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Dragonet

Wight King
Feb 3, 2015
450
Bromley
I might be a little late to the party, but I'm finally dipping a toe with a wargaming blog! After several months of tortured negotiations, child sacrifice and power brokering I've finally convinced three old friends to risk our fellowship in that most elusive of pursuits, a Warhammer campaign run by myself.

I've based the campaign very loosely on the Thorskinson's Island Campaign, but I'm keeping everything deliberately light on rules and heavy on GMing, using a set of 2D6 rolls to determine the success of everyone's progress on the map and no tables; boxcars mean big prizes, snake eyes are clearly not good.

The battles will hopefully be on Fridays and will mostly be WHFB with some skirmishes and dungeon crawls thrown in for good measure. Played in three parts of 6-8 weeks each and finishing with an epic battle and hopefully a damn fine evening meal!

I have no idea how to host a blog but I intend to produce a Word document for the weekly gazetteer to be sent out each Sunday, does anyone know how I'd post that? NB: The humour may be of the 90s bawdy games room variety, should I be worried about causing offence? I can maybe post a watered down version if preferred?
 

TMS

Moderator
Staff member
True Blood
Nov 26, 2008
4,662
Sweden
Hi Dragonet!

What a funny coincidence, I'll also be hosting a 4-man WFB campaign starting sometime this month. We're looking at a longer timescale than just a couple of months though, we won't be able to fit a game night in every week.

Either way, I'm not familiar with Thorskinson's. Is it part of some Warhammer expansion? What will you be reporting in this thread? Details of battles or more a larger look at the campaign progress?

For your newsletter, if you intend to just keep it between yourselves I'd write it in a word document and then e-mail it around. If you'd like to share it here you could just upload it in this thread. I wouldn't worry about censoring your stuff yet, give it a try first.

Good luck!
 
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Dragonet

Wight King
Feb 3, 2015
450
Bromley
Thanks MasterSpark! Thorskinson's Island was a loosely map based campaign found in some of the first White Dwarfs I ever read, somewhere around the original issues 180-200, in which certain bits of land gave specific army bonuses, eg town provided extra troops, mountains and sacred groves provided warbeasts, and forests and mines gave access to artillery; very similar to your campaign. I don't have most of the issues so I can't fully employ these rules, hence the heavy GM bias.
 

Dragonet

Wight King
Feb 3, 2015
450
Bromley
The Fabled Gazette
Being a pleasant diversion in these cold, short days of excessive gift buying.

Issue 1, 2 Groats

NEW ARRIVALS ON THE FATED ISLE!

Relative peace has been broken on the Fabled Isle following the arrival of three fleets at various points along the coastline! Such an invasion on all fronts is unprecedented and our fleet is outnumbered; fortunately our valiant Admiral Achbarre scuppered a hostile flagship in the Bay Of Broad Stairs before retreating in good order, leaving a marauding band of Ogres to the tender mercies of The General, formerly known as Prince, and his deadly retinue of Seaguard. In case your region is affected by this exceptional situation, take heed as here listed are the key players among these factions as divined by our chief intelligencers.


Clan Carrock, Engineers of Karak Kadrin, played by Liam

Clan Carrock are the chief family leading a resupply force which was heading for the Chaos Wastes to aid the valiant warriors of Karak Kadrin in their struggle to hold the barbarians at the gates of civilisation and to uphold their oaths of fealty. The force comprised of engineers, smiths, miners and sappers, alongside armourers, tailors, cooks, labourers and other support staff; their cargo was guns, axes, black powder, bullets and Gromril armour, as well as the forging tools needed to sustain an army in the field, and the food meant to keep it marching. Their flotilla was caught in a terrible storm, blown miles off course and shipwrecked after a hard fought battle with the sea. Recovering as much of their possessions as they could, they counted barely half their number had survived the ordeal.

The de facto leader of this stranded band is a stalwart, stuck in his ways engineer named Arjac Greybrow, the Lord Carrock; appointed leader not for his inspirational rhetoric or the confidence a leader should inspire in his charges, but because he is the senior ranking Dwarf in the party and also the oldest. He commands respect not through his actions, which are gruff and brutish even for a Dwarf, but from the devotion his seniority commands in the Dwarfs’ deeply respectful culture of ancestor worship and conservatism.

