment to get going, and that plays well.
Chapters
Introduction
Creating a Unit
Playing the Game
Campaigns
Scenarios
Solo Play
Bestiary
Attributes
Author: Joseph A. McCullough
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 160
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2021