Among the ranks of engineers, who pass for royalty in Dwarf society in the absence of thanes and kings, is Murran Hammerfall. A young and gifted engineer with a lack of self-confidence which the elder plays on by forever referring to him as ‘his apprentice’; in fact it had been decades since any other Dwarf had addressed him in this manner. Innovative and sometimes reckless, Murran is a valuable asset to the fledgling colony even while representing a source of friction which is not looked on kindly in Dwarf society.

The Dwarfs are demoralised, having failed as a clan to honour their oaths and being severed from their kin on either end of their journey by a seemingly endless ocean, with no shipwrights to build their fleet or navigators to set them on their way. All that’s left to them is to salvage and rebuild, and to test the fabled Dwarven resilience that typifies their race.


The Mercenary Army of Reinhard von Meerkatz, played by Matt


Reinhard von Meerkatz has led a colourful life, born at the great fork in the river Talab, where 3 Imperial provinces meet. An Imperial charter and the bustling river trade served to keep the von Meerkatz coffers the envy of older more established families. Alas such envy soon bore bitter fruit, the untimely death of the then Count of Hochland removed much of the von Meerkatz support at the Imperial court and within one short year a suspicious increase in river piracy, a prototype set of bagpipes and an ill advised duel saw August von Meerkatz dead, the Meerkatz charter revoked and the family estates seized.


Reinhard, then a lad of 19, returned too late from the knightly order with which he was then in training. All that was left to him was to fall emphatically to his knees, hands upraised in a terrible silent cry before the grave of his father, the family schloss smoking poetically in the background. The following months saw the young Reinhard make terrible war upon his family's usurpers. In stealthy raids the young noble fired fields, stole river cargo, kidnapped prize swans and sowed terror at the head of a ragged band of ne'er-do-wells, peasants and ex-retainers. But the game was not to last, after the silver wheel rims were stolen from Baron von Swartzwurst's favourite coach in a daring midnight raid three thousand state troops were mustered at nearby Mierstadt to flush out the criminals once and for all. Von Meerkatz had finally become too hot for the Empire to hold and after a series of skirmishes he broke through the encircling lines, heading south. As he took a last hurried look the land that had been his home he swore to return, stronger, richer, at the head of a mighty army and with a new and less prosaic origin story.


So you get the idea, our hero follows the river of gold leading where it may, mainly the blank spots on the map of the old world. Killing a giant sea beast by exploding the barrel stuck in its mouth; flying a rope round the legs of a Shaggoth on a kite, causing the Shaggoth to fall over then explode; running the infamous Warboss Razz Luggnutz through with his own choppa which then strangely also exploded, these were just some of the bricks in the von Meerkatz wall of legend.


Our hero washed up in Belmonte, slightly worse for wear and again low on coin. Belmonte is a small city state where the foothills of Apuccini mountains meets the head of the Luparso river. The chief and indeed the only export of Belmonte is gold, the surrounding hills of Prosperita being riddled with the ducal mines. With so much wealth Belmonte should clearly dominate most of southern Tilea and indeed until 5 years ago this was certainly the case. The current decline in the city's fortunes can be traced to the last Duke Antonio, a competent man but something of an attention seeker.


For 8 weary years Antonio Fuoco had refused the pleas of his council and two twin sons to designate his heir, finally as he lay dying from a lifelong addiction to a homemade milk substitute composed of chalk and water he gathered his family. Alas the long awaited proclamation "I name my heir as ... aruguuuggghh"* did nothing to assuage the constitutional crisis.


*It should be noted that the itinerant dung peddlar Marco Arruuughi did attempt to claim the throne but awoke on his second morning in the city with a severe outbreak of arrow back and neglected to pursue the matter further.


One fateful day, Meerkatz was summoned by a mysterious 'Man from Belmonte' (yes yes I know) who is in reality Leo Fuoco one of the Duke’s twin sons. Now comes the plot (What, all that other bullshit wasn't the plot!?!?!)


Leo and his brother Ricardo have all but lain waste to the surrounding area, each throwing away kings’ ransoms on army after army, as yet to no avail. Leo however has discovered that Belmonte was originally part of ancient much larger kingdom of Fortuna, legend has it that the rulers of this land traded freely with the Elves and Dwarfs prior to the war of the beard and possessed many powerful runic or magical items not least of which is the 'Crown of Fortuna'. Tales of the crown are vague, so much so that the some believe it is not a crown but a gauntlet, sword, talisman or in one bizarre tale a broom handle but all the tales agree that the crown gives the wielder power to command the very land of Fortuna itself (;o)


'Would Reinhard take sacks of the princes gold and seek the crown, fame and probably disembowelling?'


Yes, yes he would.


'Would he also take along the Princes' least favourite sister, a woman of intellect, scorcerous powers, definitely definitely not a spy and the holder of the sea charts to the Fabled Isle?'


Why not, he always wanted to die at sea.



Tyrant Hirschbeater’s Ogres of the Smashmouth Tribe, played by Ray


Not all great stories have a great or even moderately impressive beginning. Overpopulation in the Badlands led to an excess of competition for land and food. Out of this harsh proving ground arose an infamous tyrant known as Hirschbeater for some unimportant, long-forgotten and possibly imagined reason. Sensing the way the wind blew and seeing so many of his rivals rise to prominence, he decided to take his lads off to plunder new worlds, to find ancient treasures and fresh sacrifices to the Great Maw rather than see his power base diminish and his name amount to nothing more than a notch on another tyrant’s belly plate. He would return as rich as Greasus or carve out a nice empire of his own somewhere else. He filled his tribe’s ears with promises of plunder and fine dining, filled the coffers of an Estalian mercenary navy and they were on their way.


After weeks at sea interspersed with island hopping, piracy and drunken knife fights for money on the ships’ decks, the Smashmouths finally caught sight of a flotilla of Elven craft. Bounty was finally within their grasp! The sails were hoisted and the prows bit hard into the oncoming waves, but alas the rocky reef below bit harder and the sea threatened to suck Hirschbeater and the flagship down to the briny depths. Death awaited but for a twist of fate; the starboard anchor had not been fully hoisted and got caught on the reef, pulling them sharply towards the shore. Taking on water but still at main sail, the vessel hit the beach with a terrible crack of splintering wood and was dashed to pieces. Only a handful of Gnoblars perished (barely worthy of the proper noun), caught between the hull, sand and tumbling Ogres.



The Unfolding Situation


Clan Carrock had gathered as much of their supplies as were salvageable and made a defensible position in a small cave network near the sea when Arjac decreed that a small scouting force of warriors and labourers would be sent out under the protection of Dreg’s Handgunners to search the local area for food, water, mineral seams and potential threats. Keeping the sea to their left and a long ridge to their right, the small force caught sight of a shipwreck up ahead and decided to investigate.

Having sited an uncharted land in the north of the Great Western Ocean, Reinhard gave the order to weigh anchor, resupply and scout the local area for signs of life. On their approach however, they spotted a number of ships several miles starboard, a pair of Elven frigates leading an Estalian galleon like a matador goading an enraged bull; when the less manoeuvrable vessel catastrophically ran aground he sent a small reconnaissance force under his trusted oppo and captain Jean-Claude Bonne-Homme to investigate. This one-eyed former knight of the realm renounced his former vocation in particular and horses in general after having 15 shot, crushed, exploded and generally deaded out from under him on the field of battle. He now leads the 'Brazen Drakes', a bodyguard which was originally the name of Meerkatz's army but over the years now dwindled to a single regiment.


The other Estalian vessels couldn’t get to the beach to rescue the tyrant and his personal retinue once the ships’ captains realised the corals and sandbanks would not accommodate their deep hulls, and were harried back into the sea before they were able to bring their superior numbers to bear and drive off the faster Elven craft. When the flags were changed on both Elven ships, it became apparent that this may have been part of a well laid trap; the would-be invaders were now dumped unceremoniously on the beach in the open, in what could only be described as a killzone upon which a sizeable Elven land force was now advancing.


Other smaller forces appeared on the horizon on each flank; Dreg Oakenshield’s scouting force from the west and Bonne-Homme’s recon party from the south. Interestingly the Elven command (easily recognisable for the eye-watering glint off their Mithril helms) divided into van and rear to cover itself. This was going to be an interesting day...



In Other News...


Red robed trespasser and vagrant released from prison after serving only 6 months of a 12 month sentence; vows to repeat the heinous crime.


Collegiate of Sorcery under pressure as worship of The Crone is on the rise; Undead shamblers spotted in Chatham Market.


Leeches could cause irreversible wasting disease? We investigate.


Viceroy Legoland voted Sexiest Elf 2016 for a total of a record 542 consecutive years.
 

